Probe of Police Urged in Ex-Football Player’s Death

Leaders of the city’s African American community charged Monday that police mishandling of a July 24 confrontation was responsible for the fatal shooting of a former professional football player.

Demetrius DuBose, 28, who played at Notre Dame and was later a linebacker for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, was shot after a struggle with two officers who had sought to handcuff him while investigating a reported burglary in Mission Beach.

Police said officers fired at DuBose after he took away their nunchakus and charged at the officers with them. DuBose allegedly tossed one of the officers into a planter during the chase.

Leaders of several civic groups, who held a news conference Monday to call for an investigation of the shooting, said police provoked the violent response by mishandling the initial contact with DuBose.

According to police accounts, officers answering a burglary report approached DuBose and two other men. During questioning, DuBose took off running until the officers caught him. He threw one off and ran some more, then stopped and assumed “a fighting stance,” police said. After a struggle, he grabbed the nunchakus--weapons consisting of two sticks connected by a cord--and swung them at the officers before being fired upon, police said.

But critics contend that DuBose cooperated with police until they tried to handcuff him during the questioning. They say that it was unnecessary to handcuff DuBose and may have been attempted only because he was black.

“We do not think that the gentleman did anything to justify being shot. What we do believe is that the way that the police handled the investigation is what escalated the tension and let things get out of control,” said H.J. Sims, a member of the executive committee of San Diego’s NAACP chapter “We’re putting the responsibility on the Police Department.”

John Johnson, head of the San Diego Urban League, said the killing appears to be the latest in a national trend of “lynching” under the color of authority.

“Many questions need to be answered,” Johnson said.

A San Diego police spokesman said the department is investigating the DuBose death and results will be sent to the San Diego district attorney’s office, possibly later this month.

The spokesman, Bill Robinson, said the department was not commenting during the investigation.

DuBose’s supporters portrayed him as a gentle giant who was a student leader and star athlete in Seattle before going to Notre Dame. He was “no drug addict, no gang-banger and he certainly was no hard-core criminal,” Sims said.

At the time of his death, DuBose faced criminal charges stemming from a melee in February at a Mammoth Lakes restaurant and a separate arrest nearby on suspicion of drug possession and driving under the influence.

In the Feb. 3 incident, DuBose was subdued by five police officers after refusing to leave a restaurant and bar where he had been ejected the night before, said Tim Kendall, a Mono County prosecutor. Trial on battery and other charges was set to begin July 26, two days after the Mission Beach incident.

In June, DuBose admitted to a CHP officer who stopped him near the resort town that he was under the influence of ketamine, a drug similar to PCP, Kendall said. “He was very much out of it based on the officer’s observation,” Kendall said. “He was hardly able to communicate.”