Planted bullets only materialized later, to excuse police shooting of Cameron Lamb
Here’s the detail that gets me: When a crime scene tech first did an inventory of the contents of Cameron Lamb’s pockets on the December 2019 day that he was shot to death by an Kansas City police officer in his own backyard, she catalogued everything she found there: a penny, a pair of tweezers, and a cigarette lighter.
By the next day, though, another inventory of the 26-year-old mechanic’s pockets done at the morgue listed the penny, the tweezers and the lighter plus two new items: two live rounds. And unless those bullets were walking down the street and hopped into a dead man’s pocket, someone had planted them there.
The prosecution’s manslaughter case against Kansas City Police Department Detective Eric DeValkenaere, as laid out in the state’s opening argument on Monday, holds that evidence — not just the magic bullets, but the gun police said they found by Lamb’s body — was put there after his death.
The scene was staged, prosecutor Tim Dollar argued. Staged to back up DeValkenaere’s story that he’d only shot Lamb to protect his partner, Troy Schwalm, after seeing Lamb pull a gun on Schwalm with his left hand.
When KCPD officer Kyle Easley, first to arrive on the scene after the shooting, surveyed the area, he did not see any gun on the ground, right below Lamb’s arm, which was hanging out the window of the truck he’d been sitting in when DeValkenaere shot him. Later, though, there the gun was, in police photographs of the scene.
Easley testified on Monday that a bullet-resistant shield had probably obstructed his view right after the shooting.
But the thing about where the gun was found is that as it turns out, Lamb was not only right-handed, but hadn’t had full use of his left hand since being shot in the left index finger in 2015. Kind of hard to shoot with your non-dominant hand and no use of your trigger finger, isn’t it?
I guess the positive way to look at this is that the KCPD is just not that good at planting evidence?
After the shooting, Schwalm said he had not seen Lamb with a gun, and that on the contrary, he had seen Lamb’s left hand on the steering wheel. In Lamb’s right hand, he held a cell phone, which he was using to make a call when he was shot.
On the stand on Monday, Schwalm tried to backtrack. He still says he didn’t see any gun, but is no longer sure about when he saw Lamb’s left hand on the wheel. When he gave his initial statement, he said, he was still reeling from the shock of having his life threatened by Lamb: “I was involved with someone who tried to kill me.”
If he didn’t see a gun, how again was his life in danger? He didn’t say, but did start crying when asked if he felt DeValkenaere had saved his life by shooting Lamb. Yes, he said, and DeValkenaere got emotional, too.
(In yesterday’s column, I gave Schwalm credit for being willing to say he hadn’t seen any gun. Now that he’s trying to undermine his earlier statement to help his buddy, credit withdrawn.)
And what’s more, there was no reason for either of the officers to have been in Lamb’s yard in the first place.
They were there because one of DeValkenaere’s colleagues in the violent offender unit had seen Lamb, a Black father of three, speeding down the road in his red truck, chasing his girlfriend in her Mustang convertible.
A police helicopter saw that truck pull into Lamb’s driveway, and DeValkenaere and Schwalm ran in after him, with guns drawn.
He really had been speeding, as video shows, but could police not have knocked on the door and ticketed him, instead of sending in what might as well have been a SWAT team?
Defense opened with details officers didn’t know
The defense, in its opening statement, emphasized that Lamb had slapped his girlfriend during an argument earlier that morning, before briefly speeding after her. He’d thrown a handful of nuts and bolts at her car during their altercation. He was driving a stolen truck, kept a stolen gun, and should have had no expectation of privacy in a stolen vehicle, anyway.
Only, police knew none of this when they ran into Lamb’s backyard.
No one had dialed 911. The only known crime that Lamb had committed was speeding. And after his roommate had called him and told him to get back home instead of angrily chasing after his girlfriend, Shanice Reed, that’s what he did.
Defense attorney Molly Hastings explained that DeValkenaere was part of the plainclothes violent offender squad that is “designed to investigate crimes in progress.” He and others had been in the area investigating an unrelated accident.
DeValkenaere was being “proactive” when he went to Lamb’s home, she said. Too proactive, actually. He didn’t investigate a crime, but may have committed one. He didn’t interrupt any violence, but created some.
When DeValkenaere was asked over the police radio if he wanted to join Schwalm at Lamb’s home, he answered, “Yeah, but I need to vest up first.” For a report of speeding, why?
Prosecutors emphasize that police were there illegally because they did not have a warrant and did not ask permission to enter private property as they should have done.
Defense attorneys said Lamb’s roommate, Roberta Merritt, has changed her statements about where Lamb usually kept his gun a bunch of times. She only recently said that the gun police found by his body had just before the shooting been inside the garage, on the third step from the bottom on the stairs leading up to the house.
But even if that’s true, it doesn’t change that there was evidence that police didn’t see at first that materialized later.
And if this is the “proactive” way that this violent offender unit works, that’s horrifying.
If any other officer had been in DeValkenaere’s position, the defense said, the outcome would have been the same. Let’s hope that isn’t true.
