Betty Shelby, The Officer That Killed Terence Crutcher, Was Acquitted of First-Degree Manslaughter

After nine hours of jury deliberations, Tulsa, Oklahoma police officer Betty Shelby was acquitted in the shooting death of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man.

Shelby killed 40-year-old Crutcher on September 16, 2016, on a street where his SUV had stalled. The video recorded of Crutcher’s shooting by a dashboard camera and helicopter shows Crutcher walking away from Shelby, WALKING toward his SUV with HIS HANDS ABOVE HIS HEAD. Shelby said that she fired out of fear when she killed Crutcher.

Police said Crutcher approached the vehicle but failed to listen to commands from officers. Shelby asked Crutcher if the car was his, but only mumbled to himself and didn’t respond, according to an affidavit. Shelby’s attorneys say that in the two minutes before cameras began recording the encounter, Shelby repeatedly ordered Crutcher to stop walking away from her and get on the ground. 

She fired her weapon, she told a Tulsa County courthouse on Monday, because “I feared for my life.” “I did everything I could to stop this,” she added. “Crutcher’s death is his fault. We’re not trained to see what comes out of a car, we’re trained to stop a threat, and by all indications, he was a threat.”

The manslaughter trial against Shelby opened May 10, 2017, with 9 white jurors, and 3 black jurors. The jurors asked the judge if they could explain their verdict in court. The judge told them they can only announce their verdict in court, not explain it, but said they were free to explain publicly after the trial concluded.

Crutcher’s family said the verdict was hard to accept.

“Let it be known that I believe in my heart that Betty Shelby got away with murder,” Crutcher’s father, Rev. Joey Crutcher said after the verdict was announced in the video below.

“This is definitely a tough pill to swallow,” his sister, Tiffany Crutcher, said. “Terence’s hands were up. Terence was not an imminent threat. Terence did not attack her. Terence didn’t charge at her. Terence was not the aggressor. ”