All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Michael Bell, Sr., former Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force and father of Michael Bell, Jr., who was killed by local police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, I think it is.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Scott, thank you for having me on the show.
Very happy to have you here.
And I'm sorry, I meant to say in that introduction that you have since become an activist, working very hard and successfully in some instances in pushing for new systems of accountability and for independent investigations of police shootings and this kind of thing.
And we'll talk about that later on in a minute here.
But first, we have new developments in this story of what actually happened to your son back in 2004.
And so I guess can you, I know it's hard for you and I'm really sorry, but can you remind us what it was that happened and then talk about some of the new details that have come out here?
Sure.
I'll try to make it easy for your listeners to follow.
I had a son, 21-year-old son, Michael Bell.
He was coming home from a night out with friends.
He pulled in front of his own home, a police officer arrived behind them.
We think the police officer was waiting for him on another matter.
And my son was accused of running a stop sign and you can see in the dash cam video it didn't occur.
And essentially there was a confrontation.
My son was tased.
He went to the back of the home.
A number of officers were there.
He was resisting because he just was receiving a Rodney King style beating.
Mother and sister came up from upstairs, stood on the corner of a deck area.
And at one point an officer screamed, he has my gun.
Another officer walked up, placed the gun directly to my son's temple and fired a deadly shot into his head and took his life.
I being a retired military officer, I was actually active duty at the time.
I questioned how an investigation could be completed in two days and there was a number of details that really bothered me.
And so eventually in 2010 they settled a civil rights lawsuit.
I refused to accept a non-disclosure confidentiality agreement because I knew there were other aspects of this matter that needed to be addressed.
They gave it to me and they gave us a record $1.75 million settlement at the time.
And I used those proceeds to help change state law.
We, Scott Walker in 2014 was the governor at the time and he signed a law that stated that departments could not investigate themselves after a police involved shooting.
Outside investigators had to come in.
And so my son's case was never retroactive under that law.
And the shabby investigation from 2004 still stood in place.
I approached a number of people, the governors and attorney generals and those DAs, police and fire commissions, and I kept calling for an outside investigation because it showed that there was potentially a homicide, a murder, or a cover-up and a conspiracy of a cover-up.
And I could not get any progress any place.
And so finally I brought in my own team of investigators and even though we didn't have the resources that law enforcement has, we were able to uncover six new developments in my son's case.
If your listeners would like, if they go to the website michaelbell.info, we produced a documentary called Forensically Impossible and it shows how the cover-up occurred.
And just recently we held a press conference and we released our findings regarding my son's case.
And one of the most important parts of the findings was that I found the bullet impact location which directly contradicts police testimony.
And it's a big deal because the officers, they came together and they changed their testimony multiple times and our attorney caught them with that because after they all got done completing their testimony for a civil rights trial, he handed them a copy of the medical examiner's report.
And the medical examiner report stated that my son was shot on the right side of the head even though all their testimony said that he was shot on the left.
And so we found multiple new developments to include a bullet impact location.
We have four outside sources that demonstrate that the officers physically fought with each other immediately after my son's death because it was a bad shoot.
We found out that a 3D animator was brought in to try to collaborate the police story but he couldn't do it.
It was anatomically impossible for him to make a 3D animation for their version of the shooting and that these officers under oath never disclosed this 3D animator and the attorneys for these officers never corrected the officers when they made these depositions.
So this is a big deal here in the state of Wisconsin.
And like I said, last week we had a press conference on November 5th.
It was four days before the 15th anniversary and that's what we're pushing for in the state.
So fire away with your questions, Scott.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I want to mention real quick, as you said, michaelbell.info and there's so much going on there.
There's also a recent story about this at the really great website that we really love around here, the Free Thought Project, where it looks like they talk to you for this piece actually and they go through and they list the six new pieces of information that you mentioned there.
They have the pictures for people to look at and all that.
If you want to take a quicker look, that is at the Free Thought Project and the article is called Decorated Lieutenant Colonel Exposes Cops Who Murdered His Son.
