Lawsuit against Pennington County deputy in bloody shooting going forward

Pennington County is having an awful week.

“The cop murdered my son,” Jerry Capps told Native Sun News in May of 2010 shortly after his son Christopher Capps died from five gunshot wounds fired by Pennington County Deputy David Olson. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has just confirmed the distraught father’s suspicions, that Olson used excessive force in the death of his son and violated his constitutional rights. [Native Sun News, posted at Indianz]

When Garrison Keillor opened A Prairie Home Campanion in the Rapid City Civic Center Theatre on November 20, 1999 he cited a statistic that Pennington County has the highest per capita gun ownership in the United States. A nervous chuckle rolled through the audience.

The number of experiences that i have had in gun and pawn shops in Rapid City that have taken me aback are too numerous to count. Two are vivid: a fifteen year old with mother in tow pointing at a Glock in a case saying: "that one" and a man buying five AK-47s with cash.

Christopher J. Capps, 22, who died of multiple gunshot wounds on Sunday night at Rapid City Regional Hospital, had been accepted by the University of South Dakota – Vermillion. Described as a “very outgoing” young man, Capps was well known around the neighborhood where was shot in a hail of bullets that may have ranged as high as five or six shots from Sheriff Department deputy David Olson, a nearly five-year veteran of the department. [Native Times]

The people involved in this skirmish are not the first casualties of this war; nor are they the last.

Duffy: The initial seizure of a child, the forty-eight hour hearing easy money. http://t.co/nvu5IiD9Di #sdleg @LauraSullivaNPR
— interested party (@larry_kurtz) April 1, 2015