At 3:30 AM on April 17, 2016, Troy police sergeant Randall French fires eight shots and kills unarmed Black Watervliet resident Edson Thevenin in his car after a car chase, allegedly following a stop on suspicion of DWI.1
From the beginning, the Troy PD show very little compassion to the Thevenin family. According to the Attorney General’s Report (released January 2018), the Troy Police Department (TPD) did very little to help the Thevenin family understand what had occurred, obscuring what had happened to Edson:
The TPD initially told the Thevenin family that Mr. Thevenin died in a car accident. After learning from a TPD officer at the hospital that Mr. Thevenin had been shot, the family went – in a futile search for additional information – from the hospital to the incident scene to the police department to the morgue. The family was provided with no TPD victim services information or even a TPD contact person. The family ultimately heard the TPD’s account from the TPD press conference the day after the shooting, a press conference that Mr. Thevenin’s mother tried to attend but to which she was denied access. The Thevenin family did not hear again from the TPD prior to the grand jury presentation, which the family was not even informed would be taking place. The Thevenins learned of the presentation and its outcome when a member of the RCDA [Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany] reached out to their pastor in order to obtain Mrs. Thevenin’s phone number.2