We know this may just sound like the Chron hating on Occupy again, but police dispatch tapes from Berkeley on February 18 the evening that 67-year-old Peter Cukor was (allegedly) bludgeoned to death outside his home by unmedicated schizophrenic Daniel DeWitt reveal that officers in the vicinity were aware of the non-emergency call Cukor placed, and were instructed not to respond because an Occupy Oakland march was headed to the UC Berkeley campus.
A few minutes before the fatal attack, Berkeley police officer Jerome Cobert noticed the report of the intruder at Cukor's address on his police-cruiser computer, but he was told by a dispatcher not to respond to anything that was not a life-threatening emergency or a felony in progress, because the protest was on the move.
Perhaps this was also Cukor's error for calling the non-emergency line and not just calling 911 to begin with, but just a few minutes after Cobert was instructed not to respond, Cukor's wife called 911, at about 9 p.m., to report that DeWitt was now attacking her husband. At 9:04 p.m. she reports having locked herself in her home, and says she can see her husband's body lying in the driveway. At 9:08 p.m. an officer arrived and found Cukor, who had been bludgeoned with a flower pot, and only had a faint pulse. He died later in the hospital. Dewitt was arrested near the scene.
The Occupy protest that the Berkeley police were worried about only numbered 50 people.
[Chron]
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