DOJ will not file charges against officers who killed Adolph Grimes III

5th January 2015   ·   0 Comments

In the midst of nationwide marches and protests in the wake of grand jury decisions not to indict police officers in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City and the slaying of two NYPD officers by a resident who then took his own life last month, the U.S. Department of Justice has closed its investigation and decided it will not file charges against the NOPD officers who killed Adolph Grimes III while he was sitting in a car outside his grandmother’s home in New Orleans six years ago.

The news about the DOJ’s decision not to file civil rights charges against the officers could not have come at a worse time in New Orleans as residents continue to demand justice in two high-profile post-Katrina cases dating back to 2005 and the embattled police department continues to struggle to meet the demands of a 492-point federally mandated consent decree.

Although the DOJ decided in 2013 not to file charges against the nine cops involved in the killing of the 22-year-old father on New Year’s Day 2009, the decision was not made public until recently.

DOJ officials informed the family of its decision in May 2013. Members of the Grimes family, already reeling from a NOPD inquiry that found no wrongdoing on the part of the officers, had hoped that the Justice Department might hold the officers accountable for the fatal shooting of Grimes, who had no previous criminal record.

The plainclothes officers who fired repeatedly at Grimes told authorities that they fired at the victim in self-defense after he opened fire on them without provocation in the 1700 block of Gov. Nicholls Street in Faubourg Tremé.

Grimes had reportedly just returned to New Orleans hours earlier to celebrate the New Year with his family when his life was tragically cut short.

Police claimed that the rental car Grimes was driving matched the description of a vehicle spotted leaving the scene of a shooting outside a bar called Club Fabulous.

Grimes parents, Patricia and Adolph Grimes Jr., told WWL-TV in a 2010 interview that their son was never at the club.

“No, he would never go to no Club Fabulous,” Patricia Grimes told WWL. “He wasn’t that kind of person. He wouldn’t go to Club Fabulous, no.”

“My child was celebrating the New Year on the Westbank with us,” Adolph Grimes Jr. said. “He came here, laid his 17-month-old child down, talked with my wife and mother-in-law. He went and took him a bath, he told her he was going outside to wait for his cousin.”

Grimes told WWL that plainclothes NOPD officers driving unmarked vehicles drove up on his son and shot him at least 12 times.

“His dome light was on,” Grimes Jr.. said. “He was combing his hair. They thought he had a weapon. That’s what happened.

“One of them yelled, ‘It looks like he had a gun’,” he continued. “They opened fire on him. He tried to run out of the car. He met six others at the corner.”

An autopsy found that Grimes, a Brother Martin High School graduate, had been shot 14 times, including several times in the back.

Then-NOPD Supt. Warren Riley told WWL that he sympathized with the Grimes family.

“The Grimes kid seemed to be a good kid,” Riley said. “But there are certainly circumstances in there that indicate he maybe mistook the police officers for someone else he had a conflict with earlier.”

The circumstances surrounding Grimes’ death fueled demands for justice on behalf of the slain man and police reforms more than a year before the explosive trial of the NOPD officers charged in the death of Henry Glover, 31, who was shot by an officer and later found burned in an abandoned car on a Mississippi River levee. Glover’s skull was later removed by someone and has not been returned to the family for proper burial.

Patricia Grimes told WWL that she and her family no longer have a reason to celebrate the coming of a new year.

“It’s just another day and it’s sad that I have to remember my child in this way,” she said. “There’s no holiday. I don’t want nobody to go through what we’re going through now. We’re going to go through this the rest of our lives.”

W.C. Johnson, a member of Community United for Change and host of the local cable-access show “OurStory,” said Tuesday that no one who has watched the DOJ’s dealings with the NOPD over the past decade should have been surprised by the news that the Feds won’t charge the officers involved in the killing of Grimes.

“I am not surprised,” Johnson told The Louisiana Weekly. “As a member of CUC, we have been in several meetings with the DOJ concerning the Adolph Grimes III killing. Actually, since 2010, the DOJ has danced around any public comments concerning the investigation. But in private meetings we understood the probability of the DOJ becoming involved with a prosecution was slim to none. Nevertheless, CUC continued to push for an indictment. It goes without saying that after more than a year of NOPD consent-decree implementation, the federal courts and the federal monitors are not serious about bringing constitutional policing to New Orleans. No one is sincere about bringing justice to a ‘just-less’ people. It is also evident that having, what appears to be a Black man in the seat of the U.S. Attorney’s Office that justice cannot prevail for Black folks. That has been made painfully evident despite the Black men holding the posts of Attorney General and President of the United States.

