FOR THE PAST TWO WEEKS FIREGEEZER HAS BEEN following the bizarre story coming out of the tiny town of Jericho, Arkansas, where a police officer shot the locality’s assistant fire chief in the back inside the courtroom. It started on August 29 when we reported HERE on the event where a circuit judge threw out every traffic ticket that the obviously-corrupt police department had issued for the entire month of August. The vol. fire chief, Don Payne had been contesting two of his tickets and a frustrated officer instigated a scuffle with him that ended with the policeman pulling out his pistol in the crowded courtroom and shooting Payne.
The next week we posted another video report (HERE) following up on the story where we wrote:
The police chief [has since] disbanded the entire police force. The county prosecutor says that he has no plans to charge the policeman for the shooting.
The mayor has gone into hiding. The town hall is locked up and nobody is answering the phone. The sheriff has been investigating the disappearance of large sums of city funds and has repossesed one of the town police cars for non-payment on a lease. The State Forestry Commision had seized a fire truck that it had leased to the city.
Two days ago, on September 9, the mayor and the city council held a purported “secret meeting” in the town hall. WPTY-TV Memphis sent a film crew over there, but by the time they got there the meeting was over and the town hall was locked up. When they tried to talk to the mayor at her home, she slammed the door in their faces. They filed this video report on their findings:
Now it’s becoming clear on what the secret meeting may have been about. Yesterday, September 10, the local prosecutor filed charges against Chief Payne for “battery on a police officer.” The prosecuter also said that none of the police officers will be charged.
WPTY-TV ran this video update on this latest turn in the story:
To sum up: Following the judge’s dismissal of the traffic tickets, Payne and a policeman got into a scuffle. Witnesses are saying that the officer intiated the shoving match. With Payne surrounded by police officers in the crowded court room, one of the policemen takes out his gun and begins shooting. The prosecuter says “the officers had every right to detain Payne.”
But nobody is saying that they had any right to shoot him. He was unarmed and outnumbered. There’s more to come in this story.
