06/02/15 – Ghada Morad – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest today is Ghada Murad.
Welcome to the show.
How are you?
I'm doing okay.
Well, I appreciate you joining us on the show.
Everybody, I saw this clip.
A friend on Twitter sent me this story this morning.
It's at photographyisnotacrime.com.
NBC caught altering interview with witness to fit police narrative in Long Beach police slaying of student.
That student being your brother, Ferris.
Am I saying his name right?
It's Farras.
Farras, okay.
Could you please, first of all, just tell us about your brother?
Well, he's 20 years old.
He got accepted to Berkeley and UCLA.
He decided to go to Long Beach because he wanted to save money for law school.
He was brilliant.
He was a speech and debate coach at El Camino Real High School, and he was a national ranked debater.
He had a 3.9 GPA.
He actually wanted to be the president of the United States when he grew up.
I honestly think he could do it.
He could have.
He was a genius.
He was really smart, and I can't believe this actually happened to him.
Well, I'm so sorry that it did.
It's just absolutely terrible.
Can you take us through the story?
Explain how it is that he even got in front of a cop's gun in the first place?
Well, on May 27th, he went to practice for a speech and debate tournament with his friends, and he decided to have fun, and I guess he got the wrong idea of fun, so he took shrooms with his friends for the first time.
He's never done drugs in his life, and it's not like it's an abnormal thing.
A lot of teenagers and a lot of people have just tried it before, and I know he didn't expect anything like this to happen.
He got really confused and dizzy, and he started acting really confused and weird, and he was with two of his friends, and they were trying to stop him from moving around, so he had jumped out of a two-story building.
He jumped out of a two-story window, and his friends called an ambulance, and he just was really confused, and he was walking around, like, walking around, like, just dizzy, and the police officer thought my brother was, like, a threat, and he shot him three times, and I also heard four times.
They didn't try to, like, tough him or anything.
They didn't try anything.
They just went for the gun, and that's how he ended up in front of a police officer's gun.
He didn't even really...
One second.
My mom's calling me.
Hold on.
Yeah, go ahead.
So his friends called for help.
They called an ambulance for help, and instead the cops showed up with a gun, and now it says here, again, it's photographyisnotacrime.com.
They have this story, and this is just a side note, you know, compared to what, you know, the real consequences of what happened here, but with them editing the witness statement here.
Yeah, no problem.
I'm filling time talking to the audience here about the way they edited the witness statement here.
Yeah, there's a lot of lies on the Internet.
My brother wasn't acting violent at all.
He wouldn't even hurt a fly.
He was really, like, everyone around him, there was witnesses that said my brother wasn't acting violent at all.
He didn't, like, in general, even if he was on every drug in the world, which he wasn't, he wouldn't hurt anyone.
He doesn't have that kind of mindset.
Nothing can, like, go into his mind to, like, get any anger out.
Even when he looks angry, he doesn't look, like, even when he, like, you know, when you put your eyebrows together and you look mad, he doesn't look mad.
He just looks, like, I don't know, confused.
He just, his face is too kind to look angry.
He just, he would never, like, be able to, he can't scare anyone.
He wasn't, like, strong enough to hurt anyone.
He doesn't look like he's strong enough to hurt anyone anyway.
Yeah.
He was unarmed.
He didn't have anything with him.
And his friends kept yelling at the police officers that he was unarmed.
Well, yeah, and it says here that he was not wearing a shirt and was unarmed.
And he was bleeding from head to toe from the fall from the window, and I'm sure he had, like, trauma.
Like, his brain, he was probably, maybe he was bleeding, like, inside his head.
He fell from a two-story window.
He doesn't look like he could hurt anyone.
Well, and, you know, the way the witness, the edited statement, again, we talked about this a little bit in the earlier segment, where a guy was coming around the corner and saw the local news recording an interview with the witness, and he decided he wanted to compare and contrast the whole interview with the edited version on TV that night.
And sure enough, they went and edited his statement and cut it to somebody else's statement, trying to make it sound like, you know, putting the word, oh, yeah, it was very aggressive in this one guy's mouth, when he was actually describing an entirely different thing.
And he actually mimics Firas and puts his hands straight up in the air.
I mean, not just kind of up, bent at the elbows, but straight up and kind of mimics him slowly shuffling forward.
And then he emphasizes the amount of blood.
It almost sounds like the cop just shot him because he didn't want to have to touch him because he was so bloody from the fall, maybe.
Yeah.
I mean, and, you know, that's just my supposition, but it seemed like, you know, obviously there's no threat.
