Olympia: Fuck The Police March, for Bradden Ferber [Saturday, tonight! #M12 – 9PM]

from (A) Wild Harbor:

Olympia FUCK THE POLICE march this Saturday, May 12, 9 PM at 4th and Columbia in light of the recent police shooting of Bradden Ferber

Bradden who?

Bradden Ferber was a 53 year-old “unemployed attorney” who was shot and killed by Olympia pig Mike Hovda at about 5:45 pm, Friday the 4th. B worked as a bank examiner for the State’s office of Financial Institutions, from at least 1995 through at least 2009. He was unemployed, perhaps. He’d had a law degree from 1986. But to describe him as an unemployed attorney begs the question of why, in a state worker town like olympia, he was not described as a recently laid off state worker. Now we hear he was being served foreclosure papers on a downsized duplex condo which was worth maybe $750 / month (According to craigslist ads).

The account of the events leading up to and including his murder are confusing, to say the least. We know we can’t trust the pigs, and we know we can’t trust the media to report on the pigs; so we’re going to present several of the accounts of what happened next, accept that none of them are true, and see where that leads us.

The story begins with Bradden being served foreclosure papers earlier in the afternoon on Friday. Skip to 5pm, to the Creekwood Apartments, off Boulevard Rd SE, on Eastside Olympia. He allegedly was driving through the parking lot when his car struck another vehicle. He got out of the car, entered an apartment briefly, and then left on foot. Olympia pig Mike Hovda, who has spent at least the last quarter century separating the working class from the wealth they created, responded to the scene. A snitch pedestrian who had seen Bradden leave the car pointed Hovda in the direction he went, and Hovda followed.

According to one account, Hovda was following Ferber, who had walked away from the accident on foot. A second pig, Kory Pearce, also responded and stopped at 12th Avenue SE, near Boulevard Road, where he claimed to have seen a subject matching the driver’s description. The subject was walking through a grassy, open area. “The subject appeared to have a firearm in his hand at this time,” said the OPD press release about the murder. The subject walked away from Pearce, and toward the direction Hovda was approaching. The release does not state whether Hovda was on foot or in a car.

“Officer Pearce yelled to Officer Hovda the subject had a firearm and a short time later Officer Hovda encountered the subject,” the release states. “The subject raised the handgun, presenting a threat to Officer Hovda who discharged his duty firearm. The subject fell to the ground and was found deceased.” According to the press release, a gun was found at the scene, and Hovda only fired one shot.

How then, was Bradden Ferber shot twice, once in the head and once in the stomach?

Another account, found on KMAS news radio online, claims that both officers fired a shot “almost simultaneously”, and that Bradden Ferber never shot his gun.

Another, newer story being spewed by The Olympian is that although Hovda shot B once in the abdomen, B’s cause of death is a suicide: after seeing Hovda, Bradden lifted the gun to shoot, was shot in the stomach, then shot himself in the head. The same words are appearing in this account, “almost simultaneously”.

Our team already knows the pigs are hella shitty. And I don’t mean to say that if this had happened any other way it may have been justified or acceptable in the slightest. But I would like to point out that if you see somebody with a gun to their head, you don’t proceed by shooting them in the stomach, and say later that you felt you were in danger.

Thurston County’s officer-involved shooting team, made up of pigs throughout Thurston County, is investigating what happened. Tumwater Lt. Jay Mason and Detective Chuck Liska are supervising the investigation.

On Monday morning, Tumwater pig Jen Kolb said that OPD would be the sole agency to release public information about the shooting or the investigation.

Hovda the pig was interviewed about it today, Tuesday the 9th, more than a week after the shooting took place. We’ll see in the coming days what kinds of excuses and lies he spits, and we’ll report on it.

Personally, I think the pig shot Bradden because he wanted to murder somebody, and when he saw the gun he knew he had an excuse. I’ll be at the Fuck the Police March on Saturday. And when I’m there, I’ll be thinking about the fact that if Bradden Ferber hadn’t been served with foreclosure documents earlier in the day, he might not have been drinking that night. And maybe the pigs never would’ve had a chance to murder him.

Fuck the cops.
We don’t need em.
All we want
Is total freedom.

Fuck the cops.
Fuck foreclosures.
Feel our rage
Boil over.

 

(the information in this article comes from a variety of sources, including the OPD press release, several commercial news outlets, as well as some digging done by trusted comrades)

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FTP Oakland

FTP LA

OTP Seattle

FTP NYC

 

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from Seattle Weekly. May 9:

 

 

Police Mystery:

Bradden W. Ferber, Olympia Attorney, Shoots Self Just As Cop Shoots Him

The reported killing of a suspected drunk-driving attorney by an Olympia police officer was bungled from the beginning and, though police officials in the capital are now insisting the shooting was justified, the death of Bradden W. Ferber, 53, continues to be surrounded by some mystery and quite a few unanswered questions.

In its initial news release, as reported Friday by The Olympian shortly after the 5:45 p.m. shooting in the Creekwood Court Southeast area between Olympia and Lacey, the department said a driver had been involved in a crash with another vehicle and had fled.

Officers followed him, and when they reached him, he threatened an officer. The officer shot the man in the head.

That blossomed into TV and wire-service reports, such as this one at pi.com, that most people heard or saw over the weekend:

Officers arrived on scene a few minutes later and immediately began tracking the man. They caught up with him a short time later, at which point police say the man threatened an officer. The officer, who’s a 25-year-veteran of the force, shot the man in the head, killing him. Police have not said if the man was armed or how he threatened the officer.

On Monday, it became a different story. The Associated Press reported that autopsy results on the suspect, now identified as Ferber, an “unemployed attorney,” committed suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.

The [coroner’s] report also says he suffered a large caliber gunshot wound to his stomach, but that it did not cause his death.

The Olympian added further details on Monday: Officer Mike Hovda shot Ferber after the subject raised his handgun, “presenting a threat” to the officer.

But it remained unclear, the paper noted, whether the shot fired by Hovda caused Ferber’s death.

Police Chief Ronnie Roberts said it was “his understanding,” the paper said, that two shots were fired, and that Hovda fired only a single shot.

It’s three days later, and the story is still evolving from cop shoots drunk driver to driver shoots self, although where – stomach or head – remains uncertain.

The next day – yesterday – The Olympian reported what now stands as the up-to-date full story:

A local man shot himself in the head almost simultaneously as an Olympia police officer shot him in the abdomen after a suspected DUI crash on Creekwood Court SE after 5:45 p.m. Friday, according to Olympia Police Chief Ronnie Roberts.

Yet Roberts, according to the news report, did not seem ready to own the story that his department was putting out.

Chief Roberts said that based on the information he has received regarding Friday’s shooting, Hovda was justified in using deadly force as Ferber raised a handgun while walking towards Hovda, presenting a threat. [Emphasis added]

The report includes no further explicit details about that most important fatal moment, however: Ferber clearly had to be raising (or had raised) his gun, but he had to have already put it to his head to shoot himself. He could not be pointing it at the officer when he shot himself and was, at the same moment, shot in the abdomen by Hovda.

If the officer shot a man who was shooting himself at the same split second, how exactly did that come about? What was the officer saying, if anything, to Ferber? And could he see he was not in the line of fire since Ferber’s gun was pointed at himself?

Anyone who pulls a gun on an officer risks being shot. But by now Olympia police should have been able to provide more detail to prove the shooting was justified. The case is now being investigated by outside agencies, headed by a Tumwater Police crew. Presumably, someone will eventually have the answers.

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