Mayor promises investigation as disabled teen shot by police is buried

DENVER (AP) -- Lawyer Johnnie Cochran promised Saturday to bring justice to the family of a developmentally disabled 15-year-old boy fatally shot by a policeman.

"We can turn justice right side up and we're going to do that," Cochran said at Macedonia Baptist Church, where the funeral for Paul Childs was held. "We have to make sure there are no other funerals like this."

Moments later, Mayor Wellington Webb, whose city Cochran plans to sue, took the pulpit to promise a quick and public investigation into the shooting.

"Do we need to review what happened? Yes. Do we need to do it soon? Yes. Do we need to do it openly? Yes," Webb said.

Childs, who was black, was shot four times July 5 in the doorway of his home after his family called 911 and said the boy was threatening his mother with a knife. Officer James Turney, who fired on him, said the boy refused to drop the knife. Police said they did not know the teen was disabled.

The Childs family had dialed 911 at least nine times before the shooting for help in dealing with the teen, who sometimes wandered from home, according to records examined by the Rocky Mountain News.

After speaking, Cochran shook hands with Webb, a longtime friend and the city's first black mayor, and both sat in the fourth row next to Mayor-elect John Hickenlooper.

Cochran said witnesses reported that the teen never threatened police. Besides winning an acquittal for O.J. Simpson, Cochran won an $18 million judgment from Chicago for the wrongful police shooting of a black woman.

Turney was suspended after the shooting in what officials would only say was an unrelated matter. He is being investigated for allegedly threatening his former mother-in-law the day before Childs was shot, the Rocky Mountain News has reported.

Turney last year was cleared by the department in the shooting death of an 18-year-old hearing impaired youth, also black, who allegedly was wielding a pocketknife.

Black activists and civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have called for an independent investigation.