On Wednesday, brand new dashcam footage of the shooting of Daunte Wright was revealed. The footage was released during the opening stateme...
On Wednesday, brand new dashcam footage of the shooting of Daunte Wright was revealed.
The footage was released during the opening statements of the trial of Kim Potter, the former police officer accused of shooting and killing Wright during a traffic stop in Minnesota in April.
Potter, a 26-year veteran of the Brooklyn Center Police Department, was on patrol with a trainee when she and other officers pulled over Wright, who was wanted on an outstanding warrant related to a “gross misdemeanor weapons charge.”
When the officers found out about the warrant, they said they tried to arrest him, but Wright broke away and attempted to flee in his car. It was then that Potter reportedly fired her gun at Wright, saying she thought she had actually been holding her Taser.
Prosecutors showed the following brand new footage of the shooting to the jury Wednesday, according to CNN.
Assistant Minnesota Attorney General Erin Eldridge told the jury that, during the arrest, Wright was “scared” and attempted to get back in his car to flee the scene.
After shooting Wright, Potter can be heard on video admitting she made a mistake.
“S**t, I just shot him, I grabbed the wrong f***ing gun and I shot him … I’m going to go prison … I killed a boy,” Potter said.
Potter faces a charge of second-degree manslaughter.
In Minnesota, an individual can be charged with second-degree manslaughter if the killing was “culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk, and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another,” according to the 2021 Minnesota statutes.
Potter’s defense has argued that Wright created an unreasonable risk, not Potter, by resisting arrest in the first place.
All Wright “had to do was surrender,” attorney Paul Engh said in his own opening statements on Wednesday, according to CNN.
“All he has to do is stop and he’d be with us.”
Engh went on to stress that Potter made an accident by grabbing her gun, albeit a tragic one.
“She realizes what has happened much to her everlasting and unending regret,” Engh said.
“She made a mistake. This was an accident. She is a human being, but she had to do what she had to do to prevent a death to a fellow officer too.”
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