Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/2/21 Ford Fischer on the New Details Surrounding Johnny Hurley’s Tragic Death

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

Scott is joined by journalist and primary source documentarian Ford Fischer to discuss the recently released footage of Johnny Hurley’s death at the hands of an Arvada police officer. Fischer made a short documentary about the tragedy shortly after it occurred this past summer. Hurley heroically gunned down a man who had just begun what was clearly an attempted killing spree. By doing so, Hurley likely saved numerous lives, but he was tragically killed moments later when police arrived on the scene. Fischer explains what this recently released surveillance and bodycam footage reveals about Johnny Hurley’s last act.  Discussed on the show: Fischer’s July Short Documentary about the shooting Full Footage of the Shooting (Graphic) Ford Fischer is co-founder and Editor in Chief of News2Share, an independent media outlet based in Washington, D.C. Follow his work on Twitter @FordFischer and @N2Sreports. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey guys, check it out December 8th in New York City. The Soho Forum is hosting a debate on the resolution. While vaccine mandates are an infringement on freedom, some are justified due to their big payoff in lives saved. For the affirmative will be George Mason Law Professor Ila Soman. And for the negative, our friend Angela McArdle, chair of the Libertarian Party of Los Angeles County, and declared candidate for national chair of the Libertarian Party. The live debate will be at the Sheen Center, and of course, yes, they do have the vaccine restrictions at the Sheen Center, but they do not at Gene Epstein's apartment. They're going to have a live viewing party at Jean's House so people who oppose the mandates can watch the debate about the mandates. And so find out everything you need to know all about it at the Soho Forum.org. That's this December the 8th in New York.

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scott horton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show all right you guys introducing ford fisher news to share the number two there news to share independent journalist and uh he's as you know done

great work in the past on the story of the police killing of johnny hurley of arvada colorado right after he was done killing a bad guy who was killing cops and there have been further developments in that story and so i'm happy to welcome you back to the show how are you doing yeah thank you for having me here all right so it's kind of a complicated mess but maybe we should just start with um the new revelation which is they released more information and it does get right to the crux of the question of uh the police claim that Hurley, after killing the bad guy, went and picked up his rifle. And so the cop that blew him away made an easy, common sense type, understandable, reasonable accident, blowing away the wrong guy because the good guy picked up the rifle of the bad guy. And so does the new information, and I'm not saying that's a good enough excuse, but I'm just saying that's their claim the way that they've set it up. So now with the new information coming out, I know that that's something that is specifically addressed.

So can you explain what it is that we've learned here? Right. So originally they released a sort of partial video from one security camera angle where you saw Tricky, the original, the mass shooter, who kills a police officer, which they did show in the original video. Um, and then you see him begin to start, uh, to receive, he goes and gets another weapon, right? So he started with a shotgun. He went back to his car. He grabs a rifle. Uh, he starts to, um, return and is, and has fired rounds at basically empty police cars. But it's clear that as opposed to just a targeted, you know, single murder, like this is an active shooter who brought multiple weapons, uh, you know, to hurt people. Um, and in fact, fired rounds at a restaurant sort of across Arvada. Square called So Raddish. So this was an active shooting in progress that, you know, thankfully only by that, by the point that he was confronted by Johnny Hurley had taken only one life, which of course is still a tragedy.

But it seems that he was trying to kill or hurt many more people than that. And in that initial video, you just saw Johnny Hurley leave the military surplus store that he was in at the time across Arvada Square. and you see the position of cover that he got to. And then the original video release stopped there. And the police, in describing what happened after that, although they originally released no sort of video proof of it, then described that Johnny Hurley shot the shooter. He engaged the shooter and won.

And then they said that he picked up the rifle and that a responding officer, then shot Johnny Hurley. Never in dispute was the fact that Johnny Hurley was, of course, the hero of the situation and that the police shooting was incorrect. Well, not after the first couple days, right? Well, to be clear, yeah. Right. For the first couple days, they didn't actually say almost anything, right?

The police were dead silent for a bit. And it was originally actually a police source that sort of leaked the fact that a police officer had shot Johnny and not the shooter, right? The way that it was originally implied was hero Johnny Hurley engages shooter, you know, one cop and Johnny die in addition to shooter. That was the way they originally spelled it. And I think that that could have led people to assume that what they meant is that Johnny and, you know, Troiki killed each other. And the community around him, right? So to be clear, Johnny Hurley was a complete by stander in this situation, but he was known by the community as an activist who was critical

of police and government itself. And so his friends, his particular friend group was really skeptical of the way they were talking about it at first. And what they told me when I went there was that when they were reading the sort of way that this was being reported at first, they felt like the police were covering up the fact that they shot Johnny and not that the shooter had shot Johnny. And it turned out that was true. They assumed it at first, then a leaked source revealed it, and then the police revealed it. And so they were skeptical, understandably so, of the claim that Johnny, in fact, picked up the rifle, I think because they felt that that sense of trust had already been degraded. And then the police were not initially releasing any images proving that to be so.

