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The video of a police officer fatally shooting a North Carolina woman who was holding a meat cleaver was released by Greensboro police Wednesday.
Chieu Di Thi Vo, 47, died on March 25, 2014 after Officer Timothy (TJ) Bloch arrived to the Aberdeen Townhomes on a report of a fight, according to the Greensboro Police Department. Vo's family members, who viewed the newly-released footage for the first time earlier this month, said the video showed she never attacked him with the knife.
The disturbing footage shows the former officer, who state and local investigators have said used “justified and reasonable” force, shooting Vo in a tense momentary encounter.
Greensboro police on Wednesday released video footage of the fatal police shooting of Chieu Di Thi Vo, 47, on March 25, 2014.
(WGHP)
“Where is she? Is this her?” Bloch can be heard saying in the body camera video as Vo came into view with the butcher knife. “Hey, put it down! Put it down!”
He then shot her, and she fell down motionless with her mother standing nearby. The department also released the audio footage of the preceding 911 call from the apartment complex Wednesday, the Triad City Beat reported.
The mother of Chieu Di Thi Vo, 47, holds up a portrait of her daughter at a May 3 demonstration in Greensboro.
Vo's family and the Southeast Asian Coalition successfully urged the Greensboro City Council to require the department to release the video.
(Southeast Asian Coalition)
The mother of Chieu Di Thi Vo, 47, holds up a portrait of her daughter at a May 3 demonstration in Greensboro.Vo's family and the Southeast Asian Coalition successfully urged the Greensboro City Council to require the department to release the video.
“Can you please send someone over here to the area of 4027 Hewitt Street?” the caller said, mistaking the Vietnamese woman’s origins. “There’s a little Filipino woman. She’s not right.
She’s chasing her mother with a meat cleaver.”
The Greensboro police, the district attorney and the state Bureau of Investigation found shortly after the shooting that Vo was running toward him with the knife and Bloch had reason to shoot her. Bloch, who didn't respond to requests for comment Thursday night, resigned later that year anyway.
Local and state investigators have said the Greensboro officer's use of force was "appropriate and justified."
(WGHP)
Greensboro police Chief Wayne Scott called Vo’s death a “tragedy” on Wednesday but repeated his support for the investigators’ findings.
“I believe it’s readily apparent that she’s looking directly at him and she’s heading directly at him,” Scott said at a news conference. “She does not change her course until after the first shots are actually fired.”
Timothy (TJ) Bloch has since resigned from the police department.
(Greensboro News & Record)
Yet Vo’s family and their supporters successfully won passage Monday of a law from the Greensboro City Council requiring the department to release the video and audio recordings. The disclosure of the materials doesn't change the need for an examination of the department's policies, said Cat Le, the executive director of the Southeast Asian Coalition, a Charlotte advocacy group.
"It raises a lot of questions in our community of immigrants and refugees who don't speak English. It raises a lot of questions around mental health," Le told the Daily News. "There's a lot of folks here that believe the policies need to be looked at."
Vo never lunged at Bloch, threatened her mother or yelled at Bloch in Vietnamese, as police originally said she did, her family wrote in a letter posted on the coalition's website. They also said Bloch could have used other methods to resolve the situation.
"From the 5-6 times that we watched the video last Tuesday, it appeared that Bloch stood approximately 10-15 feet away from Chieu Di and only waited for a couple seconds before he started opening fire on her," the family said in the letter. "Within that distance, Bloch did not have to respond to Chieu Di with lethal force as she was not an imminent threat to his life."
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