Rage quote of the day: Cop explains why he shot Philando Castile

Philando Castile

From investigators’ interview with Jeronimo Yanez, the (now-former) Minnesota cop who murdered Philando Castile last year:

“I thought, I was gonna die,” Yanez later recounted about the moments leading up to the shooting, “and I thought if he’s, if he has the, the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five year old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing then what, what care does he give about me. And, I let off the rounds and then after the rounds were off, the little girls [sic] was screaming.”

Because when confronted with the sort of monster who would recklessly endanger his own child with secondhand pot smoke, the only possible recourse is to let the bullets fly mere feet away from said child. It’s the responsible thing to do.

In a just universe, the investigators might have grabbed their notepads and walloped Yanez over the head with them for giving such a dumbfuck excuse. Then again, in a just universe, an innocent and law-abiding man wouldn’t have been shot to death in front of his family by a panicky police officer.

(via @AmandaMarcotte)

Edit (06/23/17 @ 10:37 PM ET): Changed “an evidently incompetent” to “panicky”.