Attorney for family of Black man killed in North Carolina police shooting says body camera footage shows an 'execution'

Protest in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

(Image credit: Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

published 26 April 2021

The fatal police shooting of Andrew Brown Jr. was an "execution," his family's attorney Chantel Cherry-Lassiter said after watching a 20-second video clip from a North Carolina sheriff's deputy's body camera, CNN reports.

The shooting took place last week when several sheriff's deputies in North Carolina's Elizabeth City attempted to serve Brown, who was Black, with an arrest warrant. No footage of the incident has been made available to the public because North Carolina law stipulates such video can only be released with a court order. Subsequently, details remain scarce, but Cherry-Lassiter said the video she saw showed the deputies shot at Brown while he sat in his vehicle with his hands on the wheel. "He wasn't reaching for anything, he wasn't touching anything, he wasn't throwing anything around," she said, adding that Brown put the car in reverse and backed out of his driveway as the deputies shot at him before he crashed into a tree.

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Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.

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