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An autistic boy was seriously injured in Salt Lake City, USA, when he was shot by a police officer, after his mother had asked for help to transport him to the hospital because he had suffered a crisis.
Linden Cameron, 13, who has Asperger syndrome, suffered a severe anxiety attack because her mother was about to return to work for the first time in a year.
The woman, Golda Burton, called 911, the emergency number, to take him to a hospital. “I told them that he was not armed, that he was just going crazy and starting to scream, he is a boy, he needs attention,” the mother told the local television channel KUTV.
A police officer opened fire on the 13-year-old boy.
When Utah police arrived at the home, the teenager ran away. Then a police officer shot him repeatedly. “During this brief harassment, a police officer opened fire with his service weapon and hit this person,” a police spokesman, Keith Horrocks, said at a news conference.
The 13-year-old has injuries to his shoulder, ankles, intestines and bladder. “He’s a little boy, why didn’t you throw him on the ground?” the mother asked crying.
Police say the 13-year-old was carrying a weapon
The initial version of the police was that they believed that Linden Cameron had “threatened people with a weapon”. However, according to Horrocks, so far no trace of a weapon has been found at the scene.
In a country that has been rocked in recent months by the historic movement against police violence, the Linden Cameron case has caused disgust among human rights organizations with disabilities. “The police were called in to help, but instead it did more harm than good,” said Neurodiverse Utah.
The 13-year-old’s case is reminiscent of Daniel Proud, a 41-year-old African-American man who suffered from mental illness and died of suffocation after his arrest on March 23 in Rochester, New York. Police intervened after Proud’s brother asked for help because the 41-year-old had suffered a crisis from the problems he was facing.
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