Police Shooting of Black Man in North Carolina an ‘Execution,’ Say Lawyers

Attorneys for the family of Andrew Brown Jr., a Black man shot by sheriff’s deputies in North Carolina last week, said body cam video showed Brown had been “executed” and accused the city of showing them only a small portion of the video evidence.

Lawyers for the family said Brown had his hands on the steering wheel of his car and was complying with police orders when he was gunned down, leaving a trail of shell casings in the driveway at his home in Elizabeth City.

“They were shooting and saying ‘Let me see your hands!’ at the same time,” Channel Cherry-Lassiter, one of a team of attorneys for the family, told a press briefing on Monday.

“Let’s be clear: this was an execution.”

Earlier on Monday Elizabeth City had declared a state of emergency as it prepared for the public release of the police video. Police say they were attempting to arrest Brown when the shooting took place.

Ben Crump, a lawyer for the family, said there was evidence from at least 9 cameras, including police body cam and dash cam videos, but that the victim’s lawyers were shown only a 20-second portion from a single body cam video after the county attorney decided against showing more.

“We do not feel we got transparency. We only saw a snippet of the video,” Crump said. “They were going to show the whole video, then decided at the last minute they were going to redact it.”

The shooting last Wednesday, a day after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd after a highly publicized trial, has led to small, peaceful protests in Elizabeth City, a riverfront community of about 18,000 residents, half of whom are African Americans.

(Reporting by Peter Szekely in New York and Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; Additional reporting by Rich McKay; Editing by Paul Simao, Howard Goller and Dan Grebler)