NBC Los Angeles selectively edited a video interview of a witness to a police shooting to better fit the police narrative about the killing of an unarmed college student last week.
Now friends and family of the victim, Feras Morad, who was shot and killed by Long Beach police on Wednesday, are putting the news station on blast through social media.
Richard Florence, a friend of the slain student who happened to record a video of the video interview between NBC reporter Kate Larsen and witness Bob Garner, posted the video to Facebook with the following commentary:
#CanIGetAWitness NBC chopping up words to make up a conversation that never happened. Ok so I turn the corner and see #NBC interviewing this dude so I film their interview & make sure to catch the 11 o’clock news tonight to compare the two.
EVERYONE PLEASE TWEET #NBC Ask them why they need to make shit up!
Notice how he says Feras is walking towards the officer like this…and does a shuffling motion with his hands up.
Then watch the news version edit add in audio of the womans voice saying, “Towards the…” and the man’s voice from minutes later or earlier saying “he was acting very aggressive yeah”.
NBC is attempting to support the narrative that Feras approached the officer ‘aggressively’ and are editing audio to do so.
The witness told NBC that Murad was slowly shuffling towards the officer with his hands up, but what NBC aired was that the bloody and injured man was “aggressively” moving towards the officer. The video is posted below. It is not the first time that NBC Los Angeles proved to be a mouthpiece for local police departments.
Morad, a nationally-ranked debate competitor and student at Moorpark College, had told his family he was going to Long Beach to study for a debate. The student, with a 3.9 GPA, reportedly ingested mushrooms with his friends – something his family says is out of character.
Experiencing an extreme reaction to the hallucinogen, Morad reportedly fell out of a second story window and his friends called 911 for help.
According to a press release from the city of Long Beach:
The suspect was acting erratically and got into a physical altercation with his friends that lasted approximately 10 minutes. While they tried to restrain him, he broke loose and jumped through the glass of a second story window. The suspect continued to behave irrationally and a short time later, the officer arrived.
According to the police report, the officers claim that when they arrived he began to advance towards the officers despite orders to stop. His family and friends maintain that he was not wearing a shirt and was unarmed. One officer, who has yet to be identified, opened fire shooting Morad an unknown number of times, despite his friends repeatedly screaming at the officers that their friend did not have a weapon.
“What they resorted to, this is not the type of help he needed,” a friend who was at the scene, Ryan Fobes, told CBS.
Tom Cleary, who wrote about the incident for Heavy, compiled a series of Fobes’ tweets about the incident, posting them on Storify.
Family and friends of 20-year-old Morad are speaking out and claiming that they were not contacted by the Long Beach Police Department, the hospital or the coroners office at any time to be informed that their loved one was killed.
His sister told KTLA that she only learned of his passing through a Facebook post, confirmed after she frantically called his friends two days later.
“I am so angry no words can explain what I’m feeling,” Ghada Morad, Feras’s sister told KTLA. “What if I hadn’t called [his friends],” she continued.
The family is now hiring an attorney to file a lawsuit against the department for their deadly reaction to a medical emergency.
His sister and friends have also started a campaign called #Justice4Feras, where people are encouraged to write “unarmed, please cuff me” across their arms and a protest is scheduled for 1 pm on June 27 in Long Beach.
Below is the video showing NBC Los Angeles twisting the narrative along with a video of Morad reacting after learning he had advanced to the national semi-finals of a debate tournament.
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