ANY ONE of the four gunshots that wounded a 20-year-old Dublin man shot dead by a police officer in the US last year would have been sufficient to kill him, the State Pathologist told an inquest yesterday.
Andrew James Hanlon (20), from Sandyford, Dublin, was shot by Officer Tony González in the town of Silverton in the northwestern state of Oregon on June 30th, 2008.
The police were called after Mr Hanlon began knocking at the door of a house two blocks from where his sister lives, begging to be let in, his stepfather Justin Carroll told an inquest into Mr Hanlon’s death at Dublin County Coroner’s Court yesterday.
“No one seems to know why [he was knocking on the door]. People have said he seemed to be upset and looking to gain entry to the house. He seemed out of sorts and panicking,” said Mr Carroll, who was in court together with Mr Hanlon’s mother, Dorothea Carroll, who was visibly upset throughout the hearing.
Mr Hanlon had spent the evening with friends and had seemed in good spirits when he left their company. “Twenty minutes later he was dead,” he said.
“The lady of the house phoned the police and a call was put out [to the police] giving misinformation saying a burglary was in progress. He wasn’t breaking in. He was banging on the door.”
Mr Carroll told the inquest that the police and Officer González were aware that Mr Hanlon was unarmed, “from the descriptions of the three people in the house. They could see Andrew clearly and gave a full description of what he was wearing and that he was barefoot and unarmed,” he said.
Mr Hanlon then left the house and went to nearby scrubground, while two police officers, one of whom was Officer González, arrived at the scene from different directions.
Mr Carroll said the statement of an eyewitness which was taken on the night in question, stated that he heard Officer González say: “Get down on the ground – do you want me to shoot you?”
Mr Carroll said Mr Hanlon was between five and eight feet from Officer Gonzalez when he was shot at seven times with a high-calibre Glock 21 gun. Five of the bullets struck him and four penetrated his body. “He [Officer González] was a cage fighter and a martial arts expert. His action was excessive even if Andrew was not compliant with what the officer said,” he said. Mr Carroll said that to his knowledge Mr Hanlon was not on medication and had attended a clinic on one occasion.
A postmortem by State Pathologist Prof Marie Cassidy found that Mr Hanlon had four gunshot injuries to his body and died from gunshot wounds to his trunk.
“Any one of those gunshots would have been sufficient to kill him and not just to knock him down,” said Prof Cassidy.
Officer González was cleared by a US grand jury of any criminal wrongdoing in the shooting. He was jailed in December 2008 after pleading guilty to four counts of sex abuse.
A jury of four men and two women returned a unanimous open verdict under the direction of the coroner, Dr Kieran Geraghty.