They Shot Him in 12 Seconds — Because He Couldn’t Speak

Speaker A: 00:00:04

So we usually start by being silly and having a goofy intro and welcoming people in with a fake record button. And all of that is normally a lot of fun, but I don't think I'm very fun or magnanimous today. The last couple days have been really hard.

Certainly not as hard for me as for a lot of other people who are stuck in this hellscape that we currently live in.

But we spend a lot of time talking about communication difficulties and how those present in a world where people don't understand context, they don't understand context clues, they don't understand social context. We don't spend a lot of time talking about the people who can't communicate with language at all.

In general, the people we interact with who are getting diagnosed with adult autism. And by adult autism, I mean late diagnosed autism. It was childhood autism too.

But in general, those individuals, they're able to have communication through acquired language, they're able to talk, they have held jobs or attempted to hold jobs, they've gotten through school or attempted to get through traditional education. There obviously is an entire contingent of people with autism spectrum disorder who do not communicate with language or acquired language.

Maybe they have verbal spoken with your mouth language. They might use sign language, which obviously is an acquired language, but is not a spoken language, or spoken with your mouth language.

They might use pantomime, actual pantomime, that's not an official language.

They might gesture, they might have a language board that they use that does speaking for them, but the words are not coming out of their own mouth, not in a language that is understood or spoken by the people around them. Those are in general considered the highest support need individuals.

Those are people who typically end up in long term care or need some sort of long term care. They're still people and they still deserve to exist.

And over the weekend we learned that Victor Perez, who was a 17 year old male with autism, was nonverbal, died from his injuries after being shot multiple times by the police who arrived on the scene of what was basically a domestic conflict. And it wasn't even necessarily that it was a dysregulated autistic kid. We don't know a whole lot more than that.

Aside from the fact that he was having an episode or had some sort of dysregulating event. I don't know what it was. He grabbed a kitchen knife, I don't know why, I don't know if anybody knows why somebody called the police.

It sounds like it was a neighbor who called the police, A neighbor who probably didn't understand. The police arrived. They saw a Brown person with a knife who did not respond to their very brief commands. A Brown person who doesn't have language.

He is non verbal. He doesn't have spoken language. So he could not respond.

I don't honestly even know that if he could respond if he would have been able to respond in English because that may not have been the language spoken in his house. But that's certainly what they were screaming at him in. And within 12 seconds of arriving on the scene, he was gunned down through a fence.

A fence that he could not traverse because he had cerebral palsy. So he was ataxic and did appear to be quote unquote drunk. But in actuality he had cerebral palsy.

So he could not walk upright and certainly could not climb a fence. But he was somehow menacing and Brown and apparently Brown and existing equates to a threat.

And we pull out our weapons and we fire on somebody who is on the other side of a fence that he could not get over. We know there was not anybody close enough to him for him to be a danger to anybody else. If another civilian was in danger, they wouldn't have fired.

So he was a danger to no one. He was unable to communicate. He was unable to move near more closely to someone and he is now dead.

There's so, so many layers of what is just fucked up here. I don't know what progressed to his state that he was in. I don't know what sensory dysregulation caused it. I don't know what he needed.

I don't know what he was trying to communicate. We know he was trying to communicate something.

I don't know how we were supposed to better approach that with him in a way that would have been safe for him. But I do know we were supposed to fucking try.

There's a lot of fair questions and I think very, very obvious questions and the answers are obvious as to whether an autistic child in the same situation with white skin would have ended up dead.

And I think the answer's pretty clear because we know that Black and Brown people are immediately treated as a threat and, and white people can be taken in without incident. Think back not that long ago they took Dylann Roof for a hamburger before taking him to jail for gunning down 12 people.

He didn't end up dead and he had a firearm and he had just killed a bunch of people. He got a hamburger.

One of the things about non verbal people is that I think people don't conceptualize enough what it's like to have a need and no fund of language to communicate it.

So like if you think about how quickly your brain breaks when you have a virus or you feel sick, how quickly things stop working, every day is like that and probably worse.

So he lives in this body that has needs, that has desires, that has pain, that has sickness, that has all of these things, that has everything that another 17 year old has. But when his stomach hurts, he can't tell you. I don't know how demonstrative he was able to be.

