This has been getting out of control, people.
A white man named Chad Cameron Copley, 39, has been charged with murder after shooting and killing Kouren-Rodney Bernard Thomas, 20, outside of his home in Raleigh, North Carolina.
According to the Raleigh News & Observer report, Copley apparently told a 911 dispatcher that Thomas was part of a “group of hoodlums.” Police said that the assailant was inside his garage when he fired what Copley called a “warning shot” at a group of young people outside his home. He hit Thomas, fatally wounding him, and as you can hear in the 911 tapes later released by police, Copley attempts to cop a plea immediately.
“We’ve got a bunch of hoodlums out here. I’m locked and loaded, and I’m going outside to secure my neighborhood. You need to send PD as quickly as possible.”
North Carolina is an open-carry state, yet, Copley never gives the dispatcher an address or an intersection or a street name while said “incident” is happening. “Negative, ma’am. It’s in Raleigh, North Carolina. PD can work with that. Thank you,” he replies to the 911 dispatcher and then the call ends. As you can hear in the tapes above, Copley believed that Thomas and his friends were “hoodlums,” who were “racing up and down the street,” engaging in “vandalism” and had “firearms.”
Moments later, the same male calls in again, saying, “We have a lot of people outside our house, yelling and shouting profanities. I yelled at them, ‘Please leave the premises.’ They were showing a firearm, so I fired a warning shot and, uh, we got something that got hit.” There doesn’t appear to be any such “warning shot” law in the state of North Carolina, according to gun info site, USA Carry. Upon the 911 dispatcher asking the man who called in whom he was referring to in regards to being hit by the “warning shot,” he responded by saying, “Ma’am, I don’t know who they are. There’s frigging black males outside my frigging house with firearms. Please send PD.”
Then he hangs up.
Hearing both sides of the story, Thomas’ friend explained that they were trying to get into a party that was happening a couple of doors down from Copley’s home. They were on their way home when Thomas lost his life. “He turned his head back to me, and that’s when a shot went off,” David Walker, Kouren-Rodney’s friend, said. “We didn’t know that it came from the house. We were all looking around like, who got a gun?” According to The Associated Press, Raleigh police have yet to confirm or corroborate any of the claims made in the 911 call, except for the fact that Thomas was “among people who were outside of Copley’s home.”
Other party attendees told the newspaper that the party was quiet.
“It was silent,” Jordan Lewis, 16, said. “No fighting and no arguing and no one [was] waving guns.” Copley was arrested hours later after additional calls about the disturbance came in, and was charged with murder. He is currently being held without bond.
The death of 20-year-old Kouren-Rodney Thomas follows an epidemic of racially-motivated violence against people of color. Thomas’ family has told the newspaper that they’re “not doing well.” “We’re broken apart, torn apart. Trying to get our lives back on track the way it was, but it’s hard. We lost somebody very special to us.” His mother described Kouren-Rodney Thomas as a “momma’s boy” and “Mr. Safety 101.” He was working at McDonald’s and was looking forward to moving his girlfriend into East Carolina University this fall.
H/T: Blavity
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