FBI Releases Footage Shot from Aircraft Showing Police Chase of LaVoy Finicum in Rural Oregon

Following-up, "Dramatic Footage Shows FBI and OSP Ambush LaVoy Finicum, Shoot and Kill Reaching for Waistband (VIDEO)."

Here's the MSM coverage at the New York Times, "F.B.I. Releases Video Showing Death of Oregon Refuge Occupier":

BURNS, Ore. — The F.B.I. took the extraordinary step of releasing surveillance video on Thursday showing the shooting death of LaVoy Finicum, a member of the armed occupation of a federal wildlife refuge here in eastern Oregon, as the occupation continued by a handful of followers.

Mr. Finicum, 54, was killed Tuesday by Oregon State Police troopers, said Greg Bretzing, the special agent in charge for the F.B.I in Oregon, after he tried to run through a police barricade on a wooded road, then climbed from his truck and, Mr. Bretzing said, reached for a weapon in his jacket pocket.

“There are various versions of what occurred during this event: most inaccurate, some inflammatory,” Mr. Bretzing said, before playing the video — shot from an aircraft — at a news conference. “To that end, we want to do what we can to lay out an honest and unfiltered view of what happened and how it happened.”

Mr. Bretzing stressed the investigation of the shooting was continuing. But he said the officers fired on Mr. Finicum’s truck as it sped toward a roadblock and went off the road into a snowbank, and then again after he left the vehicle. He said the total number of shots fired was “in the single digits.”

In the video, Mr. Finicum is shown with his hands raised at one point, but Mr. Bretzing said it also showed him reaching for a weapon.

“On at least two occasions, Finicum reaches his right hand toward a pocket on the left inside portion of his jacket. He did have a loaded 9 mm semiautomatic handgun in that pocket,” Mr. Bretzing said.

The occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge has lasted nearly four weeks and captured international attention even before Mr. Finicum’s death, in an arrest operation that captured the group’s leader, Ammon Bundy, who was traveling in another vehicle and who surrendered, with his brother, Ryan, and three other followers, without incident.

Mr. Bundy, held in jail in Portland, pleaded Thursday for those remaining at the refuge to give up peacefully. Mr. Bretzing said that number was now down to four.

“Turn yourselves in and do not use physical force,” Mr. Bundy, the leader of the occupation, said in a statement released by his lawyers. “Use the national platform we have to continue to defend liberty through our constitutional rights.”

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