Now, it was all the way, so that had, the shooting itself happened in the summer. You know, I released my documentary about this on July 23rd. It wasn't until all the way into November 9th that I actually received. I was one of five outlets that the first judicial district office of Colorado released the video to. So they sent me, you know, what amounted to about 100 minutes of video from a few different security camera sources, as well as two body cameras of officers who responded. after the fact. And so, first of all, I compiled all of that and released it to the public like immediately. So I put out a YouTube video that's literally, you know, an hour and 40 minutes long because my opinion was, you know, the problem is I looked at the other places that received it,

basically mainstream media outlets, right? I was like, like they put in the two line of who they sent it to, you know, all the other outlets. And I was kind of the only independent one. And, you know, I saw like Fox News, the local Foxes reporting on it. which was cool that they reported on it. But it's not like they released all the raw sources. And so I didn't want to be sort of like the police in this case, you know, prolonging or anything like that. Everything I received, I immediately put out. They also gave me a thousand pages of sort of their discovery and investigative process, interviews with the police officers and stuff.

I literally just downloaded that and then re-uploaded it to Google Drive. I'm like, this is for everybody should be able to see this the same way I am. Um, in any event, what it ended up sort of showing was that Johnny, um, took a cover position behind a brick wall, um, shot Troiki successfully. And the view of, there's the angle that shows this best has like a large tree in front of the camera. But, um, but Johnny then goes in the direction of, um, Troiki and then pass Troiki to a different. cover position where he is crouched. And it's several seconds later that as he is facing toward Troiki, he sort of immediately falls. Like he is clearly shot and falls and falls over. It's a little blurry and it's not exactly incredibly obvious what he's doing or the fact that he picks up the rifle from those exact clips. However, there is body camera footage that was delivered that was cropped, I believe, in order to remove the sort of blood or gore of what happened to

Johnny. But it shows that a responding police officer who responds and he sees both Troiki and Johnny's bodies on the ground. We don't necessarily know exactly at what moment did Johnny die. And I don't know that we know that the police know that either. But it is pretty standard procedure for police to treat someone. Like, they don't want to let someone play dead, right? So police treat even a dead shooter as a, you know, possibly, as a possibly alive person. And so they're giving commands to Johnny slash Johnny's body. And they approach, and then they kick away Troiky's rifle from Johnny's body.

And so from my piecing together of that video, it is very clear to me that he did. did indeed die with Troiky's rifle in his hand. Now, they were describing that Johnny was the police officer who fired it, so that now we also have details about the cop who fired in what he was thinking at the time. So this all happened actually near where several police officers are based. And so they described that when they heard the gunfire, they didn't have an angle on it. And so these few officers basically split up, right, to try to get different, positions around it try to like surround the situation and close in.

And the officer who shot Johnny describes that from the position he was at with, and the officer only had a handgun, that Johnny comes into sight with the rifle and in his words is manipulating the rifle. I think that it is kind of common sense, given what we know of this, that what Johnny was almost certainly doing was clearing the weapon, right? He almost certainly would have taken the, since he picked up the rifle. and then went to a position of cover away from the shooter, presumably he was, you know, taking the mag out

and taking a round out of the chamber. I would say this is an educated guess, to be clear, but there's no logical reason he'd be doing anything else to the weapon, right? He wouldn't be reloading it. He wouldn't be, you know, messing with its accessories, right? One way or another, presumably he was trying to disable the weapon. But the officer describes that in that moment, he felt that if he had,

made a command, like drop it or put your hands up or something, that he would then, if the person who he presumed was the shooter, had not immediately surrendered, then he would be an a pistol versus rifle standoff with this person, which he believes that he would lose because the other person had, you know, a rifle, had a better gun. Was that the law? So, and so accordingly, he fires multiple shots at Johnny, and, and, so accordingly, he fires multiple shots at Johnny. And what we now know is that one of those shots enters Johnny's right buttock and Johnny dies. And so the officers acknowledge, or that officer acknowledges, but the investigation