“With every Black person who is killed at the hands of law enforcement, the DOJ finds no other way but to prosecute under the Civil Rights law,” Johnson explained. “What we are not being told is that Black folks’ civil rights are being violated at the state level when Black folks cannot get a state prosecution or a true bill from a state grand jury for a murder within that state. And even when Blacks get the federal government to prosecute and a guilty verdict is declared, when police are involved, the federal judges find a way to retry the case to give the accused a second bite at the apple. That’s something Black folks very rarely get as a safety net.

“So here we are, back at the same point Black folks were during the Jim Crow years.”

Two civil lawsuits against the City of New Orleans and the officers involved in the shooting, one filed by the mother of Grimes’ son and the other by the victim’s parents, have been consolidated and are pending.

The New Orleans Advocate reported last week that the FBI has refused to comment on the case and has not released the findings of its probe, which began in 2009. U.S. Attorney Kenneth Polite, who reportedly took another look at the case after taking office last year, declined a request from The New Orleans Advocate to comment on the case.

Richard Root, a civil attorney representing Arabia “Shea” Whitfield, the mother of Grimes’ child, told The New Orleans Advocate that he does not know why the DOJ declined to file charges in the case because it is still unclear what federal investigators found, but added that the case’s forensic evidence raises some troubling questions that have yet to be answered, including why it appears Grimes had been shot after he collapsed.

While a handgun registered to Grimes and a rifle found in the trunk of the rental car were recovered, Root said many questions remain unanswered.

“He may have made the fatal error of showing he had a gun or pulling a gun,” Root told The New Orleans Advocate. “But why have absolutely zero evidence that he fired first.”

Root said some of the community outrage about the Grimes shooting stems from fact that the victim was a law-abiding, upstanding young man. “He was a wonderful father, fully employed, doing everything right,” Root said. “It seemed totally contradictory to everything abut his personality and everything about his life.”

“He was the kind of guy you’d want your daughter to go out with,” Grimes Jr. told The New Orleans Advocate.

Before Katrina, Grimes worked for the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board and took a job with AT&T in Houston after the storm forced him to relocate. The Grimes family sought to reunite at least once a year, prompting Grimes’ New Year’s Eve drive into the Crescent City.

Ashley Spears, the victim’s cou­sin, said Grimes must have believed he was about to be carjacked when approached by the plainclothes officers, explaining why the victim might have drawn his weapon.

Keyneshia Taylor, a witness to the shooting, told NOPD homicide detectives that it was not clear that the assailants were police officers until after the killing, an account that supports the family’s claims that he could not have known that the people who surrounded him while he was sitting in his car were law enforcement officers.

After he was shot multiple times by the plainclothes officers and collapsed, Grimes was reportedly placed in handcuffs by police. By the time he was uncuffed so that EMS workers could offer him assistance, Grimes no longer had a heartbeat.

Within five hours of the incident, authorities reportedly ran Grimes’ name through the National Crime Information Center database and learned that he had no criminal record.

The ranking officer in the case, Lt. Joseph Melsch, was terminated in 2011 by the NOPD for neglect of duty in the Henry Glover case.

NOPD spokesman Tyler Gamble told The New Orleans Advocate that only four of the accused officers — Officer Marcellus White, Officer Regina Barr, Officer Colette Booth and Sgt. Daniel Scanlan — are still employed by the NOPD.

The civil proceedings were stayed in 2010 pending the DOJ’s probe of the incident. Root told The New Orleans Advocate that he is awaiting formal notification from DOJ that it won’t file charges against the City of New Orleans and the police officers before moving forward with the civil case.

“How can the Black community have faith in the DOJ, the U.S. Constitution and all of the other bastardized legislation that has historically placed all non-white personnel in conflicting positions?” W.C. Johnson said Tuesday. “The Full Faith and Credit clause in the U.S. Constitution has made it impossible for equality of law to be granted to the non-white population. There­fore, ‘equal protection under the law’ does not extend to non-whites as Amendments are not weighed the same as the original articles are weighted on the scales of justice.”

“With every failed attempt to hold these police officers accountable for taking innocent lives, Black folks are being told that we need to mount a revolutionary force and be willing to go toe to toe with the political forces in America,” Johnson said.

In the meantime, a close-knit family that has lost one of its own continues to struggle to overcome its sense of grief and loss as it fights for justice for Adolph Grimes III.

“They killed my son, and they’re walking away with it,” Patricia Grimes told The New Orleans Advocate. “They go on about their business, and I’m sitting here suffering every day.”

“Since that happened, the holidays have never felt the same,” Ashley Spears, Grimes’ cousin, said. “You just want to lay around in the bed all day. Because of that, I think we will never find closure.”

This article originally published in the January 5, 2105 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.