Interesting to see how many of the 43 official listed fatalities were from gunshot by police and guardsmen. My question is, was there an order to shoot to kill looters, and if so, was it issued by Governor Romney or Mayor Cavanaugh?
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Interesting to see how many of the 43 official listed fatalities were from gunshot by police and guardsmen. My question is, was there an order to shoot to kill looters, and if so, was it issued by Governor Romney or Mayor Cavanaugh?
There was no order to shoot, much less to shoot to kill looters. We did make every effort to arrest them.
If no order to shoot was given, then a lot of freelance gunfire was going on. I detest looters, but shooting folks coming out of a store while free form shopping sounds criminal.
I've always wondered about the 'official list of 43'. Had a relative who was a ER nurse at Detroit Receiving at the time. She swore for years they had that many the first couple of days just at Receiving.
There was an unofficial opinion at the time that 'if there were 40, there were 400', but I've never seen any corroboration of that. It was said that many were never counted because they never made it to any official location, having been dumped in the river. But then, wouldn't there have been a lot of missing person reports?