According to a BBC article today, Jean Charles de Menezes was, in fact, behaving relatively innocuously before being shot in the head while being restrained. He picked up a paper, ran to catch his train, and sat down. No bulky jacket, no leaping over ticket barriers, just a guy trying to catch his train.

In the aftermath of this incident I was willing to give the cops just a little sympathy — perhaps it was a tense situation and things got out of hand. I could, with little effort, construct scenarios in my mind that would have led to the same outcome and a less-than-clear-cut assignment of good and evil to the players involved. However, with this new information my dramatic imagination is stretched to its utmost. I’m left with the premise of “cops see swarthy/brown man running, shoot to kill.” Hopefully there will be some accountability here rather than the parade of official deceptions to which we were treated in the aftermath.