On
February 14, 1979, the Fairfax County Police accidentally killed an unarmed young black man named
Stanly Hughes when four white cops accidentally fired two bullets into his
body. The cops said they accidentally
mistook Hughes for a murder suspect named Kenneth E. King, so of course they
killed him.
The
cops said the innocent Mr. Hughes was killed because he ran from his apartment
where Kenneth King was staying and that Hughes resembled King, so, all things
being equal, they shot him down.
After mowing down Hughes police said they
entered his apartment and found Kenneth King of a self-inflicted gunshot wound
in the chest. Naomi N. Hughes, Stanley
Hughes mother would later content that the cops fired indiscriminately at her
son who ran from his apartment to escape Kenneth King. Talk about irony.
The
Police chief, Kenneth Wilson said "We are just very displeased that this
has occurred.” But he wasn’t clear if he
was talking about the shooting or the publicity the shooting brought to his
department.
Fairfax
County Commonwealth's Attorney Robert F. Horan, who never ever disappointed
with his show of support for the police said he would review the results of the
internal police investigation of Hughes' death.
In the nearly four decades that Robert F. Horan Jr. had been the chief
prosecutor in Fairfax, no cop has ever been charged with improperly shooting
someone.
That
got more than a few chuckles around the county and then added “Statistically,
it's not fair to say that this department shoots first and asks questions
later... There's less use of weapons by
this department than by any other department I'm aware of.” Two weeks after Stanley Hughes was gunned
down, the two cops questioned in the shooting were refusing to talk to
investigators. It didn’t matter. An internal police investigation cleared the
cops of any wrongdoing.