MILWAUKEE (CN) - The former police officer who shot and killed 17-year-old Alvin Cole in Milwaukee in 2020 testified on Tuesday that time has erased much of his memory of the incident, but that he didn't shoot for no reason.  

In February 2020, around 6 p.m., Wauwatosa police officers were dispatched to Mayfair Mall for a dispute involving a group of teenagers, one of whom was 17-year-old Alvin Cole. He was described by mall security as a Black teenage male wearing a gray hoodie and a fanny pack containing a handgun.

When officers arrived on the scene, Cole and his friends ran away. While he was fleeing one officer and a mall security guard, his gun went off and he collapsed, according to the incident report written by the Milwaukee Police Department.

Nearly 10 seconds later, former Wauwatosa officer Joseph Mensah arrived and fired five times, killing him. No criminal charges followed, but Cole's parents sued Mensah for excessive force in 2022. The first trial in March ended with a hung jury.

The civil retrial began on Monday in the Eastern District of Wisconsin before federal Judge Lynn Adelman, a Bill Clinton appointee.

On Tuesday, Mensah testified that he could not recall several details from the night he shot Cole, despite holding the statement he gave Milwaukee police just three days after the incident during the testimony.

Under questioning by plaintiffs' attorney Nate Cade, Mensah said the statement, given with a lawyer present, does not necessarily reflect his memory of the events.

"He signed off on his statement then, and I deposed him later," Cade said after court adjourned for the day. "You don't get to just say five and a half years later that the statement was wrong or that you don't remember."

Cade pressed Mensah for specifics about the shooting, including Cole's body position and the location of the firearm. FBI Agent David Shamsi, a Wauwatosa police officer at the time and the closest person to Cole, testified the firearm was in Cole's hand and never moved.

Mensah could not recall the details, only that he was "staring at the barrel of a gun" and added, "you don't just forget that." He didn't know whether Shamsi was armed or how far either of them was from Cole.

Cade and Mensah verbally sparred over semantics for several minutes before Adelman called a recess for lunch, appearing frustrated with the repetition.

Mensah served in Wauwatosa, a suburb of Milwaukee, for around five years before moving to the Waukesha Police Department in 2020. In that time, he fatally shot three men:  Antonio Gonzales, who had mental health issues and refused to drop a sword; Jay Anderson Jr., a Black man who was shot in the head while asleep in his car in a public park; and Cole.

He continued working in Waukesha County, another Milwaukee suburb, for five months before moving on to become a detective in the Internet Crimes Against Children Division, according to his LinkedIn.

He left the force entirely in July, citing mental health and family reasons, four months after the first civil trial.

Mensah argues in this case that he used deadly force against Cole because he feared for his own life. He claimed on the stand on Tuesday that he didn't know what happened before he arrived on the scene, but that he fired his weapon to protect everyone in the parking lot.

"I didn't want to get shot I didn't want to die," Mensah said. "I didn't expect this to happen."

Conversely, the plaintiffs say that Mensah could not have had time to assess the situation, give orders or otherwise determine whether deadly force was justified. They assert further that Cole never pointed his gun at Mensah at all.

During his testimony, Mensah recalled loudly exclaiming "fuck" immediately after the shooting while walking away from the scene and toward his unmarked squad car, which was recording video from the dashboard and audio from a microphone on Mensah's person.

Mensah and Officer Evan Olson, who witnessed the shooting from the street while apprehending two others from Cole's group, then together got into his car to return to the station, and the audio and video recording immediately stops.

Mensah testified that he does not know why it stopped, and that he had been crying.

Officers are required to isolate themselves from anyone else who was on the scene of an officer-involved shooting until they can give a statement, according to Milwaukee Detective Lori Rom, who investigated the circumstances of the shooting. She told Cade that she was surprised to hear that Mensah and Olson left the scene together.

Before wrapping up for the day, Cade asked Olson if he recalled talking to Shamsi about the shooting after the fact and then affirming he wouldn't tell anyone they spoke, though it is unclear where that statement came from. Olson will testify on Wednesday.

Mensah and his attorneys declined to comment on Tuesday's proceedings.

Source: Courthouse News Service