On April 5, four Pocatello, Idaho, pigs opened fire just seconds after exiting their police cars, repeatedly striking a 17-year-old boy, Victor Perez, who'd been in his yard holding a kitchen knife. Victor was autistic, nonverbal, and intellectually and physically disabled, with cerebral palsy, according to his family.
The police said they were responding to a 911 call about a drunken man chasing people in his yard with a knife. A video taken by a neighbor shows that when the pigs arrived, Victor was in his yard behind a gate, lying on the ground, with a knife in his hand. The four pigs ran up to the fence with their guns drawn, one carrying a shotgun. They shouted “drop the knife,” and then as Victor got up and turned toward them, they fired 12 rounds in less than three seconds, hitting him nine times. These pigs were outside a chain-link fence when they unleashed their barrage. And Victor wasn't pointing a gun, he was holding a kitchen knife. As soon as the shots were fired, the screams of Victor's family can be heard.
The shooting put Victor Perez in a coma in critical condition, hooked up to a ventilator. Doctors had to perform three surgeries to remove the bullets from his body, and amputate his leg. On April 11, he was declared brain dead, and Victor died the next day after being removed from life support.
Pocatello, Idaho police fire on a Victor Perez, a severely autistic teen with cerebral palsy, April 5, 2025. Photo: AP
The day after the shooting, 50 angry protesters rallied outside the Pocatello Police Department to express their anger and outrage, with signs saying “Bloody Hands, Dirty Cowards” and “What are Tasers for?” The neighbor whose son initially called police said he was hoping the cops would help the situation: "We weren't trying to bring a firing squad down to Harrison Street." He said the police “appeared to be like a death squad or a firing squad. They never once asked, 'What is going on? Or 'How can we help?' They ran up with their guns drawn. They triggered a mentally disabled child and then shot him when he reacted.”
The Perez family moved to Idaho from Puerto Rico eight years ago. “We love Puerto Rico,” said Victor’s aunt. “We came here for jobs and stuff. To start again.” Victor’s family said this was his first ever interaction with the police, and they never expected he would be met with bullets rather than with help during a crisis. Victor's 16-year-old sister, who was in the yard when Victor was shot, is devastated. She had screamed to the cops pointing their guns at Victor, “No shoot, no shoot,” and told them that he was “special.”
The aunt said Victor “walked with a staggering gait because of his disabilities; he was not intoxicated.” She said he was not threatening anybody: “He doesn’t follow most instructions. He speaks Spanish only. Because of his disabilities, when Victor is communicating something it can be difficult to understand, even for Spanish speakers.” “Instead of helping, I think they came to kill,” the aunt said. “The grandpa was outside of the gate. Why didn’t they ask him, ‘What’s the situation?’”
The four pigs who were at the scene were put on administrative leave soon after the shooting. Some people in the community have posted an online petition calling for an “immediate and thorough investigation” into the shooting.
What kind of society, what kind of system has police that kill physically and mentally disabled people in crisis, rather than help them!? Why does this happen over and over again?
The basic answer is that the job of the police in this country is not to “serve and protect” the people, but to serve and protect a capitalist-imperialist system that exploits and oppresses the masses of people. This is a system that needs to be overthrown as soon as possible through an actual revolution. As the statement from the revcoms (revolutionary communists), We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, A Fundamentally Different System, says,
A whole different way of living is possible: a whole different way to organize society, with a radically different economic foundation and political system, emancipating relations among people and an uplifting culture—all of this oriented to meeting the basic needs and fulfilling the highest interests of the masses of people.
And listen here, where revolutionary leader Bob Avakian brings alive what it would look and feel like under such a radically new society organized under the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, including how the people’s security forces would relate to the masses in a totally different way.
