14 March 16th–March 22nd, 2023 phoenixnewtimes.com phoenix new Times | music | cafe | film | culTuRe | NighT+Day | feaTuRe | NeWs | OPiNiON | feeDBacK | cONTeNTs | ‘Let People See What Police Really Did to Him’ Two minutes after entering Whataburger, Triplett, Reed, and Harris ran out of the restaurant and jumped into a red 2001 Honda Passport SUV driven by Sariah Busani. Busani had just turned 19. She had moved back to Phoenix a few months earlier after spending the summer with her mother, Christina Gonzales, in Parker, a town of about 3,000 people a few hours northwest of Phoenix, along the Colorado River. Busani had always been striking, her mother said, with a mane of long, dark hair, bright hazel eyes, and a petite frame. “She’s a beautiful person,” Gonzales said. “She’s the center of attention. Everybody loves Sariah. People are just drawn to her.” Gonzales missed much of her youngest daughter’s childhood because she was struggling with substance use at the time and gave her parents custody of her chil- dren. Busani’s father had been in prison when she was a baby and was deported back to Mexico when he was released. To Gonzales, it was a dream to spend that much time with her daughter after all they had been through. “We’d wake up in the morning and go down to the river,” Gonzales recalled. “We’d walk to this little market in the mornings. We’d always get the same thing — hot Cheetos and a soda. She’d talk to me about boys. One time in the living room we were just being goofy, rolling around tick- ling each other. We were laughing so hard, we couldn’t stop laughing. She was getting me, I was getting her. That’s my best memory,” Gonzales said as she began to cry. “I didn’t want her to leave.” Gonzales wonders if she could have stopped what happened to her daughter if she hadn’t let her return to Phoenix. “Maybe if I would have done it differently,” Gonzales paused, choking back tears. “She would be here, you know?” On January 11, Busani pulled out of the Whataburger parking lot with Triplett, Reed, and Harris in tow, unaware of the police surveillance plane tracking them from above. Footage taken from the aircraft shows unmarked police cars following Busani’s vehicle for nine minutes as the group drove down 10 miles of desert highway. There are no lights or sirens. At no point do police officers identify themselves or give Busani an opportunity to pull over. Busani stops at a red light. The light turns green, and she accelerates. That’s when Officer David Norman pulls up to the rear of the Passport and deploys a device known as The Grappler to seize the back left tire of the vehicle. The department had recently acquired the tool, a heavy-duty nylon tether that latches onto a car’s axle. It was Norman’s first time using it outside of training. The SUV jerks to a stop, turning slightly left from the force. A wall of unmarked police cars close in on the incapacitated vehicle. Bertz puts his cruiser into park, opens the door, and throws a flashbang toward the passenger side of the Passport. It explodes and covers the area with a blinding light. In the chaos, Harris opens the rear passenger door of the Passport and takes off running away from police. Within two seconds, officers gun him down. In total, Bertz, armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle and Norman, armed with a handgun, fire 11 shots at Harris. He is struck twice in the back. The first bullet penetrates his heart and his right lung and fractures his ribs, according to the Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner. The office’s report would rule Harris’s death a homicide. The second tears through his gallbladder and intestines. Bertz fired both of the fatal shots. The aerial surveillance footage shows Harris fall to the ground as he is shot, his arms extended above his head. A small object flies from his hands as he falls. Police would later report finding a gun on the side of the road where Harris was shot. Triplett and the two teenagers remain in the vehicle while other officers shoot out the windows of the Passport with rubber bullets. Terrified, Busani curls into a ball on the car’s floor with her hands held above her head. “It all happened so quick,” Busani said. “Honestly it could have been any of us that night. I thank God every day because anything bad could have happened. We could have crashed, we could have all died.” As Harris lies bleeding face down on the ground, police shout commands at him. Harris puts his hands to his head. Police tell him not to move. Harris, who at this point is mortally wounded, can be seen in the aerial footage wiggling his legs. Moments later, a Phoenix police officer shoots Harris in the backside with a rubber bullet. Harris recoils from the blow but remains on the ground. Some officers stay trained on Harris, while others order Triplett and the teen- agers out of the vehicle one at a time and forcefully detain them. Officers shoot Harris with another rubber bullet, this time in the face. The force of it flips Harris onto his side. He clutches at his chest and curls into the fetal position. Then police sic a dog on him. The dog bites Harris’s leg, thrashing