But if you just type in Free Thought Project and Michael Bell, you'll see numerous results but you'll see one from just, I'm pretty sure late last month, it'll come right up there for you.
It's no, it's early this month, November 6th, 2019 here.
Okay.
So let's talk first of all about the dent in the garage.
So I am a Liberty guy, but I'm not a gun guy.
I'm working on it.
But I asked a gun guy that I know this morning, what do you think about that?
And he said, well, you know, police guns usually have hollow points so that they don't travel through bodies and hit whatever is behind someone that they're shooting.
And so this looks more like a ball type of a bullet that would have could have done that.
He said in his opinion, he thought maybe it was unlikely that a bullet that had traveled through a skull, a hollow point that had traveled through a skull already would leave that sort of dent in the garage.
Although I think, you know, he left open the possibility.
But I wonder if your forensic investigators and all that, have they, you know, clarified about the nuance about the ammunition and about whether they think this is possibly from a second shot that missed or whether this is certainly the fatal bullet, but they explain why it is that it would have been able to, the hollow point would have survived intact enough to make that dent or something like that.
Well, there's a number of things that you have to consider.
First off is that this piece of aluminum garage trim was probably only about six or eight feet away from where my son was being held over a car.
And the bullet traveled through the right side of his head and out the left side of his head.
And it lost a lot of velocity.
And we don't know, and it's my guess that the bullet tumbles and that everybody thinks a bullet's going to travel in a straight line, but when it's passing through material, it changes its direction and it tumbles.
And from what I am able to see with our data on the bullet and the dent itself, that a couple of the lobes on the flattened bullet appear to fit directly in that impact location.
And so that's, and you have to ask yourself, why 14 years, 11 months later, did we find it?
But you're saying that, I'm sorry, just to clarify here, you're saying that you do have quality pictures of the bullet that they at least did collect that and that you have access to that evidence.
Oh, I brought in my own evidence technician before I alerted law enforcement about it.
Yeah, but I mean, you're referring to the actual bullet that was collected in the investigation, correct?
That is correct.
Oh, okay.
I just want to clarify that.
And by the way, I mean, I guess I should mention, right, that you mentioned that it was point blank to the temple, which is of course the thinnest part of the skull.
Oh, it was, yeah, it was directly to the temple.
In fact, it was so close to the temple that it actually left a bruise and we call it a muzzle stamp.
And that helps discredit the police version of the story because this bruise actually shows the spring guide and the gun site and the barrel location on this bruise to my son's temple.
And so that's a big deal because they, after a while, had to continue to change their story and they got to the point where they had to hold the gun gangster style, almost upside down, to try to make the ballistics and the crime scene evidence work.
But there were a number of eyewitnesses, and one of the things that we show in the video that the Freethought Project has released is my daughter, who had witnessed Michael's death, actually the following morning, stood over the car and demonstrated to an NBC news reporter exactly how my son was being held down.
And directly behind her is this piece of aluminum with this impact location in there.
And I went through it at, you know, there's about 30 frames per second in each piece of video, and as this camera panned over this area, I could actually see the darkened pixels of that location the morning after my son was killed.
So that's an amazing new development because that is physical evidence that is in direct opposition to police testimony.
I want your listeners to understand that the eyewitness versions of this testimony never changed.
The eyewitnesses remained constant, and nowhere did my son get bent 180 degrees around as the police eventually changed their stories, too.
The officers involved changed their stories a number of times.
The police report, or the complaint that I'm getting ready to file, is available online for all the public to see.
And if they go to michaelbell.info or the Facebook page, Plead for a Change, the Michael Bell shooting, they can actually download this multi-hundred page document, and they can see for themselves the bullet shape, the bullet size, and location, and so forth.
But you have to understand that most citizens cannot conduct this type of investigation.
Just in attorney's fees, just to get open records, it was $40,000 for me.
And then, because I have documents being produced, I was charged another $20,000 in fees just to collect this evidence.
