Science ask: How did Brandon Tate-Brown die?
It’s been four days, and we’ve not heard a peep from the Philadelphia Police Department about the details of Brandon Tate-Brown’s death. So, we’re left with what we have. A handful of pictures, speculation and a police statement.
If it’s worth anything, at this point, I’ve got a little science for you.
First let’s recap:
Here’s the police’s printed statement:
At about 2:45 a.m., two 15th district officers in uniform were on patrol in a marked police car on the 6700 block of Frankford Ave. when they saw a white Dodge Charger with a Florida license plate traveling without headlights. The officers stopped the motorist for violating a traffic law. When the officers approached the car, they saw a handgun in the front center console area and asked the driver to exit the car. The motorist exited the car, began to struggle physically with the officers and forced his way back into the Dodge. The motorist “attempted to retrieve the gun when one of the officers discharged his weapon striking the male once in the head,
To clarify, this encounter happened at around 2:40 a.m. on the 6600 block of Frankford Ave, just in front of Dr. John Fanelly’s Foot Specialist business, and across the four-lane street from TD Bank. (There have been a few stray rumors that Tate-Brown was actually already parked in his vehicle, and not pulled over, at all.)
The police have said that after approaching Tate-Brown, they saw a gun poking out of his center console, and asked him to exit the vehicle. It would appear that he did so, compliantly, as photos of his lifeless body have surfaced of him
laying by the open passenger-side door of his Dodge Charger.
Police say, on this sidewalk is where Tate-Brown became belligerent and non-compliant. After a scuffle, police say Tate-Brown forced his way back to the passenger-side of his car to retrieve the aforementioned gun.
That’s where police say Tate-Brown was shot once in the back of the head, and killed with a single-fired shot.
This is all they’ve provided — four days ago.
Now, besides all of the other obvious questions one could have about this account, my (non-accusatory) question about that story immediately became science-based: How did this bullet casing end up over approx. 100 inches to the left, being that police service pistols typically have shell case ejection ports on the right side of the gun?
For the preliminary story given by the police, the bullet shell casing had rolled/bounced to a very exotic ending position.
I found
a study from the
Investigative Sciences Journal, who have lent their scientific expertise to the ongoing study of what’s known as force science — science that helps us understand police/civilian gun encounters.
Experts typically tend to judge a police officer’s position
partly by looking at the end positions of the weapon-ejected bullet shell-casings. The study seems to conclude that you can’t come to a definite conclusion based on bullet-shell casings, alone, but the results of the experiments are still useful, nonetheless.
In the Tate-Brown case, it’s even that much more difficult, being that there’s only one casing. Only one bullet casing leaves for any number of random positions that shell could have bounced/rolled. Still, with this particular shell casing, as we’ll see in the study, this end position is quite exotic.
In the ISJ’s study, after 7.6K bullets fired, this is the overall scatter chart if the shooter is facing forward. (Forward being towards the top of the chart and backwards being the bottom. Left and right being in their respective positions.)
The red line being approximately the position that the Philly PD’s bullet has landed in.
The above scatter chart of every shot they took under all circumstances shows that the most likely place for a bullet-shell casing to land is behind and to the right of the shooter.
A lot of these shell-casings did seem to land back and to the left — but they were in an open space, and didn’t have a Dodge Charger next to them.
In this study, most of the shell casings landing in the bottom left quadrant came when the participating shooter was holding the pistol with one hand, downward, and cocked in a 45 degree angle. Like this:
I mean, Tate-Brown’s shooter was, indeed, a rookie cop having only been a part of PPD for a year and a half. But could he have hit Tate-Brown with such precision and accuracy with such an unprofessional and untrained hand position?
Here’s what ISJ has to say about this hand position:
One handed grip, with the arm extended at eye level, but the firearm is canted inward at 45 degrees. All of the inward cants, although unusual for a trained officer, have
occurred while an officer is engaged in shooting and turning and his/her elbow rotates outward in conjunction with his/her turning. This inward cant occurs most frequently when officers hold the weapon in one hand and have not been taught how to correctly align and fire when turning, such as might occur in simulation training.
[…]
One handed grip, with the weapon held at arms length and the weapon and arms are declined downward 22 degrees from the horizon and the weapon canted inward at 45 degrees.
Here’s what the scatter plot looks like with just the downward, inward-canted firing:
Other scenarios that led to reasons a shell casing would bounce into the lower left quadrant (or back and to the left of shooter) is weapon movement. A portion of this study, shows the effect weapon motion plays in where the shell casing lands.
In a lot of the examples, the shell casing end position seemed to reach its limit at about 8 feet — which interestingly enough is about the range the PPD’s bullet shell casing is seen in the scene photos.
The force research info we have via ISJ could seem to indicate that a rookie cop had an untrained hand grip (one hand, inward-canted, firing downward?) or with some drastic weapon motion, fired his weapon and hit with precision to the back of Brandon Tate-Brown’s head or he was standing positioned in another way than we’re imagining — which may have more dubious implications.
The full study, which you can read in its entirety,
here, makes for a lot of un-thought-of bullet shell-casing paths.
The overall conclusion of the ISJ study?