Court: 2 officers fatally shot man 59 times

Two Atlanta-area law enforcement officers were charged this week with felony murder for their roles in a confrontation in 2016 with an armed man who was shot nearly 60 times as they tried to arrest him, according to court documents.

The officers — identified in an indictment as Eric A. Heinze, a deputy U.S. marshal, and Kristopher L. Hutchens, a Clayton County police officer — were members of a fugitive task force that had been serving an arrest warrant for the man, Jamarion Robinson.

The task force members told the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that Robinson had fired a handgun at them two or three times on Aug. 5, 2016, after the officers broke through the door of his girlfriend’s apartment in East Point, Georgia.

Robinson, 26, had been wanted on charges of attempted arson and aggravated assault of a police officer, according to the officers, who said that he still refused to drop his gun after being shot. Three task force members shot at Robinson, state investigators said.

Robinson’s family has contested law enforcement