© 2019 HERE/Microsoft Burger King, 2601 Beatties Ford Rd, Charlotte, N.C.
Shoot first, ask questions later,' yell protesters after Charlotte officer kills man
Tension centered on whether the man who died - 27-year-old Danquirs Napoleon Franklin - was armed at the time of the shooting.
The shooting happened around 9 a.m. at a Burger King on Beatties Ford Road, near Interstate 85, police said.
Some members of the crowd that gathered across the street from the shooting were overheard yelling at police as they cleared the scene. "Shoot first, ask questions later," one protester yelled.
At least one of the protesters, identifying herself as Precious Robinson, says she was a witness and disputes the police account of what happened. Robinson says she was sitting at the restaurant's drive-thru when the incident unfolded.
An armed man apparently was threatening a woman at Burger King, she said, and an unarmed man tried to help the woman. Police shot the man who was unarmed, she said. CMPD later said that "misinformation" was circulating about the shooting, and offered a series of clarifications, including confirmation that officers saw the
suspect with a gun and "he refused" to drop it.
"We encourage any witnesses to speak to our officers," said a CMPD tweet. According to two 911 calls released by CMPD Monday afternoon, two women called separately from the Burger King to say they saw a man with a gun.
"A customer came up here and he walked behind the counter to fight an employee," said the first 911 caller, who was inside the restaurant.
A few moments later, her voice got more urgent. "He got a gun! He got a gun!" she said, adding that he had pointed it at someone. The man was apparently in and out of the Burger King during the two-minute call. At one point, the caller can be heard instructing someone to lock the door.
Officers arrived at the scene four minutes after the first 911 call began, police said. CMPD Police Chief Kerr Putney briefed the media outside the restaurant and said:
"We get here, engage the subject, who is armed. There are multiple commands to drop the weapon, as we engage him outside in the parking lot. At some point ... one of the first arriving officers perceived a legal threat (and) fired at least one round, striking the subject."
That officer was later identified as Wende Kerl.
Investigators also found a gun at the scene and it is believed to be the suspect's weapon, Putney said.
He said he was not yet sure how the man was holding the weapon when the shooting occurred, but it was "apparently pretty obvious because he was getting verbal commands to drop the weapon."
"It was visible. At some point, there was a movement or something that they perceived as a lethal threat, and fired the weapon," Putney said. Franklin was pronounced dead at Atrium Health's Carolina Medical Center, police said.
In 2010, former Charlotte Observer staff writer Eric Frazier profiled Franklin and another student, Juwon Lewis, in a story focused on the low graduation rate among African-American males in North Carolina.
Franklin, a high school senior at the time, was the example of the student with hopes for college. Both spent their first year of high school at Midwood, then a special campus for kids at risk of dropping out. Juwon eventually quit. "Danquirs is making peace with his past," Frazier wrote in the story.
His mother, Deborah, said that Franklin "had cocaine in his body when he was born. ... I did drugs all nine months I was pregnant," according to the 2010 story.
Franklin's grandmother raised him, according to the story. In a follow-up story in June 2011, Frazier wrote: "Conventional wisdom says Danquirs Franklin should be a high school dropout by now. Instead, he's about to enroll in college."
At the time, he was preparing to enroll at the Art of Institute of Charlotte and trying to find loans and grants to cover his education, according to the story.
"I am so proud of him," said his mother, Deborah Franklin, who kicked her cocaine habit in 2007, according to the 2011 story.
She declined to comment for this story on Monday.
The department's Internal Affairs Bureau will conduct an investigation into the shooting, and a separate investigation will look into whether CMPD policies and procedures were followed in the case, police said.
Officer Kerl has been placed on paid administrative leave, "which is standard policy whenever an officer discharges a service weapon," police said. Kerl has worked for CMPD for nearly 24 years, according to the department.
No officers were injured.
Maj. Mike Campagna and several other CMPD officers talked with protesters shortly before noon and stayed for about 40 minutes. Campagna said they're part of CMPD's "Constructive Conversations" team, which has its roots in the protests that followed the fatal police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott.
Charlotte City Council member Braxton Winston acknowledged that there are differing accounts of the events and he was hoping to keep communication open as the investigation progressed.
This is the second time CMPD officers have killed someone in 2019. In January, police said Michael Daniel Kelley was armed with a knife when he was shot near a Family Dollar store in west Charlotte.
Visit The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.) at www.charlotteobserver.com
The Wall Street Journal News report
China Broadcaster Says KFC’s Ice Dirtier Than Toilet Water
- Reuters
- A woman holds food inside a KFC restaurant in Beijing.
KFC’s parent company Yum Brands Inc. YUM +1.45%, faces a new challenge in its efforts to reshape the brand’s image in its largest market after China’s powerful state broadcaster alleged that the fast food chain’s ice is dirtier than toilet water.
In a program that aired Saturday night, China Central Television said reporters had recently taken ice samples from three fast-food chains and compared them with toilet water. The samples from a branch of KFC in the city’s southern Chongwenmen district were found to have levels of bacteria 12 times higher than the toilet water, and 19 times higher than China’s standards for drinking water.
Ice samples taken from the other two chains also failed to meet national standards, according to CCTV. A branch of local fast-food brand Kongfu was found serving ice with five times as much bacteria as toilet water. Ice from a McDonald’s outlet, meanwhile, turned out to be cleaner than toilet water but still fell short of being drinkable, the broadcaster said.
KFC apologized to the consumers in a statement posted to its official account on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like micro blogging, hours after the CCTV program aired.“We are sincerely sorry that this sort of situation has occurred,” the statement read. “Our executives have reached the store to look into the case.”
McDonald’s and Kongfu both issued statements on Sina Weibo saying they paid close attention to the report and were investigating.
Both the KFC Chongwenmen branch and Yum Brands declined to comment on Monday.
The toilet water report arrives only seven months after KFC had to weather a high-profile official probe into its chicken suppliers in December. The brand took a hit and company executives apologized after Shanghai health authorities said they planned to investigate why the fast-food chain hadn’t answered questions about what it did with batches of chickens found to have excessive levels of antibiotics in 2010 and 2011.
Shanghai’s health officials didn’t find elevated levels of antibiotics in KFC products they tested, but the bad publicity put a dent in sales.
Yum Brands reported a third straight quarter of declining earnings earlier this month, largely because Chinese consumers were shunning KFC, according to analysts. For more than a decade, the chicken giant was the main driver for Yum Brands’ double-digit growth in earnings per share until the chicken supplier investigation in December. Sales fell 20% at Chinese outlets that were open at least a year, compared to 1% growth in the U.S. and other international divisions, excluding China and India.
China is not alone in serving ice cubes that make toilet water seem clean by comparison. In June, the British newspaper Daily Mail said it conducted the same experiment with samples of ice from 10 fast-food chains and found six that had higher bacterial levels than toilet water.
The topic continued to be among the hottest on Sina Weibo on Tuesday as frustrated Chinese consumers bombarded KFC with complaints.
“The company’s apologies have already become formulaic,” wrote one Weibo user. ”We may tolerate this for now, what about in the future?”
[UPDATE, 11:30 a.m.: In an emailed comment sent late Tuesday morning, Yum Brands said: "We want to reassure you that we have immediately addressed the problem with the ice at this restaurant. Food safety is the most important thing for us and we will ensure our strict operating procedures are followed." ]
–Shangjing Li and Sophia Cheng
Like China Real Time on Facebook and follow us Twitter for the latest updates.
Related: Annie Gasparro has details on Lunch Break.
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