Killing of Philando Castile

Based on Wikipedia: Killing of Philando Castile

Forty seconds. That's how long the encounter lasted—from the moment Officer Jeronimo Yanez approached the white Oldsmobile to the moment he fired seven bullets into the driver. Forty seconds to end a man's life over a broken brake light.

On the evening of July 6, 2016, Philando Castile was driving home from the grocery store with his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds and her four-year-old daughter. It was an ordinary Wednesday evening in Falcon Heights, a quiet suburb of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Castile had gotten a haircut earlier, eaten dinner with his sister, and picked up Reynolds from his apartment. Now they were heading home.

He would never arrive.

The Stop

At 9:04 p.m., a St. Anthony police officer patrolling Larpenteur Avenue radioed to a nearby squad car. He wanted to pull over the white Oldsmobile and check the IDs of the people inside. His reason? "The two occupants just look like people that were involved in a robbery," he said. "The driver looks more like one of our suspects, just because of the wide-set nose."

The robbery in question had occurred four days earlier at a convenience store. The suspects were described as Black men with shoulder-length or longer dreadlocks. No height, no weight, no age estimates—just dreadlocks and the fact that they were Black. Castile wore his hair differently. But he did have, according to the officer, a "wide-set nose."

A minute later, the stop began.

Castile pulled over on Larpenteur Avenue at Fry Street, just outside the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. Reynolds sat in the passenger seat. Her daughter was buckled into the back. Officer Yanez approached from the driver's side while his partner, Joseph Kauser, came around to the passenger side.

Yanez asked for license and registration. Castile handed over his proof of insurance card. Then he did something that citizens with concealed carry permits are generally trained to do—he informed the officer that he was armed.

"Sir, I have to tell you that I do have a firearm on me," Castile said calmly.

What happened next took thirteen seconds.

Thirteen Seconds

Before Castile could even finish his sentence, Yanez responded with a quick "Okay" and placed his right hand on his own holstered weapon. "Okay, don't reach for it, then," Yanez said. "Don't pull it out."

"I'm not pulling it out," Castile replied.

"He's not pulling it out," Reynolds added.

Yanez's voice rose. "Don't pull it out!" He drew his gun with his right hand while reaching into the driver's window with his left.

Reynolds screamed, "No!"

Then Yanez fired. Seven shots in rapid succession. Five hit Castile. Two of them pierced his heart.

In the sudden silence that followed, Castile moaned and said what would be among his final words: "I wasn't reaching for it."

The Live Stream

Within seconds of the shooting, Diamond Reynolds did something unprecedented. She pulled out her phone and began streaming live on Facebook.

The video shows Castile slumped over in his seat, blood spreading across his left arm and side. He's still moving slightly, still moaning. Yanez stands outside the window, his gun still drawn and pointed at the dying man.

Reynolds narrates with a preternatural calm that comes from shock. She explains that the officer asked for license and registration. That Castile told him the documents were in his wallet. That Castile informed him he had a legal pistol because he was licensed to carry. That the officer told him not to move. And that as Castile was putting his hands back up, the officer shot him.

"You shot four bullets into him, sir," Reynolds says to Yanez. "He was just getting his license and registration, sir."

Yanez, still pointing his weapon, screams back: "I told him not to reach for it! I told him to get his hand open!"

At one point in the video, Reynolds is ordered to get on her knees. You can hear the sound of her being handcuffed. Her phone falls to the ground but keeps recording. An officer can be heard repeatedly yelling "Fuck!" in the background.

Reynolds and her daughter were placed in the back of a squad car. On that vehicle's dashcam footage, the four-year-old girl says something that would haunt everyone who heard it: "Mom, please stop cussing and screaming 'cause I don't want you to get shooted."

A four-year-old, having just watched a man shot to death in front of her, was now comforting her mother—and worried about her mother being shot too.

Who Was Philando Castile?

Philando Divall Castile was thirty-two years old. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, grew up in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, and graduated from Saint Paul Central High School in 2001. For fourteen years, he had worked for the Saint Paul Public School District, starting as a nutrition services assistant and working his way up to supervisor at J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School.

By all accounts, the kids loved him. He memorized their names, their food allergies, their dietary restrictions. He knew which students couldn't afford to pay for lunch and made sure they ate anyway.

He was also no stranger to being pulled over by police. Before the night he was killed, Castile had been stopped by officers at least forty-nine times over thirteen years—roughly once every three months for his entire adult driving life. The violations were almost always minor: equipment problems, failure to signal, driving without a muffler. Most of the tickets were eventually dismissed.

Forty-nine stops. Think about what that does to a person. Think about the accumulating weight of being told, again and again, that you look suspicious, that you need to be checked, that your presence on the road requires explanation.

And yet when Castile was finally stopped by the officer who would kill him, he followed the rules. He disclosed his weapon. He tried to comply.

It didn't matter.

The Officer's Account

Within minutes of the shooting, while still at the scene, Yanez gave a statement to a fellow officer. His account is worth examining closely.

"He was sitting in the car, seat belted," Yanez said. "I told him, 'Can I see your license?' And then, he told me he had a firearm. I told him not to reach for it." Yanez paused and sighed. "When he went down to grab, I told him not to reach for it, and then he kept it right there, and I told him to take his hands off of it."

Then Yanez said something revealing: "And I don't know where the gun was, he didn't tell me where the fucking gun was."

He didn't know where the gun was.

In a later interview with investigators from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Yanez elaborated on his state of mind. He explained that he believed his life was in danger because of Castile's behavior toward the child in the car. His reasoning? Castile had apparently been smoking marijuana in the vehicle with a child present.

"I thought I was gonna die," Yanez told investigators. "And I thought if he's, if he has the, the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five-year-old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing, then what, what care does he give about me?"

Follow the logic here: a man who might smoke marijuana around a child is therefore willing to murder a police officer. This was the mental calculation that, according to Yanez himself, led to his decision to fire.

When investigators pressed Yanez about whether he actually saw a gun, his answers were remarkably vague. He said it "appeared" that Castile was wrapping something around his fingers. He said it "seemed like" Castile was pulling out a gun. He said he knew Castile "had an object and it was dark."

At trial, nearly a year later, Yanez became more definitive. "I was able to see the firearm in Mr. Castile's hand," he testified. "And that's when I engaged him."

But when paramedics arrived to load Castile's body into the ambulance, they found his gun still in his pocket.

The Disputed Stop

Was this traffic stop even justified in the first place?

Yanez's attorney claimed the officer stopped Castile partly because of a broken taillight and partly because Castile resembled a robbery suspect. But lawyers for the Castile family pointed out a significant problem with this explanation.

If Yanez truly believed he was stopping an armed robbery suspect, standard police procedure would have called for a "felony traffic stop." This involves ordering the suspect out of the car at gunpoint, having them lie face-down on the ground, and approaching only when officers have established a position of cover. It's a high-risk procedure for a high-risk situation.

Instead, Yanez conducted an ordinary traffic stop. He walked up to the driver's window and asked for documents. That's what you do when you've pulled someone over for a broken taillight—not when you think you've just found an armed robbery suspect.

"Either he was a robbery suspect and Yanez didn't follow the procedures for a felony stop," one of the Castile family's attorneys observed, "or he was not a robbery suspect and Yanez shot a man because he stood at his window getting his information."

As for the resemblance to the robbery suspects? The police description mentioned Black men with shoulder-length dreadlocks. It mentioned no height, no weight, no age. The only specific characteristic Yanez could point to was Castile's "wide-set nose."

"I can't imagine that it's reasonable suspicion to make a stop because somebody had a broad nose," the Castile family attorney said.

Subsequent investigation confirmed what perhaps should have been obvious from the start: Castile had nothing to do with the robbery.

The Aftermath

By the time Diamond Reynolds was released from police custody around 5:00 a.m. the following morning, her video had been viewed nearly 2.5 million times on Facebook. The number would continue to climb.

Reynolds later described her treatment that night. "They treated me like a criminal," she said, "like it was my fault." She also noted that officers had failed to check whether Castile had a pulse or was breathing for several minutes after the shooting. Instead, they had comforted Yanez—the officer who had just killed an unarmed man.

Protests began forming within hours of the shooting. By 12:30 a.m., just three hours after Castile was shot, more than two hundred people had gathered at the scene. The crowds were, by all accounts, peaceful but visibly angry. More protesters assembled outside the Minnesota Governor's Residence, chanting Castile's name.

The Minneapolis chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, commonly known as the NAACP, called for a federal investigation. Castile's mother, Valerie Castile, demanded that the case be referred to a special prosecutor.

On July 14, thousands of mourners attended Philando Castile's funeral at the Cathedral of Saint Paul. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner had ruled his death a homicide—a clinical term meaning simply that one person had caused the death of another. The cause of death was multiple gunshot wounds. He had died at 9:37 p.m. at Hennepin County Medical Center, about twenty minutes after being shot.

The Trial

Five months after the shooting, Officer Jeronimo Yanez was charged with second-degree manslaughter and two counts of dangerous discharge of a firearm. He pleaded not guilty.

The trial hinged on a fundamental question: Was it reasonable for Yanez to believe his life was in danger?

The defense focused heavily on the presence of marijuana in the car. A mason jar containing a small amount had been found after the shooting. The argument, implicit but clear, was that Castile's drug use—legal in many states, still illegal in Minnesota at the time—somehow made him more dangerous, less trustworthy, more deserving of suspicion.

The prosecution presented the dashcam video showing those forty seconds of interaction. They presented evidence that Castile's gun had never left his pocket. They presented testimony about Castile's character, his work with children, his clean record.

After five days of deliberation, the jury returned its verdict on June 16, 2017: not guilty on all charges.

Yanez was immediately fired by the City of St. Anthony. It was a curious decision—if his actions were legally justified, as the jury had found, why terminate his employment? The city never fully explained the contradiction.

Wrongful death lawsuits brought by Reynolds and the Castile family were eventually settled for a combined $3.8 million. In the strange arithmetic of American justice, this was the price tag placed on Philando Castile's life.

The Larger Pattern

The shooting of Philando Castile was the first officer-involved shooting the St. Anthony Police Department had experienced in at least thirty years. But it was hardly unique in the broader landscape of American policing.

Consider the sequence of events: A Black man is stopped by police. He does everything he's supposed to do—he's polite, he's compliant, he discloses that he's legally armed. And he's shot anyway, in front of a woman and a child, for reasons that the officer himself could never clearly articulate.

Yanez said he thought he was going to die. But he also said he didn't know where the gun was. He said Castile's behavior toward the child in the car made him suspicious. He said the car was dark. He said it "seemed like" Castile was reaching for something.

None of these things are evidence of a threat. They are the scattered justifications of a man who made a split-second decision and spent the rest of his career trying to explain why.

The gun was in Castile's pocket. Castile told the officer he had a gun—exactly as he was supposed to. He said "I'm not pulling it out" twice before he was shot. And still the jury found the shooting justified.

This is what makes the Castile case so troubling. It wasn't a case where the facts were unclear. There was dashcam video. There was a live stream from immediately after the shooting. There was audio of the officer admitting he didn't know where the gun was. And it still wasn't enough.

Forty-Nine Stops

Return, for a moment, to those forty-nine traffic stops before the fatal one. Almost all were for minor violations—broken lights, improper signaling, equipment problems. Most were dismissed.

Why does this matter?

Because it suggests that Castile was stopped not for what he did, but for who he was—or rather, for what he looked like. Once every three months, for thirteen years, he was reminded that his presence on the road was subject to scrutiny. That driving while Black meant being watched, being questioned, being required to prove you weren't doing anything wrong.

And when he finally encountered the officer who would kill him, Castile handled the situation exactly as someone with that history might. Carefully. Politely. Disclosing the weapon he was legally permitted to carry because he knew—he had to know, after forty-nine stops—that an undisclosed gun could be a death sentence.

He disclosed it anyway. And it was still a death sentence.

What Remains

Diamond Reynolds' video, viewed millions of times in the hours and days after the shooting, became one of the defining documents of its era. It showed Americans something they could no longer deny: that compliance doesn't guarantee safety, that following the rules doesn't always protect you, that a traffic stop over a broken brake light can end with a man bleeding to death while his girlfriend narrates his final moments to the world.

The four-year-old girl in the back seat, the one who told her mother to stop screaming so she wouldn't "get shooted," is a teenager now. She grew up in a country where Philando Castile's killing was ruled justified, where the officer who shot him walked free, where the message—absorbed by millions of Black children just like her—is that there are no right moves, no magic words, no amount of compliance that can guarantee you'll make it home.

Philando Castile worked in school cafeterias. He memorized children's names and made sure hungry kids got fed. He had been pulled over forty-nine times and had never been convicted of anything more serious than a traffic violation. On the night he died, he was driving home from the grocery store with the woman he loved and the child he helped raise.

Forty seconds. Seven shots. Five bullets. One life.

The brake light, reportedly, was working fine.