We don't have subpoena authority, but we were able to take the records from the civil rights trial, and these new documents that we uncovered, but we had, I mean, they didn't give them to us freely.
I mean, my attorney, I had the best open records attorney in the state of Wisconsin, put pressure on them, and they finally started releasing the documents, and we started discovering, and discovering, and discovering, and then the whole case unraveled.
So those are the developments, Scott, and what I want you listeners to understand is that if a retired military lieutenant colonel with the resources and intellect and the ability to build an investigative team of police officers has this much problem in exposing a police cover-up, what does a normal family that is a medium-income wage earner that do not have the resources and the courage to do what we did, what is happening to them?
Well, and especially poor people who are the ones who are most likely to get it, black or white, and those people have the least resources of all, and that absolutely is an important point, especially when, as they document at the Freethought Project, cops kill on average two people every day in this country.
Every day.
And so, how many of those people have your capability and ability in all the different ways you just mentioned to be able to carry on something like this, which after all, hasn't gotten a single cop indicted yet?
The answer is none.
Right?
The answer is you are the single most equipped father of someone killed by a cop to do something like this in the whole country.
Everyone else has less of a capability.
And they don't have any part of the state that is supposedly their security force who's victimizing them like this in the first place to take their side.
Right?
And what's the best they've got?
The court-appointed defense attorney or something like that?
There is no mandate for a real check and balance against a sheriff's department or a city police agency or a state police agency whose cops kill citizens, armed or unarmed, in any circumstances.
They investigate themselves, and then it all goes away.
But anyway, wait, because you're about to talk about the success you've had in Wisconsin.
I want to hear that, but I wanted to ask you about one more thing before we do, which is about the fistfight between the cops after the shooting, that you have multiple witnesses talking about that, and that that was something that they tried to bury for a long time, correct?
That is correct.
From four different sources, we were told that there was a fistfight between law enforcement officers immediately after the shooting.
An eyewitness to the shooting who had no relationship to our family at all, she worked as an assistant nurse at a nursing home just about 50 feet away, immediately heard after the shooting, what did you do that for?
Get help now.
And then she reported that there was a fistfight, but they discredited her.
Mother and daughter, Michael's mother and my daughter, were immediately issued inside the house, and they heard the fight outside, but they were ordered not to look outside.
In addition to that, we have records where an emergency medical technician arrived on the scene, and the officers were fighting there.
And more importantly, a relative to the police officer who shot my son has come forward and released information about that fistfight and how that officer was challenged immediately after the shooting.
So those are the types of things that are occurring.
How could you have a life and death, supposedly a life and death struggle, and then immediately fight afterwards?
I want your listeners to understand is that we, my investigator, who is a retired Kenosha police detective, a very brilliant man by the name of Russ Beckman, Russ uncovered that the officer had a use of force error.
Essentially, an officer backed into a car, and there was a gap between his gun and his belt for his jacket to slide into.
And the car was a Nissan Pulsar, and it had a very thin driver's side mirror.
And when the officer backed into that mirror, he misinterpreted it as something as grabbing his gun, and then he screamed, he's got my gun.
But there is no DNA, and there was no fingerprints on the gun or holster from my son.
My son, to the best of my knowledge, has never shot a gun in his whole life.
And I'm his father.
And for him to supposedly be grabbing an officer's gun in this way to shoot him is just wrong.
But instead of coming back and saying that this was a mistake of fact, and this was an error that occurred on the officer's part, the police department decided to play it another way, and they accused my son of grabbing a gun, and the eyewitnesses shot down that story.
But that's the story that they stuck to, and that's why they're in trouble right now, 15 years later.
Yeah.
Well, and so, and how much trouble are they in?
We're going to talk about the new process in Wisconsin, but as you said, it's not retroactive, and you have this private team that's doing such a great job compiling evidence here, but what are the indications that the local district attorney's office is going to go ahead and indict this cop and hold him responsible for his crime?
