#Facebook pulls plug on account during #police standoff

By JULIET LINDERMAN

Associated Press

BALTIMORE (AP) — In the midst of a five-hour standoff that turned deadly, Facebook granted an emergency request from the Baltimore County Police Department to take offline the social media accounts belonging to a woman who wielded a shotgun at officers.

Baltimore County Police officers shot and killed Korryn Gaines, 23, after she barricaded herself inside her Randallstown apartment with her 5-year-old son and pointed a shotgun at officers attempting to serve an arrest warrant.

Police Chief Jim Johnson said Tuesday that the department made the emergency request to have Gaines’ social media accounts suspended after she posted videos online showing the standoff. People who saw the postings, Johnson said, responded by encouraging her to not comply with police.

Videos posted on Facebook and Instagram appeared to show Gaines, who was black, talking with police in the doorway to her apartment and to her son during the standoff. In one, she asks her son what the police are trying to do.

“They trying to kill us,” the boy says.

“Do you want to go out there?”

“No,” he says.

The standoff Monday began after three officers went to Gaines’ apartment to serve arrest warrants on her and her boyfriend, Kareem K. Courtney, 39, according to police. He left the apartment with a 1-year-old boy before the standoff and was arrested.

Gaines’ mother, Rhonda Dormeus, told The Baltimore Sun her daughter ignored Courtney’s pleas to surrender. During a Facebook call Monday, Dormeus said she heard him tell Gaines “it wasn’t worth it, to just come on out,” and then the “phone went dead.” Dormeus went to the scene but wasn’t allowed to speak to her daughter, something she said might have helped calm her daughter and end the situation peacefully.

“I do feel like they didn’t want to hurt her,” Dormeus said. “But I don’t feel like they exhausted all the means of negotiation.”

Dormeus said Gaines’ political views “weren’t for everybody.”

“Not all of her beliefs I agreed with,” Dormeus said. “Her heart was in a good place, she loved her black people, and she just wanted them to see things for what she felt it really was.”

Gaines’ bench warrant stemmed from charges during a March 10 stop, including disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Authorities said she was armed with a 12-gauge pistol grip shotgun that was legally purchased last year and toward the end of the negotiations pointed it directly at an officer and said, “If you don’t leave, I’m going to kill you.”