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#PhilandoCastile’s Mother Rips Apart Respectability Politics: ‘What’s the Difference if You’re Going to Get Killed’

The mother and uncle of 32-year-old Philando Castile, a Falcon Heights, Minnesota man who was shot Wednesday in a routine traffic stop over a taillight, talks to CNN‘s Alisyn Camerota on New Day about her son’s last few hours with her.

Last night, live Facebook video showed Castile’s brutal gunshot wounds as his fiancée, Diamond Reynolds, narrated their interaction with a St. Anthony police officer.

In the 2-minute New Day clip, Valerie Castile says that her son, Philando, was going to get his hair done. When he got back, he and his sister were having a conversation about carrying their guns and their open-carry permits that Wednesday. But his sister decided not to, out of fear of her possible death by police.

Clarence Castile, Philando’s uncle, says that when he saw the video of his nephew dying, he saw “a young man helpless and shot for no apparent reason.”

“I appreciate Diamond for streaming that video because we would never know what happened,” Valerie Castile says. “I know for a fact that my son would not do anything to provoke that officer.”

Clarence Castile calls the officer “just a man” and a “destroyer that came into our lives and took something from us.”

Here is the Facebook live stream:

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