The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office (SAO) has cleared a City of Miami police officer in the shooting of a mentally ill Black man armed with a screwdriver.
The state attorney’s office found that City of Miami police officer Kassandra Mercado acted lawfully when she fired six rounds of bullets into then 47-year-old Donald Armstrong, who was reportedly high on ecstasy and experiencing a mental health crisis when officers surrounded him on his Liberty City porch last March.
While the SAO’s 8-page closeout memo (attached at the bottom of this story) states that Mercado fired her weapon at Armstrong after he began “advancing directly towards Officer Mercado” and was in “close proximity,” body-camera footage shows that Mercado began shooting Armstrong as he fell to the ground as a result of being tased…