We think the local district attorney knows that it was a bad shoot, and he's doing everything within his power to block a proper investigation.
In fact, if your listeners read our report, you will see where the local district attorney, the police chief of the officer who killed my son, and the sheriff are all on a first-name basis, and they colluded together to block a proper investigation of my son's death.
And so, we're calling upon our newly elected governor, Governor Tony Evers, to call for an investigation of my son's death, and he has authority to do that, because our legal research showed that, and that's where we're moving forward with this.
If we have a newly elected attorney general, and if he doesn't want to have this dirt on his hands, he better do the right thing.
And so, we're pressing forward, and the conspiracy is still ongoing.
Some people try to tell everybody that the statute of limitations has expired, but when you have an intentional homicide, where you put a gun directly to somebody's head and you take their life, and you cover it up, and you continue to do that, many argue that the statute of limitations don't even start running until the conspiracy is discovered.
And so, that's where we're at.
It is kind of a complicated thing, though, right, where the one cop that actually pulled the trigger can blame the other cop for saying that he's got my gun.
And it makes sense why they had a fistfight, right?
Why'd you do that?
Well, you said he had your gun.
Well, oh, I don't know, and then, right?
Well, everybody needs to know that the officer who said he has my gun committed suicide in 2010, about seven months after the settlement.
Little did those officers know that when the mayor signed off on the settlement, that he refused to have a nondisclosure confidentiality agreement.
Typically, these types of cases are sealed forever, and you can't talk about them.
And that's why this is such an important deal, because we have the resources, we have the courage, we have the intellectual team building to bring this forward, plus we don't have a nondisclosure.
And so we can take all that evidence that's typically hid forever, and we are allowed to bring it forward and make a case-by-case point on it to the nation on why the method needs to be changed.
Hey, guys, Scott here.
I've got some books you should read.
The War State by Mike Swanson, a great history of the early Cold War.
No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussain Badakhshani, how to run your computer business like a good libertarian.
Oh yeah, and don't forget Fool's Errand, time to end the war in Afghanistan, by me.
Hey, y'all, here's the thing.
Donate $100 to the Scott Horton Show, and you can get a QR code commodity disc as my gift to you.
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Okay, so two last questions, and then you can take it from there for the next five minutes.
The first thing is, what can anybody do to help you in your mission to pressure the new Attorney General of the state of Wisconsin?
And then secondly, please tell us about the success that you have had in changing the law there, and how it works now, and what other developments you have along those lines too.
The number one way that they can help is to go to michaelbell.info or Facebook Plea for Change and start sharing our press conference video.
That's the number one thing that you can do, because once you see the video that was released this morning, and it was shot in 4K high definition with good audio, you will understand how the cover-up unfolded.
And getting that information out to others and asking them to contact either our Attorney General or the District Attorney allows public pressure, because that's the only thing that they listen to is their job in jeopardy, and if it is in jeopardy, I better do the right thing.
And so that's the number one thing that they can do to help, is to help me by creating an atmosphere where we get the story out so loud and so clear that it wants to be covered by the national media, which I believe it is, and so that's the first thing that we can do.
As regarding to changing state law, I was appalled.
I'm an Air Force pilot, and I know how safety investigations are conducted.
You take a look at what was the true cause of the accident, and you try to avoid preventing it from happening again.
That's not how it works in law enforcement.
Law enforcement immediately sets up a blame game.
They try to character assassinate the person.
In my own son's case, they said he was a convicted drug felon.
My son was caught with rolling papers in his pocket one time, and that's it.
But they use these emotionally charged words like he's a convicted drug felon when he was caught with rolling papers, and so they go after them that way.
Law enforcement understands that the first person to get their story out wins, and so typically the family's in emotional distress.
They're trying to understand what's going on.
They have no idea on how the process works, but the leadership in law enforcement and in the community immediately start spinning it in such a way where the person is discredited.
If you're an African American, usually the white middle class professional will automatically discredit the person being killed in favor of the officer.
