A Boiling Springs Lakes, North Carolina family is looking for answers after local police shot and killed their mentally ill teenage son while responding to a call for help.
The family contends that Keith Vidal, 18, was “killed in cold blood” after police were requested to help calm the teenager down during a schizophrenic episode.
Now, the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation has decided to look into the matter, as Brunswick County District Attorney Jon David vowed to meet with the family and “go wherever the truth leads in this case.”
“The public deserves to have a process put in place that will lead to the most just resolution,” he said, according to NBC News.
The incident occurred on Sunday, January 5, when Vidal suffered from a mental breakdown in which he threatened to fight his mother. He was holding a small screwdriver in his hand when the first of three police units arrived at the scene. A confrontation was noted in the county event report obtained by local WECT, but the responding unit radioed in multiple times that the situation was under control.
Little more than a minute after a third police unit arrived, it reported that a gun was fired in self-defense.