Andrew Torres’ Family Unfairly Blames Police for Death
And they’re wrong. Andrew Torres had a history of violence toward the police, and when police entered the residence (after Torres’ family called them) Andrew ran into his bedroom. The police pursued and tased him from behind the door.
Why? Because the police didn’t know what he had in the bedroom. Had Andrew Torres been allowed to run in there, grab a knife and kill one of the cops the Torres family would have simply smirked and told everyone how nice a guy Torres was. Had he killed one of the family members they would have said police didn’t take the threat he posed seriously.
But make no mistake, the Torres family knew he was dangerous, feared him themselves and needed the police to take him into custody because they couldn’t safely interact with him. Now they’re saying that the police need “special training” to deal with people like him. That training would have been … to allow a dangerous suspect to run into a bedroom unobserved and come out shooting?
No decent police officer would allow a suspect to not be controlled, especially when civilians were around. If you were at a house where someone was out of control and his family was afraid he would hurt someone, would you allow him to run into another room where you couldn’t see what he was doing?
The Torres family needs to blame someone, but maybe they should blame the group they’re shilling for who provided “services” to Andrew Torres for years. If that group was so expert they would have seen Torres getting worse. His death is a tragedy, but the idea that violent people who are mentally ill should be allowed to endanger others is asinine.
This anti-cop rhetoric in the greater Greenville area is out of control. I have received comments and emails supporting the man who stabbed the cop in Cleveland Park. That man was making a living breaking into houses at the time. This case is more of the same. Here’s a comment from the WSPA story:
Posted by kayaker41 on Aug. 11, 2010 – 7:19 p.m.
This happens when you send half wit trigger happy hillbilly’s to handle a delicate situation. if they had just left the guy alone they could have talked him out instead they tried to force their way in and caused a man who wasn’t in his right mind to feel threatened. Of course he was going to fight back. This level if ignorance really boosts my confidence in law enforcement. (NOT!)
This is, of course, moronic, and unfortunately the majority opinion of the sheltered and effete Greenville County residents who have never experienced violence. Again, Torres had a history of violence, what if he came out the bedroom with a weapon? If he killed a cop “kayaker41″ would cheer him on, if he killed someone else he’d shrug and go back to smoking weed in front of Coffee Underground.
With the economy collapsing all these cop haters will get their wish fairly soon as towns begin laying off police. The Greenville area is not as solvent as people like to think. Maybe when the Greenvile PD is cut “kayaker41″ and Andrew Torres’ family will volunteer themselves to “talk down” every person who seems mentally ill and is a threat to others.
Bad Credit Keeping People Off Greenville Police Force?
From Private Officer News Network so take a grain of salt with this:
GREENVILLE, S.C. Aug 11 2010
Credit background checks are an important part of the police recruiting process at law enforcement agencies across the country. But Greenville Police Chief Terri Wilfong said finding recruits with good credit has become more difficult in recent years.
“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, you have (recruiting) problems because of drugs.’ No, it’s because of finances,” Wilfong told News 4′s Tim Waller.
The Greenville Police Department is currently trying to fill 12 police officer vacancies. But officials said an increasing number of applicants are unable to pass the credit background check.
“A lot of these young kids, young adults, they get these credit cards, and they don’t pay them on time, or they forget, or whatever the case may be, and they get into financial difficulty, and we cannot hire an individual whose financial status is bad,” Wilfong said.
Wilfong said credit histories are important in police-hiring because they reflect an applicant’s ability to manage not only themselves, but also those they are sworn to protect. She said substandard credit histories, coupled with the fact that fewer young people are pursuing law enforcement careers, has made the recruiting process more difficult.
“I mean, you have to give up a lot of family time. You have to work weekends. You have to work holidays. We have special events, and it’s tough,” she said.
Of course the real reason police aren’t hiring people with bad credit histories is because they tend to be desperate for money which does not a cop make. A lot of employers are looking at credit scores for this reason, if someone handles valuables you need to ensure that there is no issue in their background that would make them more susceptible that usual to temptation.
