In the early morning hours of New Year's Day 2009, a 22-year-old unarmed black man named Oscar Grant was shot by a Bay Area Rapid Transit Police Department police officer in Oakland's Fruitvale train station. Dozens of people witnessed this and several of them recorded the incident on their cell phones. Footage uploaded to YouTube went viral almost immediately. Johannes Mehserle, the officer who shot and killed Grant, was eventually convicted of involuntary manslaughter, sentenced to two years in jail and served less than a year's worth of time.