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Nearly two years after their son was shot dead by a police officer on the Georgia Tech campus, William and Lynne Schultz on Wednesday filed a lawsuit for wrongful death against the university, the officer and the Board of Directors. Regents of the state.
"It was preventable. It should never have happened, it was a tragedy, "family lawyer L. Chris Stewart told a press conference on Thursday.
In September 2017, campus authorities responded to a 911 call from Scout Schultz, a 21-year-old engineering student, who said a suspicious and armed person would be on campus, according to investigators. Police said on arrival that Schultz was armed with a knife and dismissed repeated calls from police asking him to drop the weapon.
After Schultz did not obey, one of the policemen shot him.
At the time, a Schultz family lawyer stated that Schultz, who identified himself as non-binary and intersex and preferred pronouns, was experiencing a "mental collapse" during the fatal encounter with the police. In a video of a witness, Schultz can be seen in front of a parking lot of the campus shouting "pull me!" to the officers who had their rifles unsheathed.
According to the lawsuit, among the four officers who responded to Scout Schultz's call, one or more had followed specialized training in tactics of crisis intervention. Although several officers remained calm and attempted to defuse the situation, one of them, Constable Tyler Beck, did not do so, the prosecution said.
"Immediately after one of his colleagues ordered Schultz not to move, Beck shot Schultz – shooting only once with his gun," according to the trial.
The lawsuit also maintains that Beck did not have the necessary mental health training to respond properly. At the time of the shooting, Beck had been an officer for 16 months, but records indicate that he had received no training in crisis intervention.
According to school records of the day, only one-third of Georgia Tech's police officers had been trained in crisis intervention.
"Schultz's death was the result of the failure of Georgia Tech and the state of Georgia to properly train its staff to prevent the exclusion of people such as Schultz from security." to which all students were entitled on campus. from Georgia Tech, "says the lawsuit.
Following the shooting, three suicide notes were found in Scout Schultz's dormitory, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced. Two years before the shooting, Schultz had received counseling after a suicide attempt, according to his father.
Schultz's actions "were consistent with a person experiencing a mental health crisis and were actions that a properly trained law enforcement officer would recognize as such," says the prosecution.
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