acknowledges that Johnny was not issued any sort of command. And of course, because Johnny was actually the hero in the situation, again, it stands completely to reason that if an officer I said, you know, police dropped the weapon, right? There's absolutely no reason that. Johnny would have challenged that officer, right? Johnny would almost certainly, I guess I'll say, I'll use the caveat of almost, but quite certainly nobody would have been hurt further had there been a command issued. And so I've since heard it referenced by many of his friends and activists who are concerned by this story, that this should be a fundamental change that we learn from it, that police should not be able to basically shoot somebody without at least attempting

to make verbal contact with the person who they suspect is the shooter. So in this case, even there's no even visual contact, right? There's no indication that Johnny even saw this cop. The cop basically snuck up on him and blew him away or threw a crack in the door, right? Yeah, not exactly snuck up on. It was that Johnny by, Johnny entered the field of vision of this police officer because he entered a spot that he hadn't been. So he's at one cover position on one side of Troiki when he shoots him. He picks up the rifle and then goes to a different cover position still face at Troiki.

And that's how he ends up with his back to an officer who he does not know is there. And so this officer basically is describing that he has this brief moment where from his cover position he sees what he assumes the shooter with a rifle. And that behind Johnny, this was another point that was emphasized in these documents, that behind Johnny is a brick wall. And so the officer felt that this would be the one safe time to engage what he believed was the shooter, as opposed to shooting into Arvada Square at some point that could cause there to be crossfire, right? You know, from virtually any other angle of Arvada Square, if you were shooting at, you know, a person, you could possibly end up with bullets going into other businesses or something. So he sees what he assumes the shooter with a brick wall behind him and with a rifle.

and his thought is just shoot first, figure it out after and he got it wrong and Johnny died because of that. Yeah. Hey, y'all check out our great stuff at Libertarian Institute.org slash books.

First of all, we've published No Quarter, the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our Institute's late and great co-founder. He was the very best one of us, our whole movement, I mean. And no quarter will leave his mark on you, no question. Which brings us to the works of our other co-founder, the legendary libertarian

thinker and writer Sheldon Richmond. We've published two collections of his great essays, Coming to Palestine, and What Social Animals Owe owe to Each Other. Both are instant classics. I'm proud to say that coming to Palestine is surely the definitive libertarian take on Israel's occupation of the Palestinians. And Social Animals certainly ranks with the very best writings on libertarian ethics, economics, and everything else. You'll absolutely love it. Then there's me. I've written two books. Fools Arrind. Time to end the war in Afghanistan. And enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. And I've also published a collection of the transcripts of all of my interviews of the heroic Dr. Ron Paul, 29 of them, plus a speech by me

about how much I love the guy. It's called the Great Ron Paul. You can find all of these. at Libertarian Institute.org slash books. Now, you know, I know they're going to say, well, that's just, those are the breaks, you know, because he made the mistake of picking up the rifle. He should have settled for the bad guy being dead and not able to use that rifle and then left it up to the professionals from there. But, I mean, is it the law that if you only have a handgun and someone else has the rifle, that it's okay then to shoot them in the back

without like a sucker punch without them knowing that you're there? I never heard of that standard before. Well, I will first point out an irony that might be clear to a lot of people actually. So if you watch

my documentary, I actually interviewed the owner of the Army surplus store that Johnny was a customer in at the time that this was happening, right? So Johnny hears these gunshots and he pulls his concealed carry, his lawful, concealed carry handgun and responds. And

when I interviewed the store owner, he said something very interesting to me, which he said, it takes a special person to engage a mass shooter armed with a rifle when you have a handgun. Right. Johnny B-lines from cover position to cover position. He goes like kind of behind a lamp pole, a garbage

can, and then ultimately a brick wall before shooting this guy at close range. And with a rifle, that guy could have, you know, if he had seen Johnny coming, he could have hit him at any time during that. So this is an extremely like unequivocal. I don't think anybody could debate this. It's an extremely brave action to beeline toward a person with a rifle when you only have a handgun to stop a mass shooting. I don't want to make any kind of personal

assessment about the police officer. But the police officer essentially in that moment found himself in a dilemma somewhat similar to Johnny. And Johnny did not make the same decision that that officer did, right? Johnny closed in, slowly. He made, like, he understood what he was basically looking at. He got close to the shooter and then fired. I don't think if we know, or I don't think anybody knows if there were words exchanged. I don't think we know if Johnny actually attempted to say, like, drop it to Tricke or anything like that, or if he just fired. But he at least closed in close enough that he knew what he was shooting at, and the police officer basically didn't hesitate, didn't, you know, take the time to think about what he was looking at. He just did

