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Bodycam video shows police shooting 13-year-old with autism after mom called 911
Body camera footage released by the Salt Lake City Police Department shows police shooting a 13-year-old boy with autism after his mother called 911 to de-escalate a mental health crisis.
On Monday, the department released video of the Sept. 4 shooting. In the video, officers approach a house in Glendale, Utah, and begin chasing Linden Cameron, who is on the autism spectrum. They order Cameron to get on the ground and to “pull your hands out” before an officer opens fire, shooting him nearly a dozen times.
“Show me your hands!” an officer yells as Cameron lies on the ground.
“I don’t feel good,” he responds.
Cameron’s mother Golda Barton told KUTV that her son was upset because she returned to work and she called 911 to ask for a crisis intervention team. She said Cameron was unarmed, having a “mental breakdown,” and needed to be taken to the hospital to be treated.
“He’s a small child,” Barton said, according to the station. “Why didn’t you just tackle him? He’s a baby. He has mental issues.”
Barton said Cameron was injured in his shoulder, ankles, intestines and bladder.
She told KSL that she won’t watch the video because “she’ll never be able to unsee it.”
“I can’t, I just can’t watch him fall down. Like I just don’t want to watch him fall down,” Barton said.
Cameron remains hospitalized, and an independent investigation of the incident is ongoing, according to CNN.
“It’s horrible,” Wesley Barton, Cameron’s brother, said about the video, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. “To see your little brother bleeding out, saying his last words. It plays in my head over and over.”
Wesley said his brother ran from the police “because he was scared” and that he didn’t have enough time to respond after an officer yelled at him “to show his hands,” according to the publication.
Police said Barton told officers that Cameron “has issues with law enforcement and can have issues when he sees uniforms,” according to a news release. Police said she told them her son “threatened to break things in the house” and had shown her co-worker a gun, but she didn’t “think it was real.”
“The mother again advised officers her son does not like law enforcement, and it could trigger her son,” police wrote.
Police said the officers handcuffed Cameron after he was shot and they administered medical aid. The boy was transported to a hospital, where he is being treated for his injuries.
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