The police shooting death of a 14-year-old boy in Aurora, Colorado, and how authorities handled the subsequent initial investigation is being questioned by the lawyers representing the family of the slain teen. Jor'Dell Richardson was chased by police, then shot and killed for suspicion of shoplifting vape materials from a store. 

Police body cam shows the teen running in an alley behind some shops and being tackled by two officers. Police say the suspect was armed, but the body cam footage did not show if Richardson had a weapon or showed him pointing anything at officers.

The footage does show Richardson telling the officers, “You got me, you got me” as soon as he was tackled. Moments later, another officer yells “Gun, gun” before shooting the teen in the abdomen. Richardson later died from his wounds.

Siddhartha H. Rathod, a lawyer for Richardson’s family tells CGTN that the Aurora police have been “issuing false and misleading statements from the get-go”.

“They have said this boy had a loaded gun. They said the officers responded to an armed robbery. These (statements) are provably false with what we already know,” Rathod said in an exclusive interview with CGTN.

Police initially claimed that Richardson was armed with a loaded gun, but Rathod tells CGTN that minutes before the police chief’s Friday, Jun 9 press conference, they clarified to him and the family that the teen was allegedly carrying a replica pellet gun that was designed to look like a 9mm handgun.

Rathod says he questions if the boy had a weapon and says that if the police did find one that they would have immediately realized it was a replica when they tried to de-chamber the weapon and unload its magazine before entering it into evidence.

“We don’t know what Jor’Dell had. We want the facts. We want to see the evidence ourselves. We want to be able to see what evidence was collected. We want to see the body camera of the officer who was collecting that evidence,” Rathod said.

During the press conference, Aurora Police Chief Art Acevedo showed surveillance footage of the alleged robbery, identifying Richardson in the photos which match footage released from the officer’s worn body cameras.

Acevedo told reporters that the officer involved in the shooting, Roch Gruszeczka, didn’t have any record of “significant” use-of-force incidents or disciplinary histories., but according to court records the officer was implicated in at least one lawsuit against him and two other officers for racial profiling and unlawful search. The police department settled that case for $100,000.

“He (Acevedo) doesn’t say the other half of that statement, which is that Jor’Dell has no criminal history, doesn’t have contact with law enforcement. If he (Acevedo) is being an honest broker, he would disclose both sides,” Rathod said, referencing Acevedo’s statements about Gruszeczka.

Other questions have arisen from the review of the body cam, such as how the weapon was recovered, and if police had adequate legal cause to chase down Richardson in the first place.

"It's questionable about whether they (police) even had reasonable articulable suspicion, which is what's required, to begin chasing Jor'Dell," Rathod told CGTN.

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