The Wichita Eagle:
Blue and red lights flashed outside of the McCormick Street house just after 6 p.m. on Thursday. Curious of what was going on – Andrew Finch, 28, opened the door.
“I heard my son scream, I got up and then I heard a shot,” his mother, Lisa Finch, said Friday morning.
Finch and other relatives invited reporters into their home Friday morning – more than 12 hours after Wichita police said an officer fatally shot a 28-year-old man, who was identified by family as Andrew “Andy” Finch.
“We want Andy’s side of the story to be told,” his mother said.
On Thursday, Deputy Wichita Police Chief Troy Livingston said a substation received a call that there was a hostage situation in a house in the 1000 block of West McCormick — and that someone had been shot in the head.
“That was the information we were working off of,” he said, explaining that officers went to the house ready for a hostage situation and they “got into position.”
“A male came to the front door,” Livingston said Thursday night. “As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon.”
Livingston didn’t say if the man had a weapon when he came to the door, or what caused the officer to shoot the man.
Finch said her son, a father of two young children, wasn’t armed.
As the Finch family talked to reporters, they carefully navigated their way around their foyer, and pointed out a reminder of what happened.
“There’s where he was shot,” Andrew Finch’s aunt, Lorrie Hernandez-Caballero, said, as she pointed to spots of blood on the home’s porch, and on the carpet just inside the door. “They (police) had to take the screen door as evidence.”
After she heard the shot, Finch said she walked out of her bedroom and into the kitchen. A door leading from the kitchen to the side yard was open, she said.
“The police said, ‘Come out with your hands up,’” she said. “(The officer) took me, my roommate and my granddaughter, who witnessed the shooting and had to step over her dying uncle’s body.”
The family was handcuffed, taken outside and placed into separate police cruisers, she said. They were taken downtown and interviewed by Wichita police officers.
Asked if the family has talked to investigators from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, Finch said they were told KBI investigators would contact them.
But they have questions now.
“What gives the cops the right to open fire?” Finch asked. “Why didn’t they give him the same warning they gave us? That cop murdered my son over a false report.”
Finch and Hernandez-Caballero said they want to see the officer – identified only as a seven-year veteran of the department – and the person who made the false report held accountable.
“The person who made the phone call took my nephew, her son, two kids’ father,” Hernandez-Caballero said. “How does it feel to be a murderer? I can’t believe people do this on purpose.”
Online gamers have said in multiple Twitter posts that the shooting was the result of a “swatting” call involving two gamers.
There are a number of misdirects in this report. Let’s address two of the most prominent and important. First of all, the blame will be placed on the illegal practice of Swatting, or calling the police and reporting an active shooting or hostage situation. The perpetrator will likely be found and dealt with, and the blame will be placed squarely on him.
The second misdirect for the readers is the question whether the innocent man was armed. We’ve dealt with this in detail before. First of all, the Castle doctrine is based on Biblical precept and it’s moral standing is rock solid. Home invasions, whether by criminals bent on evil, or police criminalds bent on soldier-boy impersonations, are all immoral in the superlative.
Furthermore, we’ve seen that even if the police announce their presence, there is no compelling reason to believe that it is the police. Criminals have become savvy to the ways of the police SWAT teams and make a pretense of the same kind of entry procedure. Men announcing that they are the police may be the police, or they may not be and may intend on rape or murder.
It doesn’t matter if he was armed, any more than it matters whether he was a gamer or if he was Swatted by another gamer. While Swatting is illegal, the perpetrator didn’t do the shooting. Being armed while answering the door isn’t illegal or immoral. Gaming isn’t illegal or immoral.
While the media will present all of these misdirects as will the Sheriff when he finally presents his case to the public (the gamer did something illegal, my deputy thought he was armed, blah, blah, blah), the reality of the situation is that the shooter is a murderer, and the team that helped him is guilty of conspiracy to commit murder.
The police in America have become the most dangerous hoodlums, thugs and murderers. As I’ve said before, I feel more comfortable around gangsters who might threaten me than I do around goober cops who have no discipline or moral compunction about shooting innocent people.