If he's got no shirt on, then it's plain to see.
He's got no gun in his waistband or anything like that.
He's got no machete in his hands, like they're claiming this morning.
He has no muscles or anything, actually.
He doesn't look like he can even – he barely looks like he can pick up a box full of, like, books.
He looks like – I mean, I'm not saying he looks weak.
He just doesn't look like he can fight anyone and hurt anyone in any way.
Well, you know, the thing is, too, that, you know what, even if he – and I understand what you're saying about his appearance, but even if he was having the worst mushroom trip in the world and had hit his head so hard that he was just completely in a daze and flipping out and maybe even attempting to take a swing at the cop or maybe it could have possibly looked like he was going to or something, if we give them that much.
You still don't get to kill him for that.
A cop ought to be able to win a fist fight.
Yeah, exactly.
But he didn't even try.
Yeah.
All right, now, so what are the other cops saying?
Are they, you know, pretending to take this seriously and giving him two weeks paid vacation here?
You know what?
The police officers, the hospital, the coroner's office didn't call me, didn't call my family when my brother died.
He died on Wednesday, and I found out on Friday through a Facebook message and a call.
They didn't call your mother or anything?
They didn't call anyone.
I found out because my brother wasn't answering the phone.
He was supposed to eat dinner with us the day before, and he wasn't answering, and we got worried.
So I contacted his friend, and I called his friend, and his friend told me that my brother was dead.
They still haven't called us.
They never said anything.
And they told his friend that they were going to contact us, and they still never contacted us that my brother was dead.
He's been dead since Wednesday, and I've been at school having fun, and I didn't know that whole time my brother was dead.
Oh, man, I'm so sorry that this happened.
That is just absolutely terrible.
God, I'm so sorry.
Listen, so are you guys, do you have a lawyer?
Are you trying to press charges and file complaints and do everything you can?
Yeah, we are.
We have a lawyer.
We're going to press charges for sure.
We want to put a stop to police brutality.
It's been happening too much.
Actually, there's been four police shootings.
They killed four people in Long Beach, the police, in these past, I think, four or six months.
Last month on April 23rd, there was a 19-year-old boy who was shot for vandalism.
Yeah, well, it's been 23 days.
I'm not sure if this is true, but I heard his mom was watching.
I'm not 100% sure, though.
Well, you know, this will be no consolation to you at all or anything, but there's a guy in Wisconsin who the cops killed his son in his front yard for no good reason other than they had a chance to, I guess.
And what he did was he got a law passed.
And it's not a cure-all or anything like that, but what it does is it mandates that some official from another jurisdiction has to be included in the investigation.
And I think that's probably about halfway to what we should really be trying to push for would be, and, you know, call it Farris's law, Farris's law, I'm sorry, I'm saying his name wrong, Farris's law, that it has to be a prosecutor from another jurisdiction within the state who does these reviews, and that the prosecutors who rely on the cops that they're investigating are no longer allowed ever to look into these.
It has to be somebody else within the state.
You know, it won't change the whole world overnight or anything like that, but what's happening now is they know that there's no accountability.
So they're all just looking for a chance to escalate a situation, for a chance to kill somebody, because it's fun if you're a killer to kill people.
And so they have to have a counter-incentive, which is they could go to prison for the rest of their life.
Right now they are not in fear of that because there's no chance of it.
And so, you know, I just try to bring that up as much as I can because I imagine you're going to be involved in this kind of activism now for a long, long time because of what they've done to your family here.
And it just seems like, you know, I try to encourage people to keep the eye on the ball here about what could possibly actually make a change, other than just demanding that they be nicer, you know what I mean?
But anyway, I'm sorry, I'm more yelling at you than interviewing you here.
Oh, no, no, don't worry about it.
I don't know what to ask anymore other than, you know, just please understand that there are a lot of people out here that are with you and feel very bad for you for what happened here.
And, you know, if you do end up, you know, kind of working on this in the future, not just this case, or even, you know, any further developments in this case or any further activism that you do along these lines, I do hope that you'll keep in contact with me.
And for that matter, I really hope you do get involved in, you know, the Free Thought Project, Photography is Not a Crime, Cop Block, and all those great groups that are doing so much great work on these issues because, you know, that's the only way to make a change here.
Mm-hmm.
All right, well, I'm sorry for lecturing you so much.
I really appreciate you coming on the show, Gada, and I'm very sorry about what's happened here again.
Thank you.
All right, bye-bye.
Okay, guys, that's Gada Murad.
Her brother, Firas, was murdered by the cops last week.
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