The police officer who shot Jordan Edwards has been arrested for murder


The police officer who fatally shot Jordan Edwards, a 15-year-old black boy from Dallas, Texas, turned himself in for arrest on a murder charge Friday night. The officer, Roy Oliver, who is white, was released on bail set at $300,000. He was fired from his job earlier this week and now faces life in prison if convicted.
Oliver was one of three officers called to investigate underage drinking at a party Edwards was attending with his two brothers. Around the time the police arrived, a gunshot was heard somewhere nearby. Edwards, his brothers, and several other teens got into a car to leave the party, and Oliver repeatedly fired on the vehicle. One of his bullets struck Edwards in the head, killing him.
Oliver initially claimed he acted defensively because the car was aggressively reversing in his direction, but body camera footage revealed it was driving away from him. All the teenagers inside were unarmed.
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Edwards is the youngest of 339 people fatally shot by police in America in 2017 so far, according to a count maintained by The Washington Post.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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