Family Releases Video of Mentally Ill Man Killed by Fort Bend Officer




A video released Wednesday shows the last few minutes in the life of Michael Blair who died in a hail of gunfire last year from a Fort Bend County sheriff's deputy.

In the last seconds of the video, Blair - holding a knife but already struck several times by a stun gun - appears to stumble toward the deputy standing in the bathroom doorway at the family's Rosenberg-area home.

The deputy shouts for the man to stop, then begins firing.

The video appears to show the deputy continuing to shoot almost a dozen times, the pistol following Blair as he collapses to the floor.

Anguished screams from family members can be heard as they are hustled out of the home.

Community activist Quanell X on Wednesday called the shooting "nothing less than a cold-blooded execution."

Blair's family gave the video to the Houston media and said they intended to hand over a copy to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

It was never provided to local investigators, so was not taken into account by a Fort Bend County grand jury that declined to issue an indictment in the case.

A Fort Bend County Sheriff's official said the department could not comment on something it hasn't seen.

"We consider it evidence and it needs to be turned over to the proper authorities," said sheriff's spokesman Bob Haenel.

The deputy, an 11-year veteran, was sent to the home in the 7000 block of Dawn Bloom on Nov. 4, because Blair had locked himself in a bathroom and was threatening to harm himself, officials said.

Blair's family said they called 911 only after several hospitals told them that was the proper course in the case of someone who was possibly suicidal.

"All this family wanted was somebody to help. This young man did not have to die," the activist said, standing outside the U.S. Attorney's Office in downtown Houston.

The video shows the deputy standing with another officer in front of a closed bathroom door.

"If you don't open this door, we're going to kick it in," the deputy said.

"We want to do this the easy way. Don't make us do it the hard way."

After several attempts jiggling the knob, the door opens slightly, allowing the deputy to see inside the bathroom.

"He's got a knife. He's got a knife," the deputy yells, as the doors shuts again.

He kicked open the door and shouted at Blair to "Stay down. Stay down."

He told the other officer to use the Taser and continued ordering Blair to drop the knife.

The video shows the deputy trying to coax Blair to disarm himself, telling him he didn't want to shoot him.

"We're trying to help you. Let it (the knife) go. Do it now," the deputy said.

The confrontation lasted about 20 minutes.

"All we're asking is that someone recognize what we recognize - that was brutality," said Blair's mother, Kimberly Blair-Olaniyi.

Quanell X would not say why an apparently hidden camera was aimed at the bathroom door during the violent confrontation.

He said the family wanted to release the video after local investigations were concluded.

"These cases are always lies and truths are not told," he said. "We have a tape to expose those lying hypocrites."

The activist said the man's family wants a federal civil rights investigation into Blair's death and will likely file a lawsuit.

"We forgave that officer," Blair's mother said. "We want him to live a long life so he will always remember my son and how he murdered him in that bathroom."

The sheriff's office was creating a crisis intervention team and training the deputies to deal with mental health problems at the time Blair was fatally shot. Haenel said the 10-member team is now operational.

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Users with fake names get boot from Google Plus

(CNN) - Google+ has been a hit in the tech community, with early adopters praising its clean design and features like Circles and group video chat.

But some of those same folks are now miffed, saying the social-networking site is being too aggressive in booting users who don't sign up with their real names.

Over the weekend and into Monday, multiple tech blogs were reporting what appeared to be an uptick in the number of people removed from Google+ for signing up under assumed names.
"Google Profiles are designed to be public pages on the web, which are used to help connect and find real people in the real world," a Google spokeswoman said in an email. "By providing your common name, you will be assisting all people you know - friends, family members, classmates, co-workers, and other acquaintances - in finding and creating a connection with the the right person online."

The email did not specifically address complaints about the policy and account deletions.
The Google+ content policy says, "To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles," users must use the name their friends, family or co-workers usually call them.

"For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable," the policy reads.

Limor "Ladyada" Fried, a noted figure in the open-source hardware community, briefly had her account suspended over the weekend. Her name is an assumed one but one by which she's well-known (she recently was featured in a cover story in Wired magazine).
Her account was reinstated.

Former Google employee Kirrily Robert, who goes by the single name "Skud," said she also had her account suspended when she used the nickname to sign up.

She wrote that she expected the nickname issue to come up and largely wanted to test how the site dealt with it.

"I thought it would be interesting and educational for someone who understands the system quite well (my recent ex-Googler status helps with this) to poke at it from outside and see how it appears to work," she wrote on her personal blog. "My goals were, firstly, to help highlight the problems with the policy, and secondly, to test out and document the processes around it. This seems to be going well so far."
On the blog TechCrunch, Jon Evans wrote a strongly worded post saying he likes Google+ but calling its name policy stupid.

"It's too bad that the service has sacrificed a pile of goodwill over the last week by repeatedly publicly shooting themselves in the foot," he wrote.

Evans suggests that Google, which allows a "nickname" to be used along with the user's real name, limit how often a nickname can be changed and then let users decide which of their social circles see which name.

"Voila. Accountable identities and pseudonymity, all in one package: problem solved," he wrote. "You can thank me later, Google. After you reinstate all those accounts."

Critics note that dissidents and whistle-blowers have used social media like Facebook and Twitter under assumed names to fight corruption and contribute to political causes. Their safety might be jeopardized if they used their real names, critics say.

Facebook's policy also requires users to register for the site with their real names. That site's terms and conditions state: "We reserve the right to remove or reclaim [a user's name] if we believe appropriate (such as when a trademark owner complains about a username that does not closely relate to a user's actual name)."

Tech writer Robert Scoble (Google+'s sixth most-followed user,according to Social Statistics), has hosted a running dialogue about the naming controversy on his account.


Scoble wrote early Monday that he talked with Vic Gundotra, the senior vice president for Google's social networking products, and quoted him as saying that Google has made some mistakes while trying to nail down the naming policy.

According to Scoble, Gundotra said there is no intention to require legal names, just to delete obviously fake and offensive ones.

"After running through his reasoning, mostly to have a nicer, more personal, community, I feel even stronger that Google is on the right track here even though I feel they weren't fair or smart in how they spun up these new rules," Scoble wrote. "But Vic convinced me to hang in there and watch their decisions over the next few weeks."

By Doug Gross, CNN

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