the police have surveillance footage of the whole thing with the vehicle involved , but they refuse to investigate and the family has tried to get help but it's always something stopping it.
Wow. How can that happen? Don't they want to solve a case? I wonder what is going on...
William was unarmed, just walking down the street, when he was approached and gunned down. He was shot multiple times.
What happened next is a nightmare the family can’t escape. While william was still being life-flighted away, the Gridley Police brought in a fire hose and washed the entire crime scene into the storm drains. The official evidence logs for this homicide show that zero items of physical evidence—no ballistics, no DNA—were ever collected from the street by the police that night.
The "cleanup" was so negligent that a family member went to the scene the very next day and found a shell casing just lying on the ground. He had to turn it into the police himself because they had hosed the rest of the evidence away.
In a 15-second clip of a neighbor's surveillance video from that night. In it, you can hear the gunshots and you can hear William screaming for his life. The police seized the full-length version of that video from the neighbor, but they have never let the family see if or asked for help from the community.
This isn't the first time this has happened here. In Gridley, it seems the only homicides or suspicious deaths that ever get a real investigation are the ones that fall outside of the Gridley Police Department’s jurisdiction. There is a saying among people here that if you want to get away with murder, you do it in the city of Gridley. When a case is in their hands, the evidence disappears and the investigations go cold.
Family has spent years asking for answers, only to be met with "no." Just this past November, they received another formal denial from the GPD. They are still claiming it’s an "active investigation" to keep the footage hidden, but I don't understand how a case with zero physical evidence can stay "active" for five years just to keep a mother in the dark.
His mother has reached out for legal help, but the system is so full of red tape and "blocks" that it feels like the universe is working to keep this buried.
