LOS ANGELES (AP) - A homeless foreigner shot to death by police on Los Angeles' Skid Row was in the country illegally after serving time for a bank robbery but couldn't be deported because no country would take him
France issued travel documents for a man identified as Charley Saturmin Robinet but rescinded them in June 2013 after determining it was an assumed name and the man was really from Cameroon, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice said in a statement.
ICE, which had issued a deportation order in April 2013, said Cameroon consular officials failed to respond to repeated requests for travel documents after France spurned him.
A person who said he has just one name, Bindz, and heads the consular section at the Embassy of the Republic of Cameroon in Washington, D.C., said he cannot respond to questions by telephone and the ambassador would have to respond to a written request for information.
The homeless man, known on Skid Row as "Africa," was shot to death Sunday. The confrontation that led to his death was recorded on a bystander's cellphone and viewed millions of times online.
Authorities said the man tried to grab a rookie Los Angeles police officer's gun, prompting three other officers to shoot him.
Like many people on Skid Row, the man suffered from mental illness and his background was murky. He told U.S. authorities he was from Cameroon and gave a different name - Keunang - after France rejected him.
The man was in immigration custody in September 2013 when a federal judge in California ordered him to a halfway house. The man had no place to stay and no permanent address.
The man had served roughly 13 years in prison and spent six months in the halfway house before he was released in May 2014.
, said Ed Ross, a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that immigration authorities cannot detain people indefinitely just because no country will take them. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that the government would need a special reason to keep someone in custody after six months if deportation seemed unlikely in "the reasonably foreseeable future."
While in federal prison in Rochester, Minnesota, the man was assigned to the mental health unit, and federal officials said medical staff determined he had "a mental disease or defect" that required treatment in a psychiatric hospital, documents show.
Under the terms of the man's release, he was required to provide reports to his probation officer each month, Deputy U.S. Marshal Matthew Cordova said. When he failed to do so in November, December and January, a federal warrant was issued Jan. 9.