SANFORD FLA Jan 21 2008 – The family of Chris Penley, the 15-year-old killed at Milwee Middle School two years ago, has sued the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office, alleging the marksman who shot the boy never should have pulled the trigger.Chris took a pellet gun to the Longwood-area school and brandished it as though it were the real thing. He had retreated into a restroom, away from other students, when sheriff’s Lt. Mike Weippert shot him in the head with a high-powered rifle.Although prosecutors cleared Weippert of any wrongdoing, the lawsuit highlights questions that remain about his actions. Weippert told investigators he made a split-second decision to pull the trigger because the boy had pointed the gun at him and he feared for his life.
Ralph Penley, the boy’s father, said his son should still be alive. Weippert, he said, “was an overzealous police officer.”He and the boy’s mother, Donna Penley, filed suit Jan. 11 in state circuit court in Sanford. They accuse Weippert and his boss, Sheriff Don Eslinger, of violating the boy’s civil rights and wrongfully causing his death. They ask for unspecified damages.Penley was shot Jan. 13, 2006. He was removed from life support and pronounced dead two days later.When Weippert pulled the trigger, the suit alleges, the boy was confined to a restroom, had no hostages, no means of escape and had hurt no one. The weapon in the boy’s hands was a toy, an air-powered pistol not loaded with any pellets.The boy had painted over the red muzzle tip that manufacturers put on toy guns to distinguish them from the real thing. Witnesses, including deputies, told investigators he pointed the gun at them and at his own head several times.Several of the suit’s allegations are similar to findings of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Sheriff’s Office, both of which investigated the shooting:*A hostage negotiator not far from Weippert said he did not feel threatened by the boy.*Weippert pulled the trigger without consulting anyone else and as other officers on the scene were working on a plan to apprehend the boy.The Orange County Medical Examiner’s Office concluded Weippert’s bullet hit the boy’s left ear, then entered his skull and fragmented. A private pathologist who studied case evidence for the Orlando Sentinel said the boy could not have been looking at Weippert when the bullet hit his head.”He has his head turned 90 degrees from the shooter,” said Dr. William Anderson, a former deputy Orange County medical examiner who is now in private practice.Sheriff’s Office spokesman Lt. Dennis Lemma disputed that conclusion.”The boy raised the weapon in the direction of Lt. Weippert and was looking in his direction,” Lemma said.Not every medical expert who reviewed the boy’s injuries agrees that the bullet entered his ear. That may be because the brain was so severely damaged.Dr. Eric Trumble, the neurosurgeon who tried to save the boy’s life, concluded the bullet entered just above the outer edge of the boy’s left eyebrow.Trumble’s surgical notes make no mention of the wound to the ear. When questioned about it several months later, Trumble said he did not recall it. Autopsy photos show that someone at the hospital had stapled the wound shut.”There’s not much you can tell because all the tissue was pulverized,” said Sara Irrgang, the associate Orange County medical examiner who performed the autopsy.Dr. Patrick Lantz of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C., a forensic pathologist who reviewed the case for the Sentinel, said he thinks the bullet most likely entered the left side of the boy’s forehead.The wound to the ear, he said, was most likely an exit wound caused by a bullet fragment or piece of bone.The lawsuit does not mention the ear wound, but “that’s another thing that troubles me,” Ralph Penley said.Weippert, who has more than 20 years of experience with the Sheriff’s Office, continues to help with training and planning for the agency’s SWAT team.
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