A prayer vigil was held for a homeless man who was fatally shot by LAPD officers on Skid Row on Sunday, in an incident caught on cellphone video that prompted community outrage.
The vigil which took place on Wednesday focused, not on the politics and policing techniques, but on shared sadness, said Pastor Tony Stallworth from Community Church of the Nazarene.
It's being held "so that people could come and pray and grieve, without the other stuff," he said.
The man shot by Los Angeles police was a Cameroon national, according to a statement from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The federal agency didn't release his name.
The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office is working with the U.S. State Department and immigration officials to identity the man. A law enforcement official identified Charley Saturmin Robinet, 39, as the man police shot. The official wasn't authorized to speak publicly and talked to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The man was living under an assumed name and was wanted for violating probation terms for a bank robbery conviction, French and U.S. officials said Tuesday.
He was ordered removed from the United States in April 2013 while he was serving a sentence in federal prison for armed robbery and firearms convictions, said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Because he claimed French citizenship, he was initially granted travel papers to that country. France later denied his travel after learning he was from Cameroon.
Cameroonian authorities repeatedly failed to respond to requests for a travel document, Kice said in a statement.
The man, who was known as "Africa" in the rundown Los Angeles area of Skid Row, was shot to death Sunday. The confrontation that led to his death was recorded on a bystander's cellphone and viewed millions of times online.
Authorities said the man tried to grab a rookie Los Angeles police officer's gun, prompting three other officers to shoot him.
