The U.S. Park Police has one story. And a WJLA story with interviews from potential neighborhood witnesses has yet another version of events. Let's break it down.

In an interview with City Desk, U.S. Park Police Sgt. David Schlosser, the department's spokesperson, lays out this simple scenario.

"Yesterday detectives received information about about a man with a gun, located the subject," Schlosser says. "While they were making the arrest, a struggle ensued. The suspect was shot. The suspect did have a gun and the gun was recovered at the scene."

According to WJLA account, Trey Joyner never pointed a gun at the cops:

On Monday night, four U.S. Park Police officers moved in when an informant reportedly made a call about a man with a gun. The plainclothes officers are part of the multi-agency Safe Streets Task Force.

Trey Joyner apparently got of a car and then something occurred which prompted the officers to fire repeatedly. Witnesses say they heard at least seven gunshots.

Investigators say they recovered a gun at the scene, but some who say they witnessed the shooting are adamant Joyner never brandished a gun or threatened the officers.

"He never pointed the gun at him," said a witness.

The diverting narratives could simply be due to the fact that the case is still very, very fresh. One hopes the D.C. Police Department were able to do a thorough canvas and that residents came forward with whatever they saw. The D.C. Police Department is handling the case.

Schlosser says: "We are cooperating completely with them."

This afternoon, the Partnership for Civil Justice announced that it had filed a FOIA request today seeking answers concerning this shooting. [You can read a PDF of the FOIA].

In a release, the Partnership writes:

"In response to reports that a resident of the District was shot in the back and killed last night in the Trinidad neighborhood by undercover federal law enforcement agents, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund filed a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) today demanding disclosure of the directives and policies authorizing and implementing the program through which the officers were operating.

Few D.C. residents are aware of the existence of this FBI-led undercover law enforcement operation through which plain-clothed Park Police officers opened fire in the midst of a D.C. neighborhood. The fact of this operation, shrouded in darkness, came to light in reports published today that the officers involved in the above-referenced incident were working as part of an MPD and federal “inter-agency task force dubbed Operation Safe Streets, which addresses violence throughout the region and is overseen by the FBI.” (See Debbi Wilgoren and Martin Weil, The Washington Post, June 9, 2009, online edition)

The FOIA request was submitted to the MPD, the Mayor’s Office, the FBI and the National Park Service’s Police."

U.S. Park Police were last involved in a shooting on April 13 of this year at 2nd and K Street NE. Schlosser says that investigation is still on-going.

*Correction: This reporter in a previous post was completely confused about this police shooting. He mixed up the earlier police shooting from yesterday morning with the Park Police shooting from last night. Item has been fixed. Embarrassment remains.

Maybe you are sick of hearing about the DeOnte Rawlings case. The 14-year-old was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer on September 17, 2007. That's a long time ago. By now, the off-duty cops have been cleared by the U.S. Attorney's Office and the D.C. Police Department. Law enforcement contends that Rawlings had fired on the officers—James Haskel and Anthony Clay—first and was riding Haskel's stolen minibike. Officer Haskel only returned fire in self defense.

So what keeps this case from going away? We keep learning new problems with the police work on this case, and new holes in the narrative. Today we published a very long piece on the Rawlings shooting that's simply taken from the depositions of those involved. In it you may find out things you didn't already know. On City Desk, I will be presenting a series of documents and deposition testimony highlighting more screwups, questionable memos, and just sad little details. There's a reason why this case won't go away.

Kicking off this series, we have an exchange between Rawlings' family's attorney Gregory Lattimer and Sgt. Ralph Wax during Wax's deposition taken last fall. Wax headed up the investigation into the shooting. Here he details what Rawlings had on him when he died and the confusion over exactly what color shirt he was wearing at the time. The shirt color would turn out to be crucial since the cops could only recall what Rawlings was wearing at the time. They couldn't identify any of his physical features. Wax also notes that no gunshot residue was found on Rawlings' clothing.

Lattimer: There was one polo shirt, short sleeve, white in color, correct?

Wax: That’s what it says, yeah.

Lattimer: Pair of boxer shorts, right?

Wax: Yes.

Lattimer: Pair of athletic socks, right?

Wax: Yep.

Lattimer: One pair of tennis shoes?

Wax: Yes.

Lattimer: One pair of pants, tan in color, [Old] Navy, right?

Wax: Yes.

Lattimer: Then U.S. currency, paper money, $8, one $5 bill and three $1 bills?

Wax: Yes, sir.

Lattimer: Anything unusual about any of this?

Wax: I think, if I’m not mistaken, the shirt was actually light blue, not white, but everything else is consistent.

Lattimer: Light blue? Why do you say that?

Wax: Just remember, when I saw the shirt, I thought it was light blue.

Lattimer: So you think the hospital got it wrong?

Wax: Hospital didn’t write this out.

Lattimer: MPD got it wrong?

Wax: Might have been the technician….

Lattimer: All of that stuff was tested for powder residue, right?

Wax: Yes.

Lattimer: What were the findings?

