AUSTIN — The police officer who accidentally shot and killed Bettie Jones in December says he feels horrible about what happened and will feel that way until he dies.
"I feel terrible about it to this day, and will for the rest of my life,” Rorbert Rialmo said in an article in Time magazine, “but people don’t know how it was to be in that situation, and ‘sorry’ will never cut it.”
In the incident Dec. 27, Rialmo also shot and killed Quintonio LeGrier, 19, after the teen allegedly came after him with a baseball bat after his father had called police saying the teen was being threatening. Police said one of the shots Rialmo fired accidentally struck Jones, who lived in the same building as the LeGrier family.
Rialmo spoke with the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization in New York that covers the U.S. criminal justice system, in a series of interviews quoted in the Time story. The interviews were his first since the shooting, which drew national headlines and led Mayor Rahm Emanuel to rush back from a vacation to Cuba.
READ THE FULL STORY IN TIME HERE
The interview notes that Rialmo's Mexican-American father is a fireman and his uncle is also a police officer. Rialmo spent six years as a Marine and served in Iraq before joining the force in 2013. He called his police training "a complete joke."
Rialmo weighed in on Chicago policing strategy and whether police should be more like "warriors" or "guardians."
"If you want to be a guardian in Chicago, be prepared to start going to a lot of cops' funerals," he said, according to Time.
The story also questions whether Chicago policing methods should be emulated in other cities.
Quintonio LeGrier's father has sued the city, challenging the police version of events in the incident in the 4700 block of West Erie Street. Rialmo has also sued the teen's estate, saying he was forced to shoot LeGrier and now suffers from "extreme emotional trauma."
In his interview with the Marshall Project, Rialmo said he filed the suit to defend himself and doesn't expect to make money off of it. But his attorney, Joel Brodsky, would not allow him to comment in detail on the case, the story said.
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