By Joe Gamm
News & Record
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Six seconds.
Six seconds is about how long it took between the moment a Greensboro police officer saw an armed woman and when he shot her.
Six seconds on March 25, 2014, changed the lives of a Greensboro Vietnamese family and a Greensboro police officer.
After about two years of wrangling, the city agreed this week to release video from the body camera worn by then-Officer Timothy Bloch that shows the shooting of 47-year-old Chieu Di Thi Vo. She died of her wounds two days later.
Bloch later resigned from the police force.
More than two dozen people, including members of the media, the City Council and the Beloved Community Center, wedged into Police Chief Wayne Scott’s conference room Wednesday afternoon to watch the video.
It was released on the city and police department’s website and social media sites later in the day.
“There’s not a day that goes by that the Vo family doesn’t think about this,” Scott said before showing the recording. “Some of the things you’ll see are difficult to watch.”
Scott played two 911 calls, radio discussions and the video recording for the group.
The first 911 call begins with a woman screaming, “No.” She then asks dispatchers to send an officer to an apartment complex in the 4000 block of North Hewitt Street.
She reports that a woman carrying a meat cleaver is chasing another woman. She explains that the woman with the knife is chasing her mother. She also says the woman had chased her mother a few weeks before, though police were not called at the time.
“She’s fussing at my door with that knife in her hand,” the caller says.
Bloch was the first to arrive on the scene. Dispatchers told him there were reports of a woman armed with a knife chasing another woman.
The video picks up as Bloch is arriving at the apartment complex in his police cruiser. He gets out and flips up his glasses to speak with the witness, the attached camera capturing audio of the conversation but video of the sky.
Bloch asks the witness where Vo went, as the view remains aimed at tree limbs above.
He rounds a corner and encounters a woman who is carrying an 8-inch-long chef’s knife.
He starts to yell at her and the glasses fall, putting Vo in the camera’s view.
“Put it down!” Bloch yells and looks down for a moment. “Put it down! Put it down! I’m telling you put it down!”
As he shouts, he fires four shots, continuing to yell for the woman to put the knife down.
She screams and takes another step forward, and he fires a fifth shot. Vo falls.
“Shots fired! Shots fired!” he tells dispatchers. “Call EMS! Call EMS!”
The video ends at that point.
Bloch, who was not in the conference room, spoke with reporters afterward. He said after Vo fell, he kicked the knife away from her and then began life-saving efforts.
“I immediately became a medical responder,” he said. “It’s a weird thing … using deadly force, then trying to save someone.”
About 20 activists protested for police accountability outside the police station as media watched the video.
Cat Bao Le, the director of the Southeast Asian Coaliton, said that even with the release of the video, the Asian community remains concerned about police transparency.
Since the shooting, city officials have said the video’s release was contingent on Bloch’s approval because it is part of his personnel record. Responding to requests on behalf of the family from attorney Tin Nguyen, Bloch recently granted permission for the family to watch the video but not the public.
Family members, including Vo’s mother, saw the video last week but said it didn’t match the narrative provided by the police department. In a statement released Sunday, the family said it did not see Vo lunging at Bloch or hear her yelling in Vietnamese. The statement said it appeared that Bloch stood about 10 to 15 feet away from Vo and only waited a few seconds before beginning to fire.
They asked the city to release the footage publicly.
The SBI investigated the shooting and turned over its report to the Guilford County district attorney’s office. That office, which had access to more video from the events that day, including recordings from the body-cameras of other officers who arrived on the scene afterward, didn’t find any criminal wrongdoing in the shooting.
The police department’s professional standards division also investigated and determined Bloch acted according to department policies and procedures.
Bloch said he is happy to be getting this portion of his life behind him. He said the video shows his training “kicking in.”
Police are trained to fire into the center of a body and keep firing until the threat is eliminated. They are taught that it takes fewer than two seconds for an average officer to pull and fire a gun — or for a person with a knife to cover 21 feet.
“Any officer would do the same thing,” Bloch said. “That’s how we’re trained.”
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