Prosecutors consider charges against officer
Atlanta’s top prosecutor said his office will decide this week whether to bring charges against the police officer who shot Rayshard Brooks, a black man whose killing outside a Wendy’s on Friday sparked a fresh wave of protests against police violence in the southern city and added fuel to nationwide anger over racial injustice.
Family members on Sunday recalled Brooks as a good father who was getting his life back together when he was shot and killed in a confrontation with Garrett Rolfe and another Atlanta police officer after a DUI stop.
Public outrage mounted across the country over the weekend, as demonstrators in New York, Los Angeles and other cities and towns took to the streets for the latest in a wave of protests prompted by last month’s killing of another black man, George Floyd, in the custody of Minneapolis police.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office determined that Brooks suffered organ damage and blood loss from two gunshot wounds, and that his official cause of death was ‘‘gunshot wounds of the back’’.
Also on Sunday (local time), Senate Republicans outlined a legislative proposal to enact police reforms – their answer to a sweeping bill introduced last week by Senate Democrats.
Brooks’ father, Larry Barbine, told The Washington Post the family was in shock, unable to accept that his son had been killed just as his life seemed to be going better than it had in years.
‘‘I can’t understand why it happened like that,’’ Barbine said of the shooting. ‘‘I heard of his passing on Saturday. Not his passing, his murder. I’m just devastated.’’
In an interview with CBS This Morning two days after her husband’s death, Tomika Miller, Brooks’ widow, called for the officers involved to be prosecuted. ‘‘I want them to go to jail . . . If it was my husband who shot them, he would be in jail. He would be doing a life sentence.’’
According to a preliminary report by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, officers were dispatched Friday night to a Wendy’s in Atlanta on a complaint about a man parked and asleep in the drive-through. The officers performed a sobriety test on the man, later identified as Brooks. When Brooks failed the test, officers attempted to put him in custody. The response escalated, and Brooks grabbed an officer’s stun gun and began running away.
Video appears to show Brooks turning back toward the officer and pointing the Taser at him, at which point the officer is seen drawing a weapon from his holster and firing at Brooks.
Paul Howard, the Fulton County district attorney, told CNN on Sunday that a decision on whether to bring charges in the case will be made ‘‘sometime around Wednesday’’. ‘‘He did not seem to present any threat to anyone,’’ Howard said of Brooks. ‘‘The fact that it would escalate to his death seems unreasonable.’’
The police department has fired Rolfe, the officer who shot his gun, and pulled the other officer, Devin Brosnan, off street patrols. Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields resigned Saturday.