A community meeting will be held at an Oakland church on Saturday to discuss the fatal shooting of barbershop owner Derrick Jones by two Oakland police officers on Monday night.
Ronald Cruz of By Any Means Necessary, a social justice group, said the meeting will be held at the Olivet Institutional Missionary Baptist Church at the corner of 27th and Market streets in Oakland at 4 p.m. Saturday.
The purpose of the meeting will be to seek justice for Jones, 37, as well as for Oscar Grant III, Cruz said.
Grant, a 22-year-old Hayward man who was unarmed, was fatally shot by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland shortly after 2 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2009. Mehserle and other officers had responded to reports that there was a fight on a train.
Mehserle, 28, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in July and was sentenced to two years in state prison last week.
Oakland police Deputy Chief Jeffrey Israel said the officers shot Jones, 37, after they responded to a report that he was assaulting a woman at a laundromat next to his barbershop. He allegedly refused repeated orders to surrender.
Israel said Jones was reaching into his waistband, which the officers thought indicated that he was reaching for a gun.
Israel also said one of the officers spotted a metal object in Jones’ hand, but no weapon was found at the scene.
Oakland police spokesman Jeff Thomason said today that the shiny object officers described seeing near Jones’ waist area was an electronic scale.
Thomason said the scale is silver and is about three inches by five inches and three-fourths of an inch thick.
There was also marijuana found in Jones’ pocket in a glass jar, he said.
Cruz said about 100 people attended a rally in front of Jones’ barbershop at 5815 Bancroft Ave. Friday to protest his shooting death.
The protest was the second in as many days, as about 100 people also gathered at the barbershop on Thursday afternoon and then marched to the Fruitvale BART station to symbolically mark demonstrators’ belief that the shooting deaths of Jones and Grant are connected.
BART police closed the Fruitvale Station for about an hour on Thursday as a precautionary measure, but Cruz said protesters didn’t march to the station Friday.
Jeff Shuttleworth, Bay City News