Wax: There was none.

On Nov. 6, 2008, David Kerstetter was shot and killed inside his home by D.C. police officers. Despite the decision of the U.S. attorney's office not to prosecute the officers involved, Kerstetter's family has filed a notice with the District that it plans to sue the city over their son's death. The family's attorney, Douglas Sparks, notified Mayor Adrian Fenty in a letter dated May 1 [PDF].

We have written about the Kerstetter shooting here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here—not to mention the cover story linked above. The Sparks letter is based on the lawyer's interviews with witnesses, the autopsy report, and an exhaustive scene analysis. It provides the first counter-narrative to law enforcement's public account that Kerstetter had lunged at the officers with a knife—that Officer Frederick Friday shot and killed the Logan Circle resident in self defense. The new evidence appears to point to excessive force.

On the morning of Nov. 6, Officers Friday and Christian Glynn responded to the Kerstetter home after receiving a radio report for a suspicious door. The two met with the condo complex's maintenance man and a concerned neighbor. Sparks writes:

The maintenance man nudged the door open further and yelled upstairs to David, asking if he was home and whether the maintenance man could go upstairs. David replied that he was home, but that he did not want the man to enter or come upstairs because he had seen the police officers standing behind him. David said they should just go away and just leave him alone. The police officers then stood just outside David's front door for twenty to forty minutes while they spoke further with the maintenance man and neighbor, communicated via radio with police supervisors, and discussed David's known mental illness...and his history of depression following the death of his partner one year earlier.

Sparks states that the officers were unsure about what to do next. Kerstetter had made it clear that he did not want them in his home. Soon, though, they became "impatient" and announced, "We're going in." Sparks says the officers had no "reasonable belief" that a crime was in progress. The two cops drew their guns, went inside, and walked up the stairs to the second-floor living room and kitchen area.

It is unclear what Officers Friday and Glynn found on the second floor. They must have noticed that the furnishings were immaculate, that everything was perfectly in place.

Officers Friday and Glynn eventually made their way up to the third floor.

Sparks notes in his letter:

The officers apparently knew of no standard protocol to follow when responding to calls involving persons in crisis or persons known to suffer from mental illness—whether from a lack of standards, or a lack of training to carry out existing standards. Nor did they seek assistance from specialists at the District's Department of Mental Health who were available to assist with these types of matters.

Officers Friday and Glynn found Kerstetter in his bedroom.

Even law enforcement officials are unsure as to what exactly happened inside that bedroom.

Immediately following the shooting, D.C. police issued a press release which stated: "The officers were suddenly confronted by an adult male...reportedly wielding a knife. Reportedly, a struggle ensued as the officers repeatedly ordered the man to drop the weapon. It was at that time that the police in the face of apparent imminent danger fired upon the subject."

The U.S. attorney's office tells a different account of the exchange between Kerstetter and Officers Friday and Glynn. Spokesperson Channing Phillips omits the struggle narrative in an e-mail to Washington City Paper:

Mr. Kerstetter threatened to take his own life and held a knife to his own throat. Despite reasonable efforts to avoid taking Mr. Kerstetter’s life by repeatedly telling him to drop the knife, Mr. Kerstetter instead lunged toward the officers with the knife and ultimately left the officer who had his weapon drawn with no choice but to use deadly force to protect himself and others from death or serious bodily injury.

Sparks says the shooting appears to be plain overkill. He points to the autopsy report [PDF] and his scene work. The bloody scene suggests that Kerstetter had been effectively caged in, that he had been trapped in the far left corner of the room between his bed and the bathroom door. So far there has been no evidence cited which supports a struggle between the cops and Kerstetter. The pictures on the bedroom walls remained untouched. A blood-stained vase next to the bathroom door hadn't been knocked over.

Kerstetter bled out in his bathroom.

According to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner's autopsy report, Kerstetter was shot five times. There were two gunshot wounds to the torso. The track of each bullet was front to back and downward. There were three shots to the lower extremities hitting knee, femur, bladder, and so on. The track of each bullet was back to front and upward. "It's consistent with a man in a sitting position and falling backwards," Sparks says in an interview.

Sparks writes that the cops fired at least eight rounds at Kerstetter. The three allegedly missed bullets were found in the bathroom floor, the floorboard in front of the bathroom, and in a bathroom wall.

"The trajectory of the rounds that hit David, as well as those that missed him, establishes that the officers fired downward," Sparks writes. "Blood spatter patterns along baseboards, trim work and elsewhere demonstrate that most, and perhaps all, rounds were fired while David was down and incapacitated."

In an e-mail sent this afternoon, Phillips says that the U.S. attorney's office did not conduct blood-spatter analysis in this case, "but it's my understanding that it wouldn't have been necessary in this instance given the other corroborating evidence that was available."

Phillips says the evidence included the knife, shell casings, audiotaped witness statements, and toxicology report.

