The 911 recording of Merritt Landry released

28th May 2014   ·   0 Comments

A week after Orleans Parish District Attorney can i get another personal loan if i already have one Leon Cannizzaro announced that he would not prosecute Merritt Landry for the July 2013 early-morning shooting of 14-year-old Marshall Coulter after finding the teen in his Marigny yard, 911 recordings were made public, Fox 8 News reported.

Landry, a City of New Orleans employee and Marigny homeowner, shot Coulter in the head after the teen was found standing in Landry’s yard. Because Coulter was at least 30 feet away from Landry, New Orleans police arrested Landry on attempted second-degree murder charges and said the teen presented no imminent threat to the homeowner and his family.

Since the shooting, Coulter has undergone several medical procedures on his brain and continues to struggle to fully recover. Despite his injuries, Coulter was arrested earlier this month and charged with unlawfully entering another Marigny resident’s home after finding a set of keys to the house in the mailbox on the porch.

Coulter reportedly speaks slowly, has not fully recovered his motor skills and sat on the porch with the Faubourg Marigny homeowner to wait for police to arrive to arrest him earlier this month.

The 911 recordings released last week allowed residents to hear Landry’s voice after the incident for the first time. Landry’s voice is shaking and sounds weak in the 911 recording, which was released by the D.A.’s Office and obtained by Nola.com/­The Times-Picayune.

“What is your emergency?” a 911 operator asks Landry on the recording.

“I came outside and found this guy in my yard,” Landry said. “I just shot him. He’s, he’s down.”

Landry called 911 from his Mandeville Street home just before 2 a.m. on July 26, less than two weeks after a Florida jury acquitted Neighborhood Watch captain George Zimmerman in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

At one point, Landry tells the 911 operator,, “Oh, My God. I can’t believe it.”

“Listen, listen. I need you to calm down,” the operator can be heard telling Landry. “I want to know where he’s shot at.”

“He’s shot in the shoulder,” Landry says. “He’s not cash advance wisconsin responding. I went by him. I’m trying to like, help the dude. He’s down now.”

After the shooting, Landry told NOPD investigators that he told the teen not to move after finding him in his yard and that he fired a single shot at Coulter after he made a move. Although Landry told police he thought he saw a gun in Coulter’s hand, no gun was found at the scene.

When asked by an EMS worker where Marshall Coulter was shot, Landry is heard saying, “He’s shot in the head.”

Landry also can be heard on the tape telling the EMS worker that Coulter was “not awake.”

New Orleans police arrested Landry after the shooting and booked with attempted second-degree murder. He spent several hours in lockup before being allowed to bond out by Orleans Parish Criminal Court Judge Franz Zibilich, a personal friend of the Landry family and the attorney who defended Landry’s brother in a drug-related case.

Zibilich also represented former NOPD officer Robert Faulcon, who was sentenced to 63 years by a federal judge for his role in the 2005 Danziger Bridge shootings, which left two unarmed residents dead and four others wounded.

Civil rights leaders and community activists protested after Zibilich allowed Merritt Landry to be released within hours of his arrest, citing possible rule violations. The district attorney also cited concerns about Landry’s brief time in custody but no evidence of improprieties has been found.

Earlier this year, a grand jury failed to indict Landry, leaving the decision up to the district attorney, who has not said much publicly about the case before last week.

On May 15, just days after news broke of Marshall Coulter’s recent arrest, the D.A. broke his silence and announced that he did not have a strong enough case to prosecute Landry.

In a statement released on May 15, Cannizzaro said that the recent arrest of Coulter “irreversibly damaged” any case the D.A.’s Office might have had against Landry.

“As the District Attorney for fast cash derby the parish of Orleans, I am ethically obligated not to charge an individual against whom I do not possess evidence that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed a crime. Such evidence does not exist in this case,” Cannizzaro said.

“This is a blatant miscarriage of justice,” the Rev. Raymond Brown, a community activist and president of National Action Now, told The Louisiana Weekly Friday. “Even the police indicated that this was an unjustifiable shooting. Marshall Coulter was standing 30 feet away from Merritt Landry and did not pose a threat to him.

“If the D.A. is unwilling or unable to do his job and prosecute Merritt Landry, the U.S. Depart­ment of Justice, which is already here working to reform the NOPD, should charge Merritt Landry with violating Marshall Coulter’s constitutional right to equal protection under the law,” Brown said.

“The timing is definitely suspect,” W.C. Johnson, a member of Community United for Change and host of local cable-access show “OurStory,” told The Louisiana Weekly in a recent interview. “The D.A. had almost a year to decide what to do about this case but couldn’t make up his mind until this story broke. Merritt Landry should already be serving time for shooting this misguided, troubled teenager in the head.

“Nothing that was reported last week takes away from the fact that Merritt Landry committed an unwarranted act of violence,” Johnson added.

“From all of the evidence that’s been reported in the media, I think that this case should have gone to trial,” New Orleans NAACP Branch president Danatus King told The Louisiana Weekly Friday.

King said that while he understands what the D.A. has said about the difficulty he has had securing a grand-jury indictment and how Coulter’s recent arrest will make it harder for him to get a conviction, “the reality of it is that the latest incidents Mr. Coulter has been involved in really shouldn’t have a bearing on whether or not Mr. Landry committed a crime.

[T]he physical evidence suggests that Mr. Coulter had his back turned when he was shot, I think all of that leads to a need for there to be an airing out of all of the evidence in the public so that the public is satisfied that justice is really being served and that there isn’t any favoritism being shown. If for no other reason, this matter should have been brought to trial.”

“The local media has taken a man who shot a 14-year-old in the head without just cause and made him some kind of hero,” Ramessu Merriamen Aha, a New Orleans businessman and former congressional candidate, told The Louisiana Weekly. “Marshall Coulter did not deserve to get shot in the head for trespassing on somebody’s property. And Merritt Landry doesn’t deserve to be treated like a heroic vigilante — he deserves to spend time in jail for taking the law into his own hands.”

Danatus King said the media has been part of the problem in the Merritt Landry case. “The media definitely played a part in it,” he said. “Mr. Coulter — incidents that he was involved in and his record before the Merritt Landry incident — really shouldn’t have a bearing on whether or not Mr. Landry committed a crime,” King told The Louisiana Weekly.

“Because of media coverage, the selected jurors might have already reached a conclusion that Mr. Coulter is a bad guy and deserved what he got and that Mr. Landry is a good guy and should be acquitted,” King added.

King says he is “encouraged” by the fact that Marshall Coulter’s case will be handled by Orleans Parish Juvenile Court Judge Mark Dougherty. “I’ve known him since before he was on the bench and think he has a genuine concern for our youth,” King told The Louisiana Weekly. “If there’s anything positive that’s coming out of all of this, it’s that Mr. Coulter is now in Judge Dougherty’s section and will receive the attention and the resources that are necessary.”

Additional reporting by Louisiana Weekly editor Edmund W. Lewis.

This article originally published in the May 26, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.