TOO CLOSE: Mom of armed 15-year-old shot dead by police wants ‘justice’ for the death of her son; Did he already receive his justice? UPDATED

[I’ve updated this with a stream of information that has come my way since initially publishing it last night.]

This one was too close to home for me.  It always happens somewhere else to someone else.  This time it was very close to my residence.

I remember it as a nice Tuesday afternoon.  Thanks to unseasonably warm weather, my kids played outside in my tranquil neighborhood in Bloomington, IL.  Shortly before my wife was due home from work I heard about 4-6 (or maybe more?) pops over the course of a second or two.

“That sounds like gunfire,” I said to myself.

My kids heard my words and got a little stressed, but I played it off as fireworks.

“Why would someone be shooting fireworks now?” one of my kids asked me.

“Yeah, dad,” said the other one.

Sometimes they’re smarter than the average six-year-olds.

Turns out the pops were indeed gunfire.  Some or all of the shots came from a pair of Bloomington Police Officers who, reports say, encountered an armed teenager roughly five blocks from my house.

Reports say BPD was responding to the report of a juvy with a gun.  He was “showing it off” to his peers, and went on to wave it around and was making some threats.

Reports that the 15-year-old Cole Turner fired first at the police are disputed.   Firing first or not, if your 15-year-old is carrying around a gun in public – real or a realistic facsimile of a real gun (such as an Airsoft gun) – they better not be waving it around and threatening people or they may invite Johnny Law into their lives.  And if the Boys in Blue show up and your 15-year-old – let’s say his name is Cole Turner – doesn’t drop the gun lickety-split, the police may drop him.

In this case, they dropped him alright.  Shot him dead right there.

Now, a few days later, mom’s on a mission.  WEEK News from Peoria interviewed the mother of the now-deceased 15-year-old.  She wants “justice” for the death of her son.

From WEEK (with video on the site, but it’s not embeddable):

BLOOMINGTON (25News Now) – On Tuesday, Feb. 26, Kelsey Woodrum’s life turned upside down.

She received a phone call that her 15-year-old son Cole Turner was shot multiple times by Bloomington Police.

The shooting happened behind 806 Arcadia Dr. in Bloomington. Multiple witnesses said they reported seeing someone who was armed in the area.

That Tuesday evening, Bloomington Police met with Turner, and in a statement, they said, “As the call for service progressed, the officer(s) fired their duty weapon(s), and the subject was struck.”

Woodrum couldn’t process the feeling, knowing her child was dead.

That would be traumatic, no doubt.  I wish her well in coping and moving on with her life.

She added that Cole had a bright future ahead of him.

“He had big dreams. He wanted to go to law school. He wanted to become a D.A. He wanted to help people. I know he needed someone to help him when he was younger and in certain situations.”

He might have had big dreams, but he made a lot of poor choices.  WGLT had more about the kid who was apparently kicked out of the Normal Public Schools.  And he ran away from home at age 13.  The missing father in the kid’s life is also glaring in the WEEK story.

Turner was enrolled and had been attending Regional Alternative School [RAS] in Bloomington since the beginning of the school year, according to Mark Jontry, Regional Superintendent for DeWitt, Livingston, Logan and McLean counties.

“The entire RAS family is saddened by his passing and offer condolences to his family and friends,” Jontry said in a statement, adding the school has made additional counselors available to students and staff and will continue to do so throughout the week.

Turner, when he was 13, was the subject of a missing/juvenile runaway alert from Normal Police in May 2023. He was located that same day.

Oh but it gets better…

Remember this story?  Published in October 2024…

NORMAL (25News Now) – Normal Police said there’s been a peaceful conclusion to a standoff with the surrender of a teenaged boy who barricaded himself in a north Normal duplex on Thursday.

Police Chief Steve Petrilli said the juvenile said he was armed with a gun, but officers found no weapons after the boy surrendered about 7 p.m.

Police were called about 1:30 p.m. to the corner of Northbrook Drive and Orlando Avenue for a “domestic” incident.

The chief credits the department’s crisis negotiation team for peacefully resolving the standoff.

He said people in the neighboring duplex were evacuated, and police blocked traffic in the area.

I’ll give you three guesses who the teenager was in that case.  Mmm hmm.

