My brother, Mohammad Usman Chaudhry, was shot and killed by the Los Angeles Police Department on March 25, 2008.

He was twenty-one years old.

The coroner's office contacted my mother yesterday, April 15, 2008 around 4 pm. The person calling my mother told her that he had been killed by the police and would not give further details.

Right away, a person that my brother had been staying, known only as Jonathan and having a reputation for taking in homeless people, called my mother and told her that we should file a wrongful death lawsuit. He said there was no way my brother could have incited a conflict with the police.

All of this in a matter of minutes…

The police have yet to tell us what happened. We had to go online to find the info, or at least their side of the story.

Here are the facts according to the LAPD blog:

1. Usman was shot and killed on March 25, 2008 around 4:00 am in the morning.

2. The location was the 1400 block of Curson Avenue in West Hollywood.

3. Two LAPD officers approached him. They claim that as they went to see if Usman was okay, he pulled out a knife and stabbed Officer Joseph Cruz in his left hand.

4. Officer Cruz, allegedly worried for his safety, pulled out his weapon and shot Usman in the chest several times.

5. Usman was pronounced dead on the scene.

After doing some online searching today, it appears that the whole world knew my brother was dead but it took the police 20 days to inform us. There was a story on every channel about him with details on who he was. But the police took this long to inform us, claiming they couldn’t find our phone number.

Here are the links to all the news available on the incident:

a. NBC 4 – NBC 4 News Clip
b. KTLA 5 – Part of the LA Times Article KTLA 5 News Clip
c. CBS 2 / KCAL 9 - CBS 2 / KCAL 9 News Clip
d. CBS 2 – CBS 2
e. MSNBC – MSNBC Article/Video

I will be contacting the webmaster to get copies of these clips so I can place them in this blog.

Here are other websites and blogs that have a story on him. Most of them are a direct cut-and-paste from the LAPD blog site.

a. Los Angeles Times – Los Angeles Times Article
b. Los Angeles Times Blogs – Homocide Report – LA Times Blog
c. LAPD Online – LAPD Online
d. ABC 7 – ABC 7 Local
e. Officer.com – Officer.com
f. Palmetto Cops – Palmetto Cops

Today, after a Muslim mortuary service received the body, we were finally able to see it. Twenty days after being killed, he is still smiling. Those twenty days can do a lot…