its head from side to side as it drags Harris back toward the officers. They handcuff the dying teenager. At least 10 minutes pass from the time police shoot Harris to when officers render aid. The Phoenix police report on the shooting states that two officers cut off Harris’s clothing and put pressure on his wounds. Harris kicked his feet and tossed his head in pain. The fire department came and transported Harris to a hospital nine miles away. At 1:05 a.m. — 43 minutes after Bertz and Norman opened fire — Harris was pronounced dead. Phoenix police charged Harris with aggravated assault on a police officer. In the report on Harris’s death, Bertz and Norman are listed as “aggravated assault victim[s].” The charges were later dropped in light of Harris’s death. “A Black 19-year-old child’s life is worth nothing to the city of Phoenix,” said Roland Harris, Jacob’s father. “Let people see what police really did to him. It was murder. It was a shooting and then they tortured Jacob afterwards.” The city of Phoenix has long main- tained that Harris’s death was justified, but multiple law enforcement officials have made inconsistent or false statements about the circumstances surrounding his death. In a press release sent to reporters shortly after the shooting, a spokesperson for the Phoenix Police Department said Harris “pointed his gun in the direction of officers.” But in an interview with the agency’s professional standards bureau following the incident, Bertz himself said this did not happen. When introducing the case against Harris’s friends to a grand jury, Heather Kirka, a prosecutor with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, said Harris “exchanged gunfire” with police. But Phoenix police officers who investigated the crime scene after the shooting found no rounds in the chamber of the handgun that was said to belong to Harris and no casings matching that firearm. Bertz and Norman have said Harris turned toward Bertz while holding a gun, though Bertz’s statements about that night have not been consistent. In an interview immediately after the shooting, Bertz told police investigators that he saw Harris get out of the car with a gun in his right hand. According to Bertz, Harris looks at him, starts running, then “turns back towards me just slightly, kinda makes a deliberate movement with that gun.” Then he shoots Harris. Almost a month later, during an inter- view with the department’s professional standards bureau, Bertz described it differ- ently. He said Harris exited the vehicle with a gun in his hand, then stopped. “He had a gun, stopped his motion of fleeing, made a deliberate movement with his arm looking back in my direction,” Bertz said. Later in that same interview, Bertz said it was just Harris’s arm that stopped moving, and that what he actually meant was that Harris was running with his arm held still against his chest. When asked about this apparent discrepancy during his deposi- tion in the civil case brought by Harris’s father, Bertz said, “I was not trying to describe that he, Jacob Harris, the entirety of his person stopped, but that my focus being that the gun, the arm, and the hand holding the gun was not simply trying to — to run at that moment.” During the professional standards bureau interview, Bertz was asked directly if the gun was ever pointed at him. “No it never got fully up on me,” he responded. But during his deposition, Bertz said: “When that back rear passenger door opens, the first thing that presents itself from that door is a semiautomatic firearm being held in the right hand of the occu- pant seated or now exiting the backseat of that vehicle. That firearm comes out of the vehicle and swings back towards my direc- tion where I’m at, which is again off to the south and west of where their final stop location was … As that subject gets out and I identify that weapon being pointed back towards me, I raised my rifle.” Of the eight officers who were present at the time of the shooting and provided official statements, only two — Norman and Bertz — said they saw Harris holding a gun. They are also the only ones who reported seeing Harris turn toward Bertz. In Norman’s deposition and his interview with police investigators immediately after the shooting, he said Harris was running away from them, but turned back toward Bertz twice — all in the matter of two seconds. Another officer, Charles Holton, said he only saw Harris run and couldn’t see his hands. Video of the killing taken from the police aircraft shows Harris running away. He does not stop. He does not turn. He does not extend his arm toward police. And he never exchanges gunfire with the police, as prosecutors first told the public. Police and prosecutors have said the footage shows Harris as a “white blob,” and that the thermal camera inside the airplane does not capture “individualized movements.” But the footage itself clearly shows the delineation of Harris’s arms and hands. The video appears to show Harris fleeing for two seconds, before he is felled Sariah Busani (right), her mother, Christina Gonzales (center), and her brother (left) in Parker, Arizona. Jacob from p 13 >> p 17
