A St. Paul man died Wednesday night after being shot by police in Falcon Heights, the immediate aftermath of which was shown in a video recorded by the man's girlfriend as she sat next to him and which was widely shared on Facebook.
The girlfriend started the live-stream video with the man in the driver's seat slumped next to her, his white T-shirt soaked with blood on the left side. In the video, taken with her phone, she says they were pulled over at Larpenteur Avenue and Fry Street for a broken taillight.
The "police shot him for no apparent reason, no reason at all," she says.
Friends at the scene identified the man as Philando Castile, 32, cafeteria supervisor at J.J. Hill Montessori School in St. Paul.
Castile's cousin said on her Facebook page that he was dead. Castile's uncle, Clarence Castile, who was at Hennepin County Medical Center with other family members, said Philando died at 9:37 p.m., a few minutes after arriving at the hospital.
The video was posted on a Facebook page belonging to Lavish Reynolds, but it's not clear if it is the girlfriend's page or whether she sent the video to someone else to post. Reynolds' page was not available for a time, but by then copies of the video had been shared many times.
A Facebook spokesperson said the video was temporarily down due to a technical glitch and was restored to the Lavish Reynolds page as soon as Facebook was able to investigate. "We're very sorry that the video was temporarily inaccessible," the spokesperson said via email.
The girlfriend said on the video that the officer "asked him for license and registration. He told him that it was in his wallet, but he had a pistol on him because he's licensed to carry. The officer said don't move. As he was putting his hands back up, the officer shot him in the arm four or five times."