All White Jury Believes Black WI Cop Who Said He Couldn't Remember Killing Alvin Cole: Shot Black Teen 2X when He was on Hands and Knees and 3X While He was Face Down on Ground. 2nd Civil Mistrial

From [HERE] and [HERE] After 10 hours of deliberation, a Milwaukee jury could not reach a unanimous verdict in the civil lawsuit against a former Wisconsin police officer who fatally shot a 17-year-old in a mall parking lot, resulting in a second mistrial.

Wauwatosa officer Joseph Mensah shot 17-year-old Alvin Cole outside Mayfair Mall on February 2 after police responded to a call of a reported disturbance at the shopping center. 

An all-white, eight-member jury was selected out of a pool of 36 potential jurors, with an even split of men and women. None of the jurors are from Milwaukee. Two indicated that they have close relatives who served in law enforcement. 

Mensah is a Black police officer in Wauwatosa, a suburb of Milwaukee. Cole was Mensah’s third shooting over a five-year period at Wauwatosa PD, a fact not allowed to be shared with the white jurors. That is, he fatally shot three non-white men:  Antonio Gonzales, who had mental health issues and refused to drop a sword; Jay Anderson Jr., a Black man who was shot in the head while asleep in his car in a public park; and Cole.

At trial he claimed he couldn’t remember what happened but that he didn’t shoot for no reason.

In February 2020, around 6 p.m., Wauwatosa police officers were dispatched to Mayfair Mall for a dispute involving a group of teenagers, one of whom was 17-year-old Alvin Cole. He was described by mall security as a Black teenage male wearing a gray hoodie and a fanny pack containing a handgun.

When officers arrived on the scene, Cole and his friends ran away. The shooting occurred after Cole refused a command from the police to drop the stolen gun he was holding and Cole fired a bullet as he tried to flee.

It was determined that Mensah fired his weapon five times. Two shots were fired when Cole was on his hands and knees, and the remaining three shots were fired by Mensah while Cole was face down on the ground. Mensah was the only officer among the five other officers at the scene who fired his weapon.

On October 7, 2020 Milwaukee County District Attorney John T. Chisholm announced that Officer Mensah would not be charged because he had reasonable belief that deadly force was necessary. Chisholm is a white liberal.

Cole’s parents sued Mensah for excessive force in 2022. The first trial in March ended with a hung jury.

The civil retrial began last Monday in the Eastern District of Wisconsin before federal Judge Lynn Adelman.

Over three days of testimony, the plaintiffs attempted to show that Mensah did not have the legal right to use deadly force on Cole because he did not point his weapon at any officer. They used the medical examiner’s report to show that Cole was likely on his hands and knees when Mensah fired, and the testimony of other officers to disprove Mensah’s version of events.

Mensah is the only officer to testify that he saw the gun pointed at him. Officer Evan Olson also claimed to have seen the gun pointed, though he testified that he believed it was pointed at himself. The mall security guard, who was gaining on Cole when the first shot went off, said Cole turned and looked him in the eyes before Mensah got there.

Olson drove Mensah back to the station against protocol, which requires involved officers to isolate from each other until they can give statements to internal investigators. Neither could remember what they talked about, and the audio and video turn off when they get into Mensah’s unmarked squad car, according to court records.

Attorney Nate Cade, representing Cole’s estate, suggested several times that the two are close friends and synced up their stories after the shooting and before they gave statements to internal investigating officers from the Milwaukee Police Department.

“If they synced up their stories, they didn’t do a good job,” defense attorney Jasmine Baynard said during her closing argument on Wednesday.

Baynard made a convincing argument in closings, telling the jury that the law doesn’t require Mensah to actually be in danger to use deadly force — he only needs to be able to articulate the danger he perceived himself to be in at the time.

When asked why he shot and killed Cole by his own attorneys, he said simply that he didn’t want to die. He also said that when he responded to the call, which was not yet a particularly serious event, he never imagined that Cole would try to shoot his way out.

The trial was marred by frequent and tense objections, sidebars and impeachment from both sides of the case. With each witness testifying to a slightly different version of events, some seeming logistically improbable and others changing over time, the jury had the difficult task of discerning the evidence in the case from the parties’ arguments and theories.