I call those people ignorant white professionals, and I will tell everybody that I was one, and that I automatically believed the officer's version of the story.
I didn't even believe my own daughter's version of the story until the evidence started coming in.
And so what we did in Wisconsin as we fought to make sure that law enforcement departments could not investigate themselves after a police shooting, our research showed that in over a hundred years, since police and fire commissions were formed in 1885, that there were only three unjustified shootings found by, and that was by a district attorney, and no other method found an unjustified shooting.
And those three versions of unjustified shootings were actually brought forward pretty much by the citizens and the community.
It wasn't by law enforcement.
So the first thing that we had to do was make sure that the investigation is not tainted, or you shoot somebody, you get to control how the evidence is being found and presented.
And so in Wisconsin in 2014, Governor Scott Walker, after unanimous votes by this House and the Senate, signed the first bill in the nation that says if police kill, they cannot investigate themselves.
In addition to that, they have to issue a report.
If the DA decides not to charge a police officer, a full report has to be made public to the family and to the community about what really happened in the shooting.
And this is important, because I know that there are really good law enforcement officers, and they don't want their departments to experience this type of thing.
So they get to read these reports, and they get to understand what went wrong, and they get to train their officers on how to prevent it from happening again.
And so that's where we're at.
And right now, there's a senator, his name is Van Wongard, and he is a former police officer.
And he has worked with our group, and he has put together a bill where a National Transportation Safety Board-style investigation can be conducted.
And what it will do is it will help prevent use-of-force errors.
So many of these cases are errors.
I misinterpreted that cell phone as a gun.
I misinterpreted my gun being caught on a car mirror as somebody reaching for my gun, and so therefore loss of life occurred because of these use-of-force errors.
And if we can start bringing down the use-of-force errors, the rate, the death rate that you had talked about, which I believe is really about three per day instead of two per day, we can start bringing those numbers down.
And it also will increase the level of trust between law enforcement and the community.
And I am pro-law enforcement, but I am more pro-truth, and that's what needs to occur.
So that's why this is so important.
Okay, great.
So again, on Facebook, it's Plea for Change.
The Free Thought Project, of course, is covering cases like these all day long and including the case of Michael Bell, junior and senior here.
And then most importantly, everybody, michaelbell.info.
And this is where you will find Forensically Impossible, all the reenactments, all the forensic evidence, the dash cam video, all of it is there for you at michaelbell.info.
And again, one more time, how can people contact you?
Facebook is the best way to help participate in your campaign on your case, on the case of your son's shooting with the Attorney General of Wisconsin right now.
Plea for a Change, the Michael Bell shooting, that allows us the best control.
I can make updates daily.
The old website type of things, it takes a technician to go in there and make changes.
And so if your audience wants to look at our press conference, the one that we held just last week with all the evidence, and how the DA and the sheriff and the police chief colluded and so forth, they can go there and watch that, and they can share it.
And I will go out of my way to try to get some information for you to continue to contact the Attorney General here in the state of Wisconsin and ask for an open investigation into the Michael Bell shooting.
That is the best way to work here, because that puts on political pressure.
And you know what, if they did nothing wrong, they shouldn't have a problem with reopening an investigation into this shooting.
And if they did something wrong, and we expose that, that's going to help the system better for everybody.
And that's why this is so important.
All right.
Thank you again, Michael.
Appreciate it.
Scott, thank you very much.
And I just want to throw my kudos out to Jack Burns over at the Free Thought Project.
Fantastic job.
He's been covering the shooting for a number of years, and they have done a very good job of keeping the public informed.
That's right.
Yeah.
Any chance I get to say something positive about the Free Thought Project, I do it, too.
Although, I don't necessarily recommend subscribing to their evening email, because it will turn you into me overnight.
All right.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate it.
Okay.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, you guys.
And I'm being facetious.
You should do that.
But it will make you mad.
It's really something else.
All right.
MichaelBell.info.
Thanks.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
