CINCINNAT I – A white police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black man in an alley at 2 a.m. would have had trouble seeing whether the man had a weapon, defense witnesses testified Thursday.
The nearest light source to the scene where Timothy Thomas was shot was a city street light a half block away, according to testimony. One of the witnesses, optometrist Robert Weathers, also said that Officer Stephen Roach has astigmatism in both eyes that could have restricted his night vision.
The April 7 shooting of Thomas, 19, led to three nights of rioting, the city’s worst racial violence since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. A curfew was ordered citywide, dozens of people were injured and more than 800 were arrested.
Roach initially told investigators that Thomas made a threatening move toward him, and he thought Thomas had a gun.
“He would have been operating on the basis he had seen a gun,” said optometrist Paul Michel, who testified about light measurements he took 4 1/2 months after the shooting.
“Whether or not it would be proven at a later date that there was no gun, it would have been his reality at the moment,” Michel said.
Both optometrists, under prosecution examination, said Roach has generally good vision, certainly good enough to function as a police officer.
Defense witness William Lewinski, who has studied the effects of stress on police officers who have been involved in shootings, said many officers have reported suffering distorted vision or hearing and even a distorted sense of time seeming to slow down or speed up. Officers often react instinctively and then think later about why they took those actions, Lewinski testified.
He said that could explain Roach’s initial statement to other officers, within minutes of shooting Thomas, that his 9 mm police revolver “just went off.”
“The decision to shoot is a reactive decision,” Lewinski said. “What happened to officer Roach is, he made the most serious mistake of his life and he doesn’t know why he did it.”
Roach, 27, has pleaded innocent to misdemeanor charges of negligent homicide and obstructing official business. Judge Ralph E. Winkler is hearing the trial in Hamilton County Municipal Court without a jury.
Winkler refused to throw out the charges when prosecutors finished presenting their case Thursday.
Defense lawyer Merlyn Shiverdecker argued that the state failed during three days of testimony to prove that Roach was guilty. But Prosecutor Steve McIntosh argued that the trial should go on.
“We cannot conclude that the state failed to meet its burden just because the defendant is a creative storyteller,” McIntosh said.
He said evidence showed that Roach’s actions amounted to criminal neglect. And he said the state demonstrated that Roach hindered the police investigation of what happened by telling different stories to investigators about the Thomas shooting.
Shiverdecker has declined to say if Roach will testify. If convicted of both charges, Roach could get anything from probation to nine months in jail.
Thomas was wanted on 14 charges, including traffic offenses and fleeing from police to avoid arrest, when Roach and other officers chased him into an alley in the high-crime Over-the-Rhine neighborhood just north of the business district.