"Shell casings—we all know they shot him. No surprise they found shell casings. They found a knife. What does that establish? The issue in question is where were the officers and where was [Kerstetter] when they fired off eight rounds," Sparks says. "Had they done a blood-spatter analysis, they would have discovered that it contradicts the police assertions and is far more reliable and scientific."

"We did a thorough forensic examination through a combination of highly respected experts in a variety of disciplines," Sparks adds. He says that he would want to see law enforcement's forensic examinations. "What was the available forensic evidence they relied upon? We'd sure like to see it. Not just we. When homicides are committed in our name with our money, the public has a right to know the facts on a basic moral level."

Sparks notes that police missed at least one bullet during the course of their examination of the Kerstetter home. The family found the bullet when they went through their son's bedroom. The bullet was found in a floor board:

"If there's something that's justified let's find out. If there's something that's not, let's fix it," Sparks explains.

In the aftermath of the Kerstetter shooting—and the shooting death of Osman Abdullahi—the police department has decided to completely overhaul how it deals with mentally-ill residents.

Photographs courtesy of Douglas Sparks

The U.S. Attorney's Office has declined to prosecute Officer Frederick Friday for the shooting death of David Kerstetter in early November of last year. Friday had shot and killed Kerstetter in the Logan Circle resident's bathroom entrance. Friday, and his partner Officer Christian Glynn, had responded to the home after a report of an open door. Kerstetter suffered from a mental illness and had pleaded for the police to leave him alone. The police went in anyway to investigate. Officer Friday claimed Kerstetter came at him with a knife before he opened fire. Kerstetter was shot multiple times.

"We’ve closed it out," wrote  Channing Phillips, spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office, an e-mail. "After a thorough review of the matter, we declined to bring charges after determining that it was a justifiable shooting.  We have since sent the matter back to MPD for whatever action it deems appropriate."

Phillips went on to state: "There was no evidence that the officer violated the law when he used deadly force in this case.  Beyond that, I can’t comment."

Today, Phillips wrote another e-mail explaining further the office's decision.

Phillips writes:

“Our decision not to file charges in this matter was the result of a thorough investigation, which included an examination of the autopsy report, all available forensic evidence, radio communications, and witness interviews.  In this tragic incident, the officers arrived at Mr. Kerstetter’s home and discovered that his door had been kicked in and that nobody was responding from the residence.  The officers worked with Mr. Kerstetter’s neighbors and attempted to contact several third parties in order to resolve the situation peacefully.  When these efforts failed, and the officers reluctantly entered his residence, Mr. Kerstetter threatened to take his own life and held a knife to his own throat.  Despite reasonable efforts to avoid taking Mr. Kerstetter’s life by repeatedly telling him to drop the knife, Mr. Kerstetter instead lunged toward the officers with the knife and ultimately left the officer who had his weapon drawn with no choice but to use deadly force to protect himself and others from death or serious bodily injury."

The Kerstetter shooting may have played a role in the D.C. Police Department's recent decision to change how they train officers on dealing with residents in crisis. The prosecutor's decision is not all that shocking.

In the last 10 years, according to Phillips, the U.S. Attorney's Office has not prosecuted a single cop for shooting a citizen.

Last week, the Washington Post wrote an editorial asking why it took a civil suit to reveal new facts in the Rawlings shooting. Maybe it's because prosecutors just don't go after cop shooters. The bar is significantly higher to get a conviction in a criminal court.

In a cover story, a very, very old cover story, prosecutor Deb Sines broke it down: "All the cop has to do is take the stand and cry and look at a jury with tears in his eyes, and say, 'I lost it. I'm trying to do the right thing. I'm trying to be a good cop. People spit on us. People shoot us. They have no respect. I lost it. I'm so sorry.' Not one juror will convict him."

I went on to write of one example of some seriously bad policing:

D.C. cops have offered far worse testimonials. After getting stabbed by an unknown assailant on June 20, 1998, at the intersection of 14th Street and Park Road NW, Officer Edward Miller fired his Glock, hitting unarmed suspect Jose Joya several times. When later asked why he fired his weapon, Miller told a prosecutor: "I knew I had to get a shot off because I would get teased back at the station by the guys at 4D for not getting a shot off." Joya won a $500,000 civil-suit settlement in 2000.

Kerstetter's family has hired veteran attorney Doug Sparks. "On behalf of the family, we have conducted an investigation at least and likely far more thorough than the investigation described in the U.S. Attorney's statement," Sparks says in an interview this afternoon. "The results of our investigation paint a far different picture of the events leading to David's death. In particular, I haven't heard a word from law enforcement authorities about any ballistics tests in terms of bullet trajectories or any analysis of blood spatter patterns. In my view, that's probably because they didn't conduct these forensic analyses. We did. They show at least eight rounds were fired at David and five hit him. Our expert forensic analysis shows that the officers fired downward....Most if not all of the rounds were fired while David was down and incompacitated."

Sparks goes on to say: "At the end of the day, the issue for the Kerstetters is far more about police training when responding to matters of this nature than they are about whether the police officers should face criminal charges. That's the difference between the role of the U.S. Attorney's Office and the civil justice system."