Family of man killed by Abington police files lawsuit over ‘inappropriate use of deadly force’
An attorney for Wyleek Tinsley's family said the officers went in "guns blazing" and shot him without a proper investigation.
Wyleek Tinsley was unarmed and presented no threat to anyone on March 6, when Abington Township police officers entered his girlfriend’s apartment, “guns blazing,” and shot him in the head, his family said in a wrongful-death lawsuit filed in federal court Tuesday.
Tinsley, 19, was pronounced dead at Jefferson Abington Hospital not long after the shooting, which Montgomery County prosecutors later ruled justified.
Moments before the officers kicked in the door of the apartment, they overheard a woman screaming and then a gunshot from within, according to District Attorney Kevin Steele. When officers entered, they saw Tinsley at the end of a darkened hallway with an unknown object in his hand and opened fire.
Investigators later discovered that Tinsley was holding a cell phone.
The officers had been called to the Rosemore Gardens Apartments in Glenside earlier that day by the 11-year-old daughter of a 34-year-old woman whom Tinsley had recently started dating, according to the suit. The girl told a 911 operator she heard a gunshot as Tinsley was arguing with her mother.
Joseph Marrone, the attorney representing Tinsley’s parents, said in the lawsuit that the officers’ actions were an “inappropriate, unjustified and unconstitutional use of deadly force.”
“They didn’t properly assess the situation and just assumed a lot of facts,” he said, based on his review of footage from the officers’ body-worn cameras. “They couldn’t see Wyleek long enough to see what was in his hand and just started firing aimlessly.”
In a statement, Abington Township Police Chief Patrick Molloy said his officers had prepared to use less-lethal methods of defusing the domestic dispute, but that the situation quickly escalated.
“This was undoubtedly a tragic situation,” Molloy said. ”However, the responding officers acted lawfully and reasonably, with courage. In the face of a deadly and rapidly evolving incident, the officers were forced to make a split-second decision."
The the voice of the 11-year-old who called 911 “clearly demonstrated the fear for her mother’s life and her own,” according to Molloy. When the officers entered the apartment, Tinsley “turned his body in what they perceived to be a shooting stance.”
Afterward, he said, the officers found Tinsley’s girlfriend cowering in the bedroom where the gun was found. Molloy said the woman told the officers Tinsley had the gun before they entered the apartment.
At the time of the shooting, Marrone said, Tinsley was on the phone with his father, asking to be picked up from his girlfriend’s home. The couple had gotten into an argument after Tinsley called an ex-girlfriend for a ride, something Marrone said angered the woman and sparked a heated dispute.
After the shooting, the officers found a .30-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun registered to Tinsley’s girlfriend lying on a bed in the apartment’s rear bedroom. Two bullet holes, and two spent shell casings, were found in that room, according to prosecutors.
The gun later tested positive for Tinsley’s DNA.
Steele, the district attorney, said that just 17 seconds elapsed between when the officers heard the gunshot outside of the apartment and when Tinsley was fatally shot.
Because the officers heard a woman screaming and a gunshot fired shortly after they arrived at the scene, “the facts of this case supported the use of deadly force to prevent serious bodily injury to themselves” or the woman inside, Steele said in a statement.
Marrone said the prosecutor moved on from the case too quickly, “whitewashing” the behavior of the officers without conducting a thorough investigation. The gun, Marrone said, could have been handled by Tinsley previously.
The attorney also questioned the version of events presented by the girl who called police, and criticized the Abington officers for immediately “going into SWAT mode” without taking sufficient time to investigate the girl’s account.
“This lawsuit is not just about getting justice for Wyleek’s family, it’s about trying to have an independent mechanism to help improve this police department so it does better in the future,” Marrone said. “That’s what’s important.”