When you talk about the comparative courage and the fact that, you know, it wasn't Johnny's job to do this. He just did it anyway, where it's the cop's job to figure out what he's doing before he does something like pull a trigger. So, but as you ask about the legality, the DA issued a pretty long, and I'll say well-constructed or well-thought-out, even if one would disagree with it, but an explanation of why the officer is not charged with a crime here. And what the DA basically describes is that all of what you, all of how you deal with

a situation like this is based on sort of a reasonable person standard, right? And so it's not about was the officer actually in danger in that moment? Because we now know the officer was in no danger, right? Obviously, Johnny stopped a mass shooter who just killed a cop. There is zero chance. It's like not just a minuscule chance. There's a 0% chance that Johnny would have had any murderous intent toward the cop who was also, you know, trying to save lives in that moment, right?

So that cop was in no actual danger. However, the DA describes that it's based on a reasonable person standard. What did the cop think was happening in that moment? This cop knows that a cop is dead and knows that a person is, you know, an active, that there's an active shooter who has killed at least a police officer right there and then sees a person with a rifle and they would then

presume, like he absolutely believed that he was in danger, that he is looking at a mass shooter and he believed that by shooting him, he was protecting himself and others. And so unfortunately, it's based on a reasonable person standard here. Well, I shouldn't say unfortunately. What's unfortunate is that he did not know. And so the unfortunate discrepancy is that while he was in no danger, a reasonable person in his shoes would have believed that they were in danger.

Basically, that was the way that it was described. And so, of course, the question can then become, you know, what sorts of reforms could come out of that? And I'm not necessarily a use of force expert, but it has been contended to me, you know, among particularly Johnny's friends and activists who stand for him, that a very simple reform. would be that you that a police officer must give some kind of instruction before firing that the that the way to prevent this kind of tragedy is that there has to be some attempt at verbal contact before just pulling the trigger yeah or at least in a circumstance with a person is not actively using that weapon against someone or explicitly you know betraying the intent to pointing at someone and screaming I'm about to kill you or whatever you

kind of a thing like that. In this case, as you're saying, clearing the weapon, you know, okay, he's manipulating it, but that could mean he's just clearing it. And clearly he's not at the point where it's an immediate threat to anyone else. And, you know, a regular guy, concealed carry guy, you know, he might really panic in a situation like that, taking on a guy with a rifle like that. But the cop, supposedly is very well trained for a situation like this, where he's not supposed to panic and get all emotional. He's supposed to be a professional here and choose his target. It's funny, right, the way that works, where their training and experience allows them to get away with bloody murder half the time. But then the other half of the time, it's, hey, what would any schmuck in the same situation do? You know? And, uh, or what would they believe? Right. So it's not just what would they, what would a reasonable person fire the gun? The standard was simply, what would. would a reasonable person believe that firing the gun in that moment would possibly save lives or including the life of the officer who is the shooter in this case?

I think it's also worth noting, actually, because you're kind of describing a discrepancy in training or in the training that's supposed to happen. You know, I don't know too much about the background of the individual officer, but the But people who I talked to described that kind of during the COVID period, right? So bear in mind, this happened in the summer of 2021. So apparently kind of throughout COVID, Johnny became interested in, you know, exercising his Second Amendment. Like, that's when he gets his concealed carry.

But he also took kind of training classes. Like, he took classes that were much beyond just what you're required to get a concealed carry class. Right. So, like, I've done the eight-hour concealed carry class. carry class in Virginia, but that was basically poking holes in paper that isn't too far away, not super applicable to a real life situation. Johnny was taking way more than the standard required to simply be a concealed carrier. He was actually learning about, you know, tactics, maneuvers and things in situations like this. So, you know, he used his training to save lives in this situation.

I, again, I don't know so much about the individual police officers training background, but I will say that in general, police officers are not required to take, like, extremely extensive firearms classes. Like, it's pretty normal for them to have to do, like, 200 rounds downrange per year, like kind of freshening up. But they're not necessarily taking the kind of tactical training. So, again, I don't want to say anything about the specific cop, but I would say that Johnny's amount of training for a situation like this probably exceeds what any individual

cop would have to do at least for in a given particular year, like in terms of fresh training. So probably hard to compare it to like police academy or whatever. But one other thing I actually want to like point out about that officer, which, you know, I don't know if this makes any point. It's not a political point. It's not, it doesn't change anything really about the situation. But once we finally got the cop's name, I kind of looked him up and I wanted to see what sorts of news stories exist about him. Has he had other issues?

