A sharpshooter couldn't shoot out the tires of the car? Ram the car. Block the forward movement of it? Something.

I don't understand how a woman in a car with her child, unarmed yet out of control of her own thoughts is dead.

There was one point where the officers even got a good look at the car and the people inside and they still killed her.

I am glad the family is speaking out on Miriam's behalf.

By John Marzulli , Erik Badia , Dan Friedman AND Corky Siemaszko / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Published: Friday, October 4, 2013, 9:50 AM 
Updated: Saturday, October 5, 2013, 5:17 AM

...“Deadly force was not necessary,” (click here) said the grieving sister, a retired NYPD transit police sergeant who lives in Bushwick. “They could have rammed the car or disabled the car.”
“There had to be something else they could have done,” chimed in Amy Carey, a registered nurse who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “She didn’t have to die. To know a child was in the car, too, why did they shoot?”...

There are six officers standing there with guns drawn and not one had an answer as to how to deal with her. A woman and child confused and upset, unable to pose herself as a threat to any of the officers, in plain sight and the police were at a complete lose to stop her. All the guns are pointed at her and that was the only solution they had.

After Miriam was dead, the chief of police stated the barriers worked. Not. It looks like nothing worked to me. There was no preventing her death in the face of her own unreality. 

Guns. 

Kill, kill, kill. 

The guns worked.  

Eventually. 

The entire scenario is tragic. The police never had control. The death of that unarmed woman was their only answer to stopping her. 

At no point in time did anyone step back from the scenario to realize there was something very wrong and it needed an intervention different than what the police were engaged in. Six officers had already assessed the circumstances inside that car and had no answer beside shooting her.

At least seven separate vehicles are involved in this tape and they could not block her movement?  After she backed into one car they never thought to inhibit the movement of Miriam's car. Never once attempted to disable the car, puncture the tires to inhibit forward movement or break a back window to gain access to the inside of the car. They could obviously see she wasn't reacting to their presence in a reasonable way so she was a dead woman after that. 

Wow. The police were never in danger. She never assaulted them and tried to disable them. She wanted to leave the area she never understood. She had driven hundreds of miles in a delirium only to be shot by DC police. That is a successful intervention, huh? Killing unarmed people is the only answer in DC.

If this is the response to someone like Miriam, the nation needs better police training. She should be alive today, in custody and in a mental health facility. Those officers lives were never in danger. And they could have killed a child besides. I take it the child was in a child restraint in the car. Well fed. Well clothed. She was a good mom. She loved her child. She believed she was acting rationally. This entire police response is a failure. Abject failure.