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Seems like at least two guys, maybe three restraining the one dude. https://twitter.com/_barringtonii/status/1653941898023665665
Everyones only focusing on that shot with just the marine and the guy, probably taken later than the above pic
Not everyone, Black Lives Matter thinks all three should be prosecuted. Because the mentally ill homeless are ordinary people's social and moral superiors and raising a hand against them, regardless of provocation, is verboten -- and black homeless especially so, of course.
I've spent a lot of time in my life doing BJJ and it's very hard to strangle somebody to death without realizing something has gone wrong long before that. It's not even a George Floyd situation where the restraint wasn't a conventional choke and/or it was very potentially a stress heart attack. The Marine was capable of restraining the homeless guy in far less risky positions.
My reaction as well from the same background. If i read the coverage right he held that chokehold for two minutes, which is crazy. It only takes a few seconds to knock someone out like that. Anyone trained enough to know the hand position would know that from experience.
Watching the video, although he does use the BJJ position it doesn't really look like he has a blood-choke; his arm just seems to be wrapped around the guy's chin?
Hard to tell of course, but I guess if the dead guy is found to have drugs in his system the defense will want to raise the possibility that the hold was just a restraint and the guy would have OD'd anyways.
On the other hand, the article I read seemed to say that he was just acting unruly but hadn't assaulted anybody at the point when the Marine started restraining him -- which puts the Marine in violation of the 'MYOB' doctrine, which is a bad place to be in a situation like this.
Have we considered that the article may not be telling(or may not have) the whole truth as to what this crazy homeless guy was doing?
I'm the "don't believe anything you haven't seen with your own eyes" guy -- so yeah.
But given that this is clearly going to court and likely to be a cause celebre, if the grappling was in fact preceeded by a significant assault we will hear about it soon enough. There would probably be a verbal altercation as some part of this, which may be bad for the Marine in terms of claiming self-defense.
Maybe. But maybe that doesn't matter. "Hands up, don't shoot" was a blatant lie. It was known to be a lie almost immediately. It was authoritatively proven to be lie some time later. Neighborhoods still got burned to the ground, and people still believe it to this day.
The flag has been planted at this being an unprovoked lynching. Now, even if a hypothetical video shows the violent felon literally inches from shanking a defenseless woman on that subway, people will be quibbling over whether that really entitles a marine to "murder" him. That we don't know, not for certain, that he would have actually shanked that woman. The woman probably would have survived, the punishment for a survivable stab wound shouldn't be death. People survive stab wounds all the time.
Once upon a time I would have thought that exaggeration. Except it already happened. So yeah. There is no possible provocation that man could have done, up to and including actually physically harming another passenger, which would justify to these activist the subsequence events. Their claims that he didn't do anything preceding the events is not a statement of fact. It's an ontological statement of orthodoxy. Anything he did, no matter what, counts as nothing.
See this absolute masterpiece of a Tweet from Valerie Jarrett, for example:
As you point out, this is in the context of Bryant being in the process of attempting to disembowel another unarmed black teenage girl. So it's not just that some protestors got carried away, top level Dem officials unironically argue against shooting someone that is in the process of attempting murder.
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