BRADDOCK, Pa. — Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman on Wednesday defended his actions from an eight-year-old incident, in which he used a shotgun to hold up an unarmed Black man he thought was involved in a shooting.
Fetterman was a guest on the FOX43 Capitol Beat segment during FOX43 Morning News to discuss his plans to run for Pennsylvania's open U.S. Senate seat in 2022. Following his campaign announcement on Monday, a New York Times report revisited what happened in 2013.
Fetterman, then mayor of Braddock, Pa., says he was walking with his young son, when he says he heard gunshots.
"I want to be clear it's gunfire. You can't live in a town like Braddock and not know what gunfire sounds like," Fetterman told FOX43 Morning News anchor Matt Maisel. "I got my son in quickly to safety and called 911, and I saw this individual dressed in black with a facemask, running from the scene where I heard those gunshots, a cooridor which had dozens of shootings over the years, heading towards the elementary school in town, a couple of weeks after the Sandy Hook child masacre, and a I made the split second decision to intercept him before first responders could arrive, which they did about thirty seconds, under a minute after I got there."
According to the police report highlighted by the New York Times article, officers patted down the man, Christopher Miyares, 28, and found no weapons. Police said he was wearing running clothes, and was released.
"I never conceded his side of the story was the truth. He claimed there were fireworks and there was no evidence of footprints where he claimed they were," Fetterman said Wednesday on FOX43.
Maisel then asked Mr. Fetterman if he had learned anything from the incident. He replied, "It hasn't changed me. I believe, you know what the truth is, Braddock had a gun problem. Braddock has a gun problem. Philadelphia has a serious gun violence problem. I can't be afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing. That's one of the things I took up when I became Mayor of Braddock is to confront gun violence and we were successful. We went five and a half years without the loss of life from violence. This issue is revisited, cynically shopped around, and yet I was overwhelmingly re-elected to another term by a 3-to-1 margin four months after that incident. No one who examines the deals and the dynamics and the history would think it was anything other than me responding to an emergency situation to stop another potential school shooting."
Fetterman decried the story as something that gets brought up every election cycle, but that "it never goes anywhere."
Over the summer, at the height of Black Lives Matter protests stemming from police violence against Black men and women, Fetterman wrote an op-ed piece in the Penn Capital-Star, in which he called on police officers to be better trained to defuse situations where public safety wasn't threatened.
"Discretion is the most powerful tool a police officer carries on the beat, because an appropriate level of discretion can short-circuit the use of lethal force," Fetterman wrote. "Discretion and de-escalation measures are pro-community, pro-police, and create more trust while making everyone safer."
Fetterman served as Braddock mayor from 2005 to 2019, when he was elected to serve as Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor. He ran for U.S. Senate once before, finishing third in the 2016 Democratic primary.
You can watch Fetterman's full FOX43 Capitol Beat interview here:
