Under a lone, leafless tree in Gazelle Meadows Park, a photo of Anthony Cano’s smiling face peeks above a collection of candles, flowers and stuffed animals.

Friends and family set up the makeshift memorial for the 17-year-old in lieu of a funeral service.

Two months after Cano was shot twice in the back by a police officer in the same park, the votive candles framing his picture are still lit.

“Long Live Cano,” one declares carefully in printed permanent marker.

Cano was the first person shot by Arizona law enforcement in 2021.

Around 9:20 p.m. on the night of Jan. 2, Chandler police officer Chase Bebak-Miller attempted to stop Cano for riding his bike in the road without a light near Nevada and Erie streets. After a brief foot chase that led them into the park, Cano dropped a gun and stopped to pick it up.

Less than a second after Bebak-Miller yelled, “Weapon drawn! Get on the ground!” he shot the teen at close range.

Then, he shot him again, while Cano was already lying face down in the dirt.

Chandler police released Bebak-Miller’s unredacted body-worn camera footage of the shooting on Wednesday, months after their first statement claimed Cano pulled out a gun and “motioned towards the officer.”

The new footage shows the moments following the shooting, when Bebak-Miller screamed at the boy laying wounded on the ground to put his hands behind his back. In the video, Cano can be heard replying, “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t,” as he weakly attempts to move his arms. While officers cuff him, Cano pleads, “I don’t want to die.”

To Cano’s family, the new details revealed in the footage are heartbreaking and outraging.

“Honestly, it made me sick,” said Cano’s aunt, Eva Cano. “He couldn’t move. He told him, ‘Sir I can’t. I’m sorry, I cant’ — and he couldn’t. That bullet was lodged in his spine.”

But the video also confirms what they already knew about the teen — that he was as respectful as he was goofy.

To them, Anthony was “Peanut,” a curious student, star athlete and loving brother, nephew and son. Weeks later, they don’t understand why he was killed.

Family remembers night of shooting

Eva Cano laughed as she remembered her nephew. “Peanut” was the nickname that stuck from his early childhood when Anthony was small for his age.

“He was such a clown,” she recalled. “An extreme amount of energy, difficult to contain sometimes. He was always in a good mood, always joking, always happy.”

The high school junior was close with his whole family, she said. Her home is only a couple miles down the road from where Anthony lived with his mother, Renee Clum, and younger sister, Samantha. He was born and raised in that house and lived in the predominantly Latino neighborhood in central Chandler his whole life.

Clum recounted how she and her son would play catch on their block and how he’d frequently help the neighbors unload groceries when they returned from the store. The mother of four others said that her youngest daughter, 12-year-old Samantha, was handling the grief of her brother’s death the most.

“They were the closest,” Clum said, her voice tearful and tight. “She’s having a hard time with it.”

The night of Jan. 2, Clum said she last saw her son 30 minutes before a kid from the neighborhood ran to her door and told her he saw Anthony being lifted onto a stretcher and into an ambulance at the park. He had gone out with friends nearby, she said, as he often did.

It was almost six hours later around 3 a.m. when Chandler police finally confirmed with her that her son had been shot and was in surgery at the hospital, she said.

“I couldn’t get anybody to tell me what happened, where he was, was he even still alive,” Clum said. 

She still didn’t know any details of the shooting by the time she was allowed into Anthony’s hospital room after he came out of his first surgery. After a night in the hospital, the detective from the police department called and explained to her the official version of the incident.

“She just recounted what she said she saw on the bodycam, which is the same as what they released out to the public, which is that he turned and pointed the gun at the police officer,” Clum said. “I haven’t watched the video, I’m not ready to do that yet, but I’m told that’s not what happened.”

She isn’t sure how or where her son got the gun, she said.

“Doors are not locked in my house. There’s no secrets or hiding. We’re a pretty open family,” she said. “I go into his room quite often, and I’ve never seen a gun, he’s never had a gun.”

She said after the shooting, she learned his siblings found his social media and saw that he was being bullied and threatened online.

“I can only assume he feared for his life, and that was his thought to get a gun to protect himself,” Clum said.

‘Excruciating’ three weeks in the hospital

The next three weeks in the hospital were gut-wrenching as Cano’s condition remained touch and go, the family described. The two bullets in his back tore through his diaphragm and lodged in his spine.

Cano was awake, alert and able to communicate during the first week, Clum said. He was on a ventilator, so he couldn’t speak. But he could use his hands and mouth words to get a point across.

A smile briefly lightened her voice, heavy with heartache, as she recalled a moment from those first few days. Hooked up to a vent and myriad other cords and tubes, he waved at her to get her attention and then patted the bedspread beside him, gesturing her over.

“I stood up and went over to him and grabbed his hand and, of course, started crying.” She paused to collect herself. “He picked up his finger and shook his finger. And the nurse said, ‘What is that? What is he telling you?’  I started laughing and said, ‘He’s telling me to stop crying,’ and he nodded his head.”

She also remembered that during those few days of consciousness that whenever she would leave his bedside, he would mouth to her, “I love you.”

He then had several strokes, she said. He underwent more surgeries, but he never quite woke up. 

Family joins protests against police violence

Cano died at the hospital on Jan. 23.

The family held a gathering outside Chandler City Hall in late February, calling for increased transparency in the shooting. Chandler police released the full bodycam footage a week later.

Bebak-Miller has been placed on modified duty, according to a Chandler Police Department spokesperson.

Eva Cano said she thinks both her nephew and Bebak-Miller could have done things differently to avoid the shooting. She believes he fled from Bebak-Miller because he was afraid of getting in trouble for being caught with a gun and shouldn’t have reached for it when he accidentally dropped it.

“He is not that kid to point a gun ever at anybody. He was probably scared to death to be honest,” she said.

While she thinks Cano made some mistakes that night, she condemned Bebak-Miller for immediately using deadly force and shooting the teen a second time after he had already collapsed to the ground.

“The first shot obviously buckled him to the floor,” Eva said. “And the fact that there was a short lapse of time, I mean it was maybe two seconds or something, and then he put himself into closer range and took that second shot — I think is totally unacceptable and unnecessary. The kid was not moving.”

Her mother, Sylvia Morales, said the police officer hunted her grandson like a predator.

“That officer hunted him like you hunt prey,” Morales said. “He chased him no matter where — chased him until he got him. And that’s what a hunter does.”

The family returned to Chandler City Hall on Friday for a protest demanding Bebak-Miller be held accountable and measures be taken to prevent police shootings, which have killed more than 430 Arizonans since 2011.

“What we want is for this case to not get buried under the rug,” said the aunt. “We don’t want this just to be forgotten and he just be another kid that was shot.”

“Nothing is going to bring our kid back. Nothing is going to fix what has already happened, but if we can implement something … so something is changed for other families and our kids and our grandkids.”

Cano was the first person to be shot by Arizona police in 2021, following a year of both increased officer shootings and increased scrutiny on police violence. 

Chandler police said its Criminal Investigation Bureau completed its investigation into the shooting and submitted the case to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office for review.

After the County Attorney’s Office determines whether to pursue criminal charges against the officer, Chandler police’s Use of Force Review Board will review the case before submitting it to a citizens review panel made up of 15 Chandler residents appointed by the mayor.

Reporter Perry Vandell contributed to this reporting.

Reach the reporter at [email protected] or on Twitter @vv1lder.

Read or Share this story: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/chandler/2021/03/07/family-says-bodycam-video-chandler-police-shooting-shows-anthony-cano-good-kid/4562776001/