Standing in front of the Minnesota State Capitol on Tuesday, the mother of Philando Castile demanded justice for her slain son and an end to police violence and bias. 
 
 Ahead of Valerie Castile towered the Cathedral of St. Paul, where hundreds will gather for her son’s funeral Thursday. 
 
 “He was suddenly taken from us under horrible circumstances,” she said. “I am devastated, but … he is the driving force in me to make sure this doesn’t happen to another mother.” 
 
 Valerie Castile’s attorney, Glenda Hatchett, said they plan to file a lawsuit in the shooting death of Philando Castile at the hands of a St. Anthony police officer during a traffic stop last week in Falcon Heights. 
 
 Hatchett also said she will closely monitor the criminal investigation into the shooting and will ask that a special, independent prosecutor be brought in. 
 
 Castile, of Robbinsdale, would have turned 33 this Saturday, said Valerie Castile, wearing a button of her son as she spoke at a press conference that drew national media. 
 
 Valerie Castile just said her son was a pillar in community, didn't deserve to die like that. pic.twitter.com/iGLFOhEWcG — Mara Gottfried (@MaraGottfried) July 12, 2016 
 
 FAMILY QUESTIONS OFFICER’S REASON FOR STOP 
 
 Valerie Castile said she has avoided watching the video that her son’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, posted of the immediate aftermath of the shooting. She said she is baffled as to why St. Anthony officer Jeronimo Yanez shot her son Wednesday. 
 
 “I have done everything in my power as a parent to teach my children to abide by the law,” she said. “My son abided by the law, he was killed by the law. I know that he didn’t do anything to provoke the officer to shoot him.” 
 
 The Castile family said they don’t believe Yanez’s attorney’s recent statement that the officer pulled over Philando Castile because his vehicle had a broken tail light and because Castile looked like a suspect in a recent nearby armed robbery. 
 
 “He has a job … he don’t need to rob or steal or do anything of that nature,” said Valerie Castile. 
 
 In police radio traffic obtained by the Pioneer Press from a scanner listener, an officer says, “I’m going to stop a car. … I’m going to check IDs. I have a reason to pull them over. The two occupants just look like people that were involved in a robbery. The driver looks like one of our suspects just (because) of a wide-set nose.” 
 
 That description screams of racial profiling and raises the question of whether the officer had the right to pull him over, Hatchett said. 
 
 “Saying … ‘an African-American man with a broad nose’ is like saying ‘a white woman with blonde hair,’ ” Hatchett said. 
 
 Philando Castile had obtained his permit to carry a gun less than a year ago, his mother said. He didn’t get it because he felt unsafe, but because he was exercising his right to bear arms, she said. 
 
 Valerie Castile said her son was careful and would put the gun in the glove compartment when he got in the car. 
 
 In the video Reynolds took just after the shooting, she stated that Castile had “let the officer know that he … had a firearm and he was reaching for his wallet and the officer just shot him in his arm.” 
 
 Yanez’s attorney has said the officer was reacting to a gun Castile reportedly displayed during the traffic stop, and not Castile’s race, when he shot Castile. 
 
 On Tuesday, Hatchett underscored that Castile had a job, as a nutrition services supervisor at J.J. Hill Montessori School in St. Paul, and had no felony criminal record. 
 
 “This is a man who was doing everything right,” Hatchett said. 
 
 SEEKING INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION 
 
 The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is investigating the shooting and Hatchett said she was there when an investigator met with the family Sunday to explain the process and assure them it would be a thorough investigation. Hatchett said the family has not heard from St. Anthony police. 
 
 While Hatchett said she is not going into the case “assuming that there’s a coverup,” she said they won’t depend on the BCA investigation. 
 
 “We will have the best team possible on this matter,” Hatchett said. She also said a special prosecutor should be appointed to bring “a greater sense of trust.” 
 
 Gov. Mark Dayton and Minnesota congressional officials have asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Castile’s death. A DOJ spokesman said Thursday that the agency will continue to monitor the BCA investigation and “stands ready to provide assistance.” 
 
 Hatchett said Tuesday she will also be contacting DOJ “because I want to make sure that the federal government is watching closely what has happened and what will happen in this case.” 
 
 Hatchett responding to what she would say to the officer's attorney. pic.twitter.com/Gyexk3UWNe — Mara Gottfried (@MaraGottfried) July 12, 2016 
 
 Hatchett did not specify who she will file a lawsuit against, saying, “We’re going to sue whoever’s responsible.” 
 
 The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota also requested an independent prosecutor “to assure the community that justice and police accountability will be vigorously pursued by somebody who is outside the state’s prosecutorial system,” according to a Tuesday letter to the governor, state attorney general and Ramsey County attorney. 
 
 ‘THIS TIME … MUST BE THE LAST TIME’ 
 
 Hatchett, a former celebrity judge, said she was moved to work with the Castile family because she has two adult sons and worries about the same thing happening to them. 
 
 She said one of her sons told her, “Mom, you must do something. You must step up, you must help give a voice to this family.” 
 
 She read a passage that her son wrote about the Castile incident: “This time he wasn’t running from the police. This time he wasn’t fighting with the police. This time he was not trying to get his gun. This time he was not acting irresponsibly. This time he was not doing anything unlawful. … This time we have a young man employed, loved by his coworkers, adored by the children that he served, loved by his family, loved by a community, respected deeply. This time we have a man complying with a police officer’s directives. … This time … we are telling you must be the last time.” 
 
 Hatchett, who is based in Atlanta, flew to the Twin Cities over the weekend. When they first met, Hatchett said she hugged Valerie Castile “as one mother to another.” 
 
 “Because Philando is a son to all of us,” Hatchett said. “This should not just be this family’s pain. It should be one that we all share collectively, but more importantly that we are committed to make a change.” 
 
 Hatchett said there is a need for police to collect information about the race of people they pull over, along with the reason for the stop, for overall analysis. She said the fact that Castile was stopped by police in Minnesota at least 52 times should be investigated. 
 
 Though Hatchett noted that Dayton has been criticized for saying last week that he does not believe Castile would have been shot during a traffic stop if he had been white, she said, “It was the truth.” 
 
 “As a judge, I have seen cases where the police were … justified in using deadly force, so this is not about, ‘All policemen are bad,’” Hatchett said. “… But this, … based on what I know so far … should have never happened.” 
 
 Funeral services for Philando Castile will be at noon Thursday at the Cathedral of St. Paul, his family said. 
 
 The viewing at the Cathedral will be 10 a.m. to noon, according to Brooks Funeral Home. 
 
 Valerie Castile requested from the Cathedral that her son’s funeral be held there. “My son is a king,” she said Tuesday. “He is also a martyr, so I thought that that would be the place for him to have his services.” ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. 
 
 / Updated By Alex Johnson 
 
 A familiar face is representing the family of Philando Castile, the black Minnesota man shot and killed last week by police — Glenda Hatchett, the former host of TV's syndicated "Judge Hatchett" show. 
 
 Hatchett, 65, a former chief judge of Fulton County Juvenile Court in Atlanta, appeared at a news conference Tuesday with Castile's mother, Valerie Castile, at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul. She said the family is planning a lawsuit, although she didn't reveal against whom. 
 
 TV judge Glenda Hatchett tells reporters Tuesday in St. Paul, Minn., that Philando Castile's mother, right, will file a lawsuit in her son's fatal shooting by police. Jim Mone / AP 
 
 Castile, who was about to turn 33, was killed last Wednesday during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, a suburb of the Twin Cities. The Hennepin County medical examiner's office said he died of multiple gunshot wounds. 
 
 "I am deeply concerned about what seems to be an epidemic of African-American men being killed by police officers," Hatchett's law firm, which is based in Atlanta, said in a statement. "We have often seen demonstrations and debates and I raise the critical question, 'When will there be systemic reform?'" 
 
 "Judge Hatchett" ran for almost eight years in syndication until it was canceled in 2008 and has been aired in reruns ever since. It was similar in format to other so-called reality judge shows, like "Judge Judy" and "The People's Court." 
 
 She is to return in a similar program, "The Verdict With Judge Hatchett," on the Justice Central cable channel later this year.
– The family of Philando Castile will be filing a civil lawsuit that will seek justice for his shooting death and also push for "systemic changes" to law enforcement to prevent violence and bias at the hands of police, Castile's mother and the attorney representing his family said at a Tuesday press conference, per the Pioneer Press. "We're going to sue whoever's responsible," said lawyer Glenda Hatchett, adding that they wouldn't be depending on the state's own probe to assist them. Hatchett, a 65-year-old former Georgia judge in Fulton County who used to sit behind the bench on the reality court show Judge Hatchett, noted the family will also press for criminal charges to be lobbied against officer Jeronimo Yanez, who shot Castile during the July 6 traffic stop. "Valerie Castile and her family are very passionate and committed to ensuring that Philando's death is not just another statistic," Hatchett said in a press release, per KARE 11. "I am deeply concerned about what seems to be an epidemic of African-American men being killed by police officers," Hatchett said in a statement from her Atlanta-based law firm, per NBC News, adding she took on Castile's case "to make sure that working class people have a legal dream team," 11Alive notes. Hatchett also addressed reports of police dispatch audio from the night Castile was killed, noting she hasn't confirmed the audio is genuine but that if true, IDing a black man with a "wide-set nose" is about as helpful in tracking down a suspect as IDing a white woman with blond hair. Castile's mother, Valerie, also spoke at the press conference on the grounds of Minnesota's State Capitol in St. Paul, calling her son a "humanitarian" and "pillar in the community," per the New York Daily News. "In what country being honest and telling the truth will get you killed," she said. "You answer that one for me." (Watch Hatchett's entire presser at 11Alive.)