Stars and Stripes
By Martin Kuz
Published: November 5, 2014
Last in a four-part series.
Gibson’s name went unspoken during the two-day program this past summer at the headquarters of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. But the fallout from his shooting has influenced reforms to the agency’s deadly force policies and its tactics for handling veterans in crisis.
LAS VEGAS — Clouds of smoke plumed from the spinning wheels of a white Cadillac pinned between two Las Vegas police cars.
Officers had ordered the driver to exit the vehicle, and when he failed to comply, they devised a plan to flush him out. One officer would fire a beanbag round to shatter the car’s rear window. Another would then shoot a canister of pepper spray.
A witness filmed the standoff in the parking lot of an apartment complex in the early hours of Dec. 12, 2011. The video shows the plan mutate into a killing. The beanbag round was fired. Less than a second later, before the pepper spray could be shot, a third officer blasted seven rounds from his assault rifle into the Cadillac.
The car’s wheels stopped, the smoke dissipated. Four bullets had hit the driver. He was unarmed. Stanley Gibson, a 43-year-old Army veteran, served in the Persian Gulf War two decades earlier and remained besieged by post-traumatic stress disorder. He carried home memories of picking up charred corpses along the so-called Highway of Death, where U.S. forces bombed Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait near the war’s end in 1991.
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Rondha Gibson, the widow of Stanley Gibson, a Gulf War veteran with PTSD
who was fatally shot by a Las Vegas police officer in 2011, said the $1.5 million
settlement she received from the police department last year has provided no
emotional relief. "I still feel lost," she said.
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