Charlotte (NC), Sept. 25 (EFE) .- A Hispanic North Carolina will receive half a million dollars in compensation for the two shots she received in the courtyard of his house five years ago at the hands of police who were searching for another individual.
The incident occurred the night of 2 February 2004, when officers Jeffrey Ray Porter, James Barbour and Jason Barnes, Clayton police, southeast of Raleigh, the capital the state, stormed a mobile home complex inhabited by Hispanics.
duty agents were searching for another Hispanic, Rudy Gonzalez, who had escaped from the custody of a probation officer .
Barnes Barbour and ended up in the mobile home of Manuel Pena, at that time 60 years old and had been awakened by the noise caused by the officers who roamed the area.
Pena told authorities that night seized a .22 caliber rifle and went to the front of the house because he believed that some animals were attacking their livestock.
At that moment there was a misunderstanding with the Hispanic, which is a legal resident but does not speak English, and the soldiers, who allegedly ordered the man to lose his weapon.
Pena apparently did not respond and the officers fired more than a dozen bullets, two of which penetrated the shoulder height of Hispanic generating serious injury to the fragile body of the sixties.
Hector Pena, the son of Manuel and owner of the property, called the action of the soldiers as excessive use of force.
They came to my house and shot my father in the middle of the night because someone got away. Besides his body dragged bleeding from gunshot wounds, said five years ago the local media Pena's son, who is a citizen.
investigations of the incident by agents of the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) completed four months after the officers acted in accordance with the procedures relevant to the case.
According Joshnton County prosecutors, the officers knocked on the door of Pena and who believed that housing was the suspect they sought.
Then came the Spaniard with a rifle in hand pointing agents in the end decided to shoot because the man did not heed orders to lower his weapon.
On that occasion, the prosecution made no criminal charges against the three soldiers but the family Pena filed a civil suit against them and the city of Clayton.
Pena argued that the officers used force majeure against him by the multiple shots fired and that there was an illegal review property .
This week, the grand jury in North Carolina decided to give $ 300,000 in compensation by the unauthorized invasion of the officers to Pena's house and ordered the agents Porter and James Barbour to pay a total of 200,000 in punitive damages.
The jury did not impose penalties on the victim'sallegations of excessive force.
It is a fact acted prejudiced because he was a Hispanic, he told the newspaper Que Pasa Pena's attorney, Douglas Kingsbery.
I think that these officers had gone to a neighborhood white to do the same, he said,
Kisnbery said Pena, now 65 years and spent thousands of dollars in recovery was grateful for the verdict of the grand jury.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lamented that justice has not been criminally punished three officers, who are Anglo-in a clear case of discrimination against a Hispanic.
Clayon police would not comment on the jury's verdict and will not know whether to appeal.
Porter and Barnes still in the police department and Barbour moved to Germany because of his new job.
This is the only known case so far that a law enforcement agency of a North Carolina county has to compensate monetarily to hispano.EFE
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