Editor's note: This video contains graphic images.
In 2012 eight Saginaw, Mich., police officers surrounded a 49-year-old mentally ill, homeless man armed only with a penknife and shot him some 46 times. On Monday the American Civil Liberties Union released the disturbing footage, the New York Daily News reports.
According to reports, police received a call complaining of an argument between a shopper and the homeless man, Martin Hall, 49. Eight officers responded, along with a K9 unit, and surrounded Hall. Officers reportedly fired 46 times and Hall collapsed and died on the pavement, the Daily News reports.
"He had no idea that those policemen would do that to him," Martin Hall's mother, Jewel Hall, said in an interview included in the ACLU videotape, the Daily News reports. "He wasn’t a threat—I mean, he had a little penknife."
The ACLU took up the Hall family's cause after local and federal authorities declined to file charges against the officers. The police dashboard-camera footage was released to the ACLU after the Hall family's attorneys requested that the footage be made public. According to the Daily News, the ACLU plans to deliver the video to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, D.C.
"In declining to prosecute, the cops and U.S. Department of Justice said investigators did not find evidence the officers had demonstrated 'willful misconduct,' " the Daily News reported.
Read more at the New York Daily News.