Cops collect evidence, personal belongings and deal with people easy to victimize, like dealers and hookers. Greenville has a large “activist” population always ready to pounce on the police to promote political agendas so they can’t afford to hire someone so burdened with debt that shaking down dealers becomes their only option to keep afloat.
If you want a job ij this economy you need to pay your bills on time.
Why Did Andrew Torres Die?
Andrew Torres died during a confrontation with police where he was tasered after becoming combative. Police had arrived on scene after Torres’ family had called authorities to have the man involuntarily committed. In the ensuing mayhem one officer was injured and both he and Torres were taken to the hospital where Torres expired.
Plenty of people get tased and don’t die so I’m going to go out on a limb and say there’s more to the story. Torres was said to be mentally ill but his behavior seems like that of a drug user:
Monday night’s incident wasn’t the first time Torres ran into trouble with police.
Two other incident reports state he’s been violent with officers in the past. In 2008, a report stated he pulled a knife on officers. During that incident, the report shows officers used a Taser then to subdue him.
In 2004 police arrested Torres in 2004 for assaulting a police officer in Washington, D.C.
Torres’ family said they’ve worked with NAMI to get help for him for years.
Fletcher Mann with NAMI said the family was at the “end of their rope.”
This isn’t the first time they’ve tried to commit Torres.
While police are looking at their Taser policy, the coroner’s office reported the cause of death is “still pending.”
The coroner is waiting for toxicology tests, results from a Taser analysis and other test results to make a final determination.
The “NAMI” referenced in the article is the National Alliance for Mental Illness, which is a left-wing advocacy organization that supports significant increases in public spending on the mentally ill (with money created from thin air I suppose) and a cultural shift where we start treating the mentally ill like a special interest group. In other words it’s an outreach program designed to milk votes from a population they hope to ghettoize and keep dependent on them. One of the things NAMI advocates is that rather than police deal with people they deem mentally ill there should be “crisis intervention teams” (paid for by higher taxes?) that would train police to talk them down.
That team would never actually put their own training into action for fear of being stabbed to death by Torres who has a history of violence, but why let painful reality spoil leftist fantasy?
That’s an aside though. The toxicology results will be interesting, as I am sure many suspect Torres was on some sort of drug that effected his cardiovascular system. After all he’d been tased before so between then and now something had to have changed.
The vultures are circling this one already. NAMI is already pimping their services, and a host of anti-cop groups are organizing on the forums to start “demanding” justice, which I guess would have been to let Torres kill some innocent person as he got more and more out of control. But I’ll wait for the coroner’s investigation to be complete before making any judgment. Except this, cops have a right to defend themselves from people attacking them just like I do.
And I don’t tase people who are threatening me and have a history of getting stabby.
Death by Trutherism: The Strange Death of Jerry Kane
Jerry Kane ran a business designed to “help people” facing foreclosure stay in their homes. To that end he ran a website called Mortgage Fraud and traveled the country holding seminars. On these trips he liked to bring his son, two dogs and an AK-47. Police in West Memphis gunned down Kane and his son during a traffic stop where Kane used that AK-47 to kill two police officers.
I’ve watched a few clips of the seminars Kane ran on YouTube and they were snake oil to be sure, full of bad advice to desperate people which largely consisted of using jailhouse lawyer logic to run con games on mortgage holders. Kane bought into some snake oil himself, as his YouTube channel VictoriaWarrior included quite a few videos on “new age” healing, UFOs and his thoughts on the vast, shadowy conspiracy that secretly runs the world. Here’s a comment he left on his page in response to another user:
My rights are endowed by my creator and not them, so they cannot lawfully take them away. Just don’t volunteer. Everything they, (and when I say they, I mean the powers that be. I know it by their clubs like the CFR, the UN, the Bilderbergers, Bohemian Grove, Skull and Bones, The Queen, Belgium, the City of London, the Vatican, the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, the banking cartels etc. Wherever they are having secret meetings taking place regarding the people and the planet, there is no-good-going-on. If it were good, it wouldn’t be secret. The media would report the agenda, topics and guest Speakers on the 11 o’ clock news.) are doing is anti American.
They are a bunch of foreigners; imposters pretending to be constitutional government officials while at the same time they are creating fraudulent securities and engaging in money laundering, wiretapping and murder. Sounds like a R.I.C.O. is in order, that’s if there was a legitimate court to hear it.
This may explain why he believed it was appropriate to tell people to lie and cheat their way out of debt. And his love of Ron Paul.
It may also explain why he died. From Commercial Appeal:
The tragic day began at 11:36 a.m. on Interstate 40 when (Officer Bill)Evans radioed in that he was pulling over a white minivan with Ohio license plates near mile marker 275. The van pulled off the interstate onto an off-ramp near College Boulevard.
A few minutes later, (Sgt Brandon) Paudert, Evans’ backup in the Criminal Interdiction Unit, arrived on the scene. Suddenly, one of the two suspects in the van wrestled Evans to the ground. Gunfire rang out toward both officers from a “long rifle” and a handgun, police said.
Somehow, and police aren’t sure exactly how, a broadcast went out at 11:50 a.m.: “Officer down.”
Both officers were killed at the scene, sparking a manhunt that ended in a Walmart parking lot:
At about 1:06 p.m., someone spotted the van in the parking lot of the West Memphis Walmart.
What happened next is still the subject of confusion, one of many things investigators with the Arkansas State Police will have to decipher.
Dozens of shots rang out, both from the two suspects and the officers, but investigators are uncertain exactly who fired.
(Sheriff Dick) Busby and (Deputy Chief W.A.) Wren were hit, with Busby taking a shot in the shoulder and Wren taking three in the abdomen.
At that point, an unknown wildlife officer with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, part of the manhunt, rammed his pickup into the side of the minivan, disabling it.
“If it hadn’t been for him, they’d probably have killed Wren and Busby outright,” said Al Boals, a former West Memphis mayor visiting the family at The Med.
More than 30 officers swarmed the van after the shootout. The suspects’ bodies were pulled out, then thrown on a grassy median and the parking lot.
Some subtext as to why the cops are “confused” as to what happened may be explained by the fact that one of the officers killed was the son of West Memphis Police Chief Bob Paudert. Wren and Busby are older guys who likely knew the younger Paudert since he was young. Readers can put the pieces together on this, but I’m sure you know what you’d have done if someone gunned down some kid you knew.
On Kane’s side, circumstance may have conspired against him. Already knee deep in the world of conspiracy, where tenuous connections can be found between any two incidents, Kane was just coming off another run in with the law. His website has been converted to a memorial site for him and his step-son and on it this message appeared:
Bombshell
Last month, Jerry was stopped on I40 in New Mexico and arrested for not having a drivers license. He recently completed his administrative process for the unlawful arrest.
Coincidence?
I40 sounds like the good ole boy stretch-of-highway, where if they spot you, and they already dont like you, you’could get killed. Even if you are just a Dad and son with your two dogs on your way home, minding your own business.
Let’s face it. If there wasn’t a “traffic stop” no one would be dead!
If it’s true that Kane was stopped before, he may have felt threatened by another stop and reacted like a person who thinks cops work for “them.” This is a case of Death by Trutherism.
Kane was driving around in a van he apparently stole from a long abandoned White Nationalist church which some are saying means he was himself a White Supremacist. But since he subscribes to and “friends” many African-Americans on his YouTube page and does not host any racist material I think that’s unlikely. Since he killed a couple of cops I don’t see a reason to try to smear him further with Nazi accusations. Cop killers are bad enough, no?
But an interesting side note to that piece of the story is that the late reverend for that racist church, one Harold R. Redfeairn, himself shot a cop in a traffic stop in 1979 according to this report on Commercial Appeal.
Gateway Pundit is covering this story, but I doubt there will be a satisfactory conclusion to this story. Everyone involved in the original gun battle is dead, and that fact itself will give rise to more conspiracy theories and perhaps more Jerry Kanes.
Police Come Down Hard on Pre-Teen Pranksters
Slapping a felony charge on kids for a dumb prank seems excessive to me. They didn’t treat John Ludwig this harshly and he killed someone.