Bodycam footage shows Sergeant Constant Rosemond and Officer Olivier Gonzalez pacing around before a voice is heard relaying over the police radio: “We got shots fired.”
Moments earlier, Cooper and Gonzalez were locked in a scuffle after Cooper allegedly tried to flee the scene of a traffic stop. Police claim Cooper dropped a Springfield Armory Hellcat 9mm pistol on the ground during the confrontation. After arriving on the scene to find the two men fighting, Rosemond opened fire on Cooper, striking him with a single, fatal bullet to the head, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office says.
In the wake of the shooting, Cooper’s family accused the Miami Police Department of recklessly pulling the trigger on Cooper while the pistol was not in his possession and he posed no threat to the officers.
“He never pulled a weapon — and when I say ‘a weapon,’ I mean any type of weapon. Police keep saying ‘gun’ because it’s a red-herring distraction to detract from the fact that this officer shot and killed an unarmed man,” the family’s lawyer, Rawsi Williams, told New Times in April.
Williams described it to New Times as an “execution-style shooting.”
After a nine-month probe, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office (SAO) has declined to press charges against Rosemond. The state attorney’s December closeout memo found it “reasonable for him to believe that deadly force was necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or Officer Gonzalez.”
“The investigation in this case indicate Sgt. Constant Rosemond pulled up and observed Gonzalez and Cooper engaged in a violent struggle. Rosemond was able to observe Cooper on top of Gonzalez, as Gonzalez struggled to keep control of Cooper’s hands,” the memo states.
According to the memo, Rosemond “shouted several commands to Cooper which went unheeded, leading [him] to fire one round from his service weapon.”
Williams and co-counsel Frank Allen, tell New Times the decision not to charge Rosemond is a “tragedy.”
“There is no way based on the facts and physical evidence in the SAO’s possession that the SAO didn’t have probable cause to arrest him, and enough evidence to convict him,” the statement reads.
Adding insult to injury, despite Williams and Allen being in contact with the state attorney’s office and asking for a status update on the investigation, they say they were never notified about the release of the closeout memo. The attorneys only learned about it when media reached out to them this week, they say.
“The family has no trust in the SAO or its decision,” the statement reads. “We will proceed with [a] federal suit against Sgt. Constant Rosemond and the City of Miami.”
The traffic stop that preceded the shooting took place around 4:30 p.m. on the afternoon of March 8, 2022. Cooper was driving with a passenger near Miami Northwestern Senior High School in Liberty City when Gonzalez pulled him over for speeding and what appeared to be illegally tinted windows, according to the closeout memo. Cooper admitted he did not have a drivers’ license, after which point Gonzalez asked him to step out of the car.
As captured on the officer’s body-worn camera, Cooper, a 34-year-old Black man with dreadlocks, exits the car and Gonzalez begins patting him down. Cooper allegedly tried to break free, and a brief scuffle ensued between the two, during which the officer’s body camera falls to the ground. Seconds later, the sound of a single shot can be heard outside of the camera’s view.
The state attorney’s office claims investigators reviewed the bodycam footage and determined that the Hellcat gun –– which the memo identified as Cooper’s –– was not in the roadway before the incident, meaning it was dropped during the struggle, prosecutors claim.
The gun was registered to a third-party, who had twelve gun purchases on record. According to the state attorney’s office, six of those firearms have been recovered by law enforcement “under various circumstances.” The closeout memo references Cooper’s prior felony conviction for robbery, which made it illegal for him to have a firearm, according to the memo.
The passenger in the Nissan told investigators that he had lost sight of Cooper and Gonzalez as they were tussling outside the car.
“Upon looking back, [the passenger] saw Rosemond with his hands extended in front of him and a gun in hand. A gunshot was then heard,” the memo states. “[The passenger] stayed in the car in disbelief of what had just transpired,” the memo says.
Rosemond, who is also Black, declined to give a sworn statement in the investigation. He did not have an active bodycam at the time of the incident.
Following the shooting, Cooper’s family and the attorneys sent Miami police a pre-suit notice alleging the department had released “misleading, if not false information” about the events leading up to Cooper’s death, including that there was “an exchange of gunfire.”
The letter stated that even if the gun on the scene belonged to Cooper, “the fact remains true that no gun or any weapon was in Mr. Cooper’s possession nor hands when the Sergeant shot him in the head at close range and killed him.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
