He Cried for His Dad as Police Beat Him to Death

Kelly Thomas begged for his dad like a little boy, as Fullerton cops laid waste to him.

Who would you trust to help you, Manuel Ramos, Kelly Thomas or Jay Cicinelli? The outside two are suspected murderers.

(FULLERTON, CA) - The video below shows police beating a homeless man to death. It is very hard to watch, however you should, to understand what your country and the state of California have come to.

"This is what a police state looks like", and if trends continue they way they are, it might be your son or daughter who dies next due to the actions of police whose morals have slipped beneath the blue haze of injustice.

Officer Manuel Ramos and Corporal Jay Cicinelli, are or at least were, two of 'Fullerton's Finest'. They're cops charged with the merciless beating death of 37-year old Kelly Thomas, a man described as gentle, who suffered from schizophrenia. They weren't the only ones on scene either.

Too Many 'Bad Apples'

Police in Amerika: their problems are in full tilt mode and badly in need of therapy. There are few repercussions for those cops who are more criminal than anyone they pursue. I believe nearly every agency has these thugs in their employ. They fire a cop and he gets hired in a different state. Ask a cop if they have a system in place to track bad apples, they don't.

And they make more money than the majority of Americans, that is for sure. There is no 'draft' and all police on the streets of this country without exception, chose to become police officers and are 100% responsible for their own behavior. Their exceptionally high rate of pay and boatload of benefits are paid for by you and I, yet you would never know that.

We recently heard from a friend in Oregon who was pulled over by a state police officer. Her husband is dying, she is having a very hard time right now. Her big mistake was saying, "Oh man, I'm really sorry about that" and the state cop freaked out on her, a guy several years her junior, for her addressing him as 'man'.

There are no words to adequately describe how important and valued police with integrity are. I mean they are out there. Plenty of people join law enforcement simply because they want to do something that seems right, but they become jaded and their power is too broad. The bottom line is that it isn't a power trip for every law enforcement officer out there, however common the problem may be, and therein lies the hope for the future.

Of course even the good ones are part of the code of blue and most of them would lie and protect another member of the law enforcement community almost by default. In many cases, if they fail to walk the line they blacklist themselves. Law enforcement should be the most legal and ethical world in existence, with the best morals, and if cops policed each other as well as the citizens, what a different world it would be.

Corruption is Common

It may be from 40 years ago, but 'Serpico'; the 1973 American crime film directed by Sidney Lumet, is based on the true story of New York City policeman Frank Serpico, who went undercover to expose the corruption of his fellow officers.

Then there was the big shakeup in more recent years at the Rampart substation in Los Angeles, very close to where I grew up. There were so many cops on the take, the environment is full of ample opportunity for bad cops to make a lot of money. Peer pressure becomes deadly and forces members of the LE community to become morally bankrupt.

Turning cops in for breaking the law... that kind of stuff is taboo with the code of blue. 'IA' is the word, it stands for Internal Affairs; itself a questionable notion, as major crimes committed by law enforcement officers are handed off to other agencies to remove bias. But they are trusted to police their own minor crimes?

So then, the question is, how is your IA officer? If they're real and sincere, they won't win any popularity contests. IA investigators who take care of their own fare better. Of course they can run roughshod over a young cop who screws up, don't get me wrong. However we're talking about apples and oranges.

Some Cops Go Down Hard

Cops do turn hard on their own once in a while, but there are often fishy circumstances accompanying those cases. I saw it happen in Las Vegas after two cops pulled a drive by shooting on a suspect gang member.

The Las Vegas metro cop that was convicted of shooting that night though, Ron Mortensen, was the passenger, and the other guy, Chris Brady, was driving. Brady's dad was the 30-year Las Vegas detective famous for bungling the Tupak Shakur murder. Brady walked and is a cop today in another state. He almost certainly did the crime. Mortensen was driving and not on the shooting side, yet he is serving a life sentence without parole? (see: ronmortensen.com/)

The two officers in Fullerton are now on trial, however in most cases like these, they are exonerated. It is a system we have allowed to manifest. The blame is on the backs of this apathetic public. Police will always take advantage if they are over glorified and allowed to have too much political control.

And they are heavily over-glorified, far more than our brothers and sisters killed in war. Why do police who fall in the line of duty get a thousand times the credit than soldiers or Marines, what gives?

Now states are allowing laws to be passed that punish people for shooting video of the police committing illegal acts, I'm serious. It is the most troubling thing taking place right now; we are guaranteed the right to free speech and that means we can shoot video at any time on public property that we want. It is the best defense and people will get arrested when they have adequate legal teams on hand for defense. Sometimes that is the only way to turn these illegal government practices around.

Take a Lesson from the Marines

I joined the United States Marine Corps at a time that it was expressly illegal for drill instructors to beat recruits, however traditional the practice may have been. I was slugged in the stomach once, and even then I was overheard discussing it with another recruit, by an officer, who questioned me about it. I denied having been hit by my DI and this young officer shook his head at me, like he was disgusted, as he wanted to bust my DI for having done it.

This is a far cry from the Marine's past; not so much my refusing to rat out my drill instructor, but the whole atmosphere being centered around the end of recruit beatings.

I'm sure it still happens today, probably about like it did when I went in during the summer of 1981. But in the Vietnam War, Marine recruits had the crap beaten out of them regularly and I believe it was probably even worse during WWII and Korea. If the Marines can stop beating their recruits, for the most part, then police can stop beating and tasing Americans, for the most part, it's as simple as that.

Searing Memory of Deputy Violence in Orange County

Maybe what gets me the most about this, is the location. I lived in Orange County as a young Marine based at MCAS El Toro and I was arrested one night for an alcohol-related event and watched deputies at the Orange County Jail beat an old man senseless because he would not provide information they asked for. To this day I am not sure if the man even had the ability to talk. I am sure he may not have had it when they were done with him, it was pure evil and absolutely perfectly status quo on a Saturday night at OCJ in 1982. The jailers were a bunch of scumbags.

I hate them, I admit it, and I hope really bad karma came back to each of those abusive pricks in uniform, and that is gets every single bad cop out there. I want them to all end up in jail like these two mean looking bastards in Fullerton and even though they will probably not have to be accountable in the end, for now they are convict cops and at least they're off the street, unlike the other Fullerton cops that night who were never even suspended.

Caution: This video is very hard to watch. The murdered man is homeless schizophrenic. Could you follow the directions of the first policeman at the scene?

Our reports on Kelly Thomas' beating death 5 of 6 Fullerton Cops who Murdered Homeless Man Gang Style Still Working

Opening the Floodgates of Justice in Fullerton... Slightly

Tim King in 2008, covering the Iraq War

Tim King: Salem-News.com Editor and Writer

Tim King has more than twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. Tim is Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. His background includes covering the war in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007, and reporting from the Iraq war in 2008. Tim is a former U.S. Marine.

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