ST. LOUIS — A federal judge has ordered the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to produce video it may have related to a sting operation that is the subject of a lawsuit brought by a mother whose son was killed in the incident.
In a Jan. 9 ruling, U.S. District Judge Stephen Limbaugh, however, denied plaintiff Hope Angelic White's request for sanctions against the ATF over its alleged destruction of original video evidence on a government computer server.
White sued in 2015 over the shooting death of her son, Myron Pollard, on Aug. 29, 2012. According to background information in the ruling, Pollard was a passenger in the front seat of a vehicle driven by Damitrius Creighton who had been “lured” to a location, not identified in the ruling, as part of the sting operation.
The ruling states that ATF agents, including defendant Bernard Hansen, fired weapons at the occupants of the vehicle, with Pollard being shot in the head. He died early the next day at a hospital.
Before the operation took place, an ATF agent had set up four video cameras. The cameras did not record onto storage devices; rather, they wirelessly transmitted the video to a server at a remote location.
The ruling states that the videos from each camera were burned onto DVDs and given to an ATF agent. They were put into a sealed envelope and placed in an evidence room for later use during criminal prosecution. None of the four videos, however, showed the shooting itself.
White claimed that video was missing between the time the car backed up and the time a ramming truck rammed into the back of the car.
"Over four seconds of video are missing from the pole camera," White claims in her suit.
An ATF agent explained that he did not believe the original video existed any longer and he believed some "frozen" scenes were caused by the wireless signal being disrupted by all the vehicles getting in between the transmitter and receiver, according to the ruling.
White wants a judgment against the defendants or an adverse jury instruction at trial regarding the content of deleted videos, the ruling states.
Limbaugh of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri ordered the ATF to inspect recovered video files and produce any such files, supplying a report regarding the inspection or production of video files by Feb. 9. He also ordered parties to submit an amended case management order no later than Feb. 15.