Mississippi cops kill innocent man after showing up at the wrong house

Amber Randal, DCNF

Mississippi police officers shot the wrong man when they showed up at the incorrect house to serve an arrest warrant over the weekend.

Southhaven police officers entered the Mississippi neighborhood searching for Samuel Pearman, a man wanted for an domestic aggravated assault after he allegedly choked a woman in front of her daughter at a gas station, reports WPXI.

The arrest warrant listed Pearman’s address as 5878 Surrey Lane in Tate County, but law enforcement officers entered the house across the street at 5881 Surrey Lane. Ismael Lopez Rodriguez, the man who lived at 5881 Surrey Lane, was fatally shot by one of the officers who came to his house.

“Someone didn’t take the time to analyze the address,” Murray Wells, the attorney for Lopez’s family, said. “This is incredibly tragic and embarrassing to this police department that they can’t read house numbers.”

Police officers maintain that they shot Lopez Rodriguez after he opened the door and his pit bull came running at them — they also claimed that he was holding a gun and refused to put the gun down, despite repeated officer commands to do so.

“At this point, the officers began hollering ‘put the gun down, put the gun down,’ at which point that did not occur and there were more than one shot was fired toward the door and there was a male subject inside the residence that was killed,” DeSoto County Prosecutor John Champion said, adding that Lopez was not wanted for any crimes.

Wells denied that Lopez-Rodriguez had a gun, saying that his law firm would be conducting an investigation into the shooting. The family is still debating whether to file a lawsuit or not, he added.

“The primary thing that this family wanted was the story of who this man was to come out. So, whether or not we file a lawsuit, our immediate mission is to let everybody know that this was a good man who was at home by himself with his wife when he was shot, when the police made a terrible mistake,” Wells said.

The officer who shot Lopez-Rodriguez has been placed on administrative leave, but has yet to be named.

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