What you see in nonverbal people is that they sometimes get violent toward themselves, other people or objects because they are in physical pain and they can't describe it. There's actually pretty well documented instances of non verbal children who self harm in some way.

Whether they hit their head against something, whether they refuse to sleep, whether they break things, whether they scream uncontrollably, they do very disruptive things.

They can sometimes get dangerous toward other people and it's because they have a GI blockage or a stomach pain that they can't describe because they don't have language or not language that people around them understand. And so what do you do in that situation when you have pain and you can't communicate? Of course you're going to get frustrated.

Anybody would get frustrated. I get frustrated when I have a cold. Of course you're going to get frustrated. I don't know that that was what was what happened here. I don't.

But I know that that happens and things like that happen all the time.

It could have been any number of things that were hurting him, bothering him, causing a sensory response, a routine that changed something that was moved, something that he needed or he perceived he needed that he didn't have. It could have been any number of things, but none of those were lethal. None of those meant that he became disposable. All of those are treatable.

I don't know why they brought guns to a pillow fight. I feel like that's what they do anyway. I feel like that's the baseline. But they brought guns to a pillow fight and someone's dead. A child. A child.

Because they didn't take the time to figure out what was actually going on. They didn't assess the situation. You can't assess the situation in 12 seconds.

I was thinking about it the other day and I you can save a life in 12 seconds. You can grab someone who's about to fall. In 12 seconds you can figure out that there's a car coming that could hurt somebody in 12 seconds.

You could save a life in 12 seconds, I don't think. I can't think of a situation where it's okay to take it. Especially not a child, actually. Not especially not a child. Anybody, Anybody.

All of that to say, first off, this is horrible. And I mean, obviously my heart goes out to his family. Our entire team's heart go out to his family. I can't even imagine what they're going through.

Being somebody's full time caretaker in that way is taxing and it's overwhelming and it's exhausting. But also it is a labor of love because you love that person. Their loss is devastating in a way that I don't know that other losses could be.

I can't even conceptualize what that feels like to them. But please stop calling the police on Black and Brown people. Please don't call the police unless you actually need the police.

When we say defund the police, we aren't saying we shouldn't have police. We aren't saying we shouldn't have police to deal with crimes, actual crimes.

We're saying that we should have people trained using the funds that we have allocated to militarize our police forces, which is not necessary. We should be taking those funds and applying them to people who can intervene in these situations, who don't show up to pillow fights with guns.

We could have had crisis responders. You could have had a social worker, you could have had somebody who understands how to assess a situation with a dysregulated person.

There's so many things that could have been done before drawing a weapon. We cannot say that those things are going to happen when somebody who is perceived a threat just because he happens to be Brown exists.

So there are a couple of resources I wanted to talk about.

There is a resource called don't call the police, which is a listing of resources by city that you can look up to figure out who you can call instead of the police should somebody need a crisis response. So if you're in danger, call the police. If you're actually in danger, call the police. If there is a violent crime happening, call the police.

But if there is somebody in crisis, somebody who seems dysregulated, somebody who needs some sort of intervention, and you're not sure there are crisis resources available, and they're available almost everywhere. There are community based alternatives.

Don'tcallthepolice.com is the website and it gives you places that you can utilize that will be safer for individuals who could be put at direct harm by engaging the police instead of utilizing community resources.

The other thing is there is a website, I, I don't know a ton about it, please do your due diligence, but it's called autismandrace.com and it's a mutual aid fund for autistic people of color. They are raising funds to support the Victor Perez's of the world who are both racialized and disabled.

And it's another way that you can support individuals through monetary support, through programs, get access to programs, find out different ways that you can support people of color who also happen to be disabled without calling in resources that very well could kill them because they don't understand. There was no reason Victor Perez should die. None. He was a kid. He was a kid. He was a kid who didn't understand.

And nobody took the time to understand him.

Nobody who had the ability to take his life away took the time to try to understand that you can't do anything in 12 seconds aside from apparently fire Again. If you want to look more into the resources that I just talked about, they're in the episode description jump there.

And if anybody has more resources that they think are helpful for these communities that we did not talk about, please share them back at us and we'll be happy to share those with our community.