It was announced today that the officers who shot and killed Andrew Brown Jr. while serving a warrant for his arrest were justified in the shooting and the District Attorney will not press charges against them:
District Attorney Andrew Womble says the police-killing of Andrew Brown Jr. was “justified.” pic.twitter.com/izfxwB3CnN
— The Recount (@therecount) May 18, 2021
NBC NEWS – North Carolina sheriff’s deputies were justified in fatally shooting a Black man during an attempted arrest last month, prosecutors said Tuesday.
Andrew Brown Jr., 42, was shot while behind the wheel of his car on April 21 in Elizabeth City as Pasquotank County sheriff’s deputies were serving a warrant for his arrest on felony drug charges.
District Attorney Andrew Womble said Brown’s shooting death, “while tragic,” was “justified due to his actions.”
An autopsy commissioned by Brown’s family found he was shot five times, once in the back of the head. That report added to the findings of a state death certificate that showed that he was shot five times and that Brown’s immediate cause of death was a “penetrating gunshot wound of the head.”
The district attorney has said officers fired only after Brown struck deputies twice with his vehicle.
He actually struck officers with his vehicle. That jives with everything we heard about the video in court last month.
But the family, of course, is claiming otherwise:
But his family’s attorneys say the video is at odds with how law officials have framed the shooting.
Brown’s relatives have questioned why deputies used deadly force when he was surrounded by law enforcement.
Chance Lynch, an attorney for the family, said last week that the video shows that deputies fired at Brown, prompting him to move his vehicle away from them. After the shooting, Brown’s vehicle was riddled with bullet holes, Lynch said.
These ‘family attorneys’ are most often nothing but race hustlers who lie about the facts of the case and cause anger in the community. The same thing looks to be happening here, and it will likely be the catalyst for riots in Elizabeth City.
The video has still not been released yet, but there is a press conference (still ongoing) where the District Attorney explained what happened and is taking questions from the media. Questions like “couldn’t the officers have let him flee and arrest him later?” Seriously.
UPDATE: I was wrong. Part of the video was shown at the press conference and you can clearly see Brown hit the officers as he was trying to flee:
WARNING: LANGUAGE AND CONTENT
As I suspected in my writeup, the depties did NOT fire before Brown started moving his car, as the lying family attorney claimed. Even when Brown backed the vehicle up, deputies still did not fire. It was only when he tried to run them over as he attempted escaping.