And, you know, I found one sort of police brutality lawsuit against him, but that was dropped. So there's not much to learn there. But one thing that I did learn about him is that he actually is an acoustic guitarist. And he has a Spotify. and there were posts about him on the, you know, on the city's website where they had kind of a music video that showed him playing guitar. And I thought it was interesting, again, no particular comment, and I'm not necessarily trying to humanize the officer or whatever, right? People might try to drive meaning from this. And I would just say, don't put it on to me, but take it for what you will.

Johnny was also a musician. He took music very seriously. People called him Johnny Verbal. he used his music to sort of spread a message as well as simply to kind of bring joy to people's lives. And I thought it was interesting that much as a activist who's extremely critical of police could maybe be considered diametrically opposed to a police officer, particularly one who kills him, that these two people also had some level of, you know, uncanny similarity, that they both were musicians. who both believed Johnny was right, the cop was wrong, but both believed that they were protecting their community from a mass murderer. Yeah, well, and the whole thing is so ironic, right?

The kind of, I don't know exactly who's the anarcho-capitalist, but some kind of extremely libertarian anti-government and specifically anti-police activist on some issues anyway. He was described to me by one side. I don't mean to interrupt you, but just to answer that clarification, He was described to me by a friend of his as that he was a capitalist-leaning anarchist. But the person who told me that was actually a anti-capitalist anarchist. And so it was interesting because what he described to me is that although they were kind of on opposite ends of the economic spectrum,

like their unity in, you know, voluntarism and in anti-stateism was much more important to them than what. whether they happen to have left or right kind of economic views. So I think it wasn't, I don't think capitalism was, was something that you would primarily describe him by, but it does sound like his leanings were toward end cap, yes. And I like that, that it's, you know, anarchy first and capitalism second. That's fun of me.

But then, for sure. He's the hero who saves the cop from the guy with the gun, you know, whatever, nobody ever talks about, what was this guy's problem? But this guy's just out to assassinate cops that day, and the anti-cop activist kills him heroically in a textbook defensive, in-defense of other life type killing, and then is blown away in what you say is at least near a reasonable error of conclusion, and as you say also, a dilemma of a situation in timing where he has a safe backdrop for his shot now, which you might

lose in just a moment and all of these things. And then you also have a situation where, you know, and I don't know who's jerking our chain, it's probably no intent behind it, really, but they could have released pictures of the rifle on the ground right at Hurley's feet or something, a couple of still shots to show that, look, he did have the rifle and it was a reasonable mistake that was made or at least one near that, that you could claim that. Instead, they didn't release that until now. left people saying, oh, you claim he picked up the rifle, but why don't you demonstrate that and gave, you know, in a sense, all of Hurley's people the idea that maybe one day the real truth will come out and there will be some accountability for this. And now here

it is months later. And the truth comes out that the story is at least close enough to their version of it, that there will be no accountability. It's just a horrible thing that happened one day and then tough, right? Well, there certainly won't be any criminal charges. I don't think that they're technically precluded from some kind of a lawsuit or something like that, but nothing like that has been filed to my understanding. So, you know, I think that there are methods of justice that could exist other than criminal charges. And again, this was something that people talked to me about when I was filming the documentary this summer was, you know, one person who describes herself as sort of a restorative justice and kind of like healing.

figure in the community said, like, you know, she doesn't think that Johnny's philosophy would say that that this should be adjudicated by a criminal trial, that, that it, like, what would actually imprisoning the officer who made this, you know, horrific, but like, you know, technically legally justifiable mistake? What would that actually do? Right. And so, what does justice look like here? It could look like reforms to prevent it from happening. again. It could look like civil liability, but that's really up to the family, you know, that perhaps there are things other than the criminal justice system that could make this right or as right as it can be besides, you know, besides criminal charges, much in the same way as perhaps

the situation at Arvada Square could have been solved by literally anything else other than, you know, pulling the trigger in that particular moment. Yeah. All right. Well, listen, I got to go, but I really appreciate you coming back on the show and your attention to this important story that I guess, you know, they must be getting some local coverage, but the rest of us out here in the country are relying on you. So thank you for coming through for us here.

For sure. I really appreciate that. And I wish that this story was given more national attention. I think that the media has this adverse reaction to saying, like, you know, armed. Armed, you know, mass shooter stopped by concealed carrier doesn't exactly go along with the narrative, especially when the concealed carrier is an anarchist. Yeah. And then especially when he's blown away by his security force for saving their life. Oops.

And that doesn't make a very good narrative for TV news at all. All right. Well, listen. Anyway, we're glad that you're here. So that's news to share the great Ford Fisher. Appreciate it. All right. Thank you.

The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio. can be heard on K-P-FK 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.