Rick Chow, 58, was charged with murder after falsely accusing a 14-year-old boy of shoplifting, chasing him down, then killing him with a shot to the back.
In a news conference on Monday, Sheriff Leon Lott said the teenager did not shoplift from the Shell gas station, despite Chow's belief that he did. "He did not shoplift anything. We have no evidence that he stole anything whatsoever," Lott said.
The worst part of this, apart from the murdered boy, is that the Sheriff had to make clear that if he was shoplifting it still would not have been OK to execute a child in the street.
"Even if he had shoplifted four bottles of water, which is what he initially took out the cooler and then he put them back, even if he had done that, that's not something you shoot anybody over, much less a 14-year-old," Lott said. "You just don't do that."
