From the Southeast Asian Coalition: Letter released by the Vo family in advance of the May 9 Special Greensboro City Council Meeting.
Shameful treatment of the family by the Greensboro mayor and council members.
Shameful treatment of the family by the Greensboro mayor and council members.
May 8, 2016
To the General Public:
We first thank everyone who came to the Beloved
Community Center last Tuesday to march with our family to the Melvin Municipal
Building in Greensboro. Your presence at
the march and at the Greensboro City Council meeting demonstrated tremendous
solidarity with and support for our family. We certainly needed it before we
watched—for the very first time—the body worn camera footage from the day our
beloved Chieu Di was slain by former Greensboro Police Department (GPD) officer
T.J. Bloch. We are very grateful and
humbled by all of the organizing efforts of the community leaders and members
in Greensboro and the surrounding areas, who have not allowed Chieu Di’s name to
fade away from our collective memory.
We are pleased that the Greensboro City Council has
added Chieu Di’s case to the agenda for their meeting on Monday. We understand
that the city council will likely take a vote on whether to release the body
worn camera footage and audio recordings to the public. We strongly urge the honorable members of the
Greensboro City Council to release the recordings to the public. We believe that
in order to have public confidence in the city of Greensboro—in particular with
the GPD—it requires the public release of the video and audio recordings. We
urge the Greensboro City Council to allow the public to see what our family
members, our pastors, and legal counsel saw in the video. Releasing the
recordings will help restore trust between the city of Greensboro and the
community, which has been seriously damaged by the city’s handling of this case
for the past two years. The release of the recordings to the public will
demonstrate that no matter what the Greensboro City Council will stand on the
side of justice, truth, and transparency rather than expediency and secrecy.
Viewing Bloch’s body worn camera video recording and
listening to the 911 and dispatch audio recordings on May 3rd took
an emotional toll on our family. We were
not prepared to watch the violence committed against our beloved Chieu Di, who
would never hurt a fly, and did not have the capacity to hurt anyone—especially
former officer Bloch. No one should ever
have to watch his or her child or sibling being gunned down by a city police
officer—and they definitely should not wait over two years to watch the video
to learn the truth about what happened in the final moments of their loved
one’s life. We don’t want this to ever happen to any other families in the
future.
After viewing the video with our own eyes, we strongly
believe that what we saw and heard simply do not match with the GPD's initial
assessment of what happened—we did not see Chieu Di lunging at Officer Bloch, we
did not hear Chieu Di yell anything in Vietnamese at former officer Bloch, and
Chieu Di was not physically threatening her mother. From the 5-6 times that we
watched the video last Tuesday, it appeared that Bloch stood approximately 10-15
feet away from Chieu Di and only waited for a couple of seconds before he started
opening fire on her. Within that distance, Bloch did not have to respond to
Chieu Di with lethal force as she was not an imminent threat to his life.
We believe that Bloch could have used other alternative
ways to deescalate the situation. Given Chieu Di’s mental incapacity and
limited English proficiency, Bloch should have responded very differently than
the way he did. He should have followed the official GPD guidelines on how to
deal with people with mental illness and limited English speakers. In the video, it appeared that Chieu Di did
not even register the fact that Bloch was yelling at her to drop the weapon. These
are some of the discrepancies that we discovered upon viewing the video. We
believe that our family and the larger community will be closer to the truth
when more eyes view the recording and examine the interaction between Bloch and
Chieu Di on that fateful day on March 24, 2014.
Therefore, we believe that the public has the right to
view body worn camera footage of former officer Bloch. We urge everyone to
contact members of the Greensboro City Council to vote on immediately releasing
the video and audio recordings to the public.
Chieu Di deserves justice and truth.
We want Officer Bloch to know that after all of these
years we have forgiven him for what he did to our beloved Chieu Di. We do not hate him. We do not wish any enmity
towards him. Anger and hatred toward Bloch will not bring back our Chieu Di. We
know that taking a human life not only affects the family and friends of the
loved one, but also impacts the person who took the life. We forgive, but we
will never forget that but for this tragedy, our lives are forever intertwined
with Bloch’s.
God Bless.
The Vo Family
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