I don’t know all the details of this kid’s life, but I’ll say this:  I’m very glad Bloomington Police handled this situation how they did, where they did.  Thank you officers for locating this armed subject and engaging him.  I’m sorry Cole Turner’s actions brought about his death, and I’m sorry those two officers have to live with taking this kid’s life in self-defense.  Hopefully those officers won’t have too many nightmares, PTSD, Mark of Cain or other nasty common negative complications over defending themselves from some kid who thought it was a good idea to brandish a handgun and threaten people.  His gun-toting adventure came to an abrupt end when he pointed it at the police.

I shudder to think that a short walk due east he would have been in the park in my back yard, with scores of kiddos playing on the handicapped-accessible playground.  A little further east and he could have been on the sidewalk in front of my house with my kids out enjoying their childhood.

If he had waved a handgun in a menacing manner and police nowhere to be found, I might have had to engage him and deal with the fallout from that.  My kids or myself might have been injured, crippled or even killed by a 15-year-old punk with “big dreams” who wanted to be a DA.

Cole should have been at home studying, doing his chores or playing with his siblings, not walking around in the next town carrying a gun and menacing people with it.

As for justice, we’ll all know for sure when the bodycam video is released.  For now though, it looks like Cole Turner got his justice a few minutes to five p.m. on a Tuesday evening.

Hopefully mom will have better luck raising Cole’s siblings and they won’t be roaming in public and menacing others with a gun, real or fake, at the tender age of 15 – or any other time in their lives.  Otherwise they too might meet with sudden and profound success taking the room temperature challenge.

Also, as someone mentioned in comments, I suspect mom is ginning up all this publicity hoping for a payday from the City of Bloomington.  Hopefully that doesn’t happen.

And, for those in the local community that are left (most of the ISU population has left town for Spring Break already), there’s a “rally” of malcontents coming this Sunday.  Get all the details at reddit.

The responses haven’t been all that supportive…

Potential-Coat-7233
11h ago
We don’t know the details yet, as others have said.

Also why protest the Bloomington Police in Uptown Normal?

 

According-Let4085 •
12h ago
Jus like the others. Waiting for body cam and details. Has been very tight lipped on that front tho

No_Maize_230 •
11h ago
They are protesting during ISU spring break, on a Sunday, on the quad. It will be a ghost town.

Rush_76
Edited 12h ago
Without knowing the details, what are you protesting? For details to be released or to protest just to protest and be ass holes because you have nothing better to do and that’s what you do? You know, “never let a crisis go to waste”.

Striking-Will-3002 •
10h ago
What would you protest?

Alone-Yam-1357 •
8h ago
How you guys gonna protest on something you don’t know anything about??

Biggumsbytyrone •
10h ago
Can we maybe wait for the details? It literally says we don’t know if he used his weapon or not. Can we maybe get some details on that before we start demonizing the officers who went out on this call? Like, really. It says they don’t know the details or if he used his weapon and then 2 sentences later, it says it was a wrongful killing. How can we know that without the details? Yes, he could’ve turned his life around. I was certainly on the wrong path when I was that age, I was arrested 3 times as a minor, never as an adult, luckily I got my dipshit era out of the way early. However, being on the wrong path isn’t an excuse to be brandishing a weapon, possibly in the presence of the police. So let’s maybe let some details come forward before we commit to protesting for something that may not deserve our time. This is how you end up with situations like in Pittsburgh a few years back when folks were protesting for a young man who was killed by the police. Then the footage came out of him opening fire on the police first, and everyone there looked like fools protesting for an actual criminal that doesn’t deserve the time of day.

No_Maize_230 •
10h ago
It’s an angle for a money grab lawsuit for parents who all but abandoned this kid. Never had a chance.

 

SacredStardust_
7h ago
You all make a lot of sense. I put it here since I saw it on the news article I was reading. Going to the NPD to protest is weird, and we should definitely have more information on what happened. People are mad because of the age of Cole. People are mad because police are trained to use lethal force. We need more details and to do it at the BPD for it to actually mean anything, though. Otherwise, it’s just screaming into the void.

Excellent_Mixture_23
14h ago
No details have been released as the investigation is under review. Minors have used guns to harm others. It is a tragic situation, but the child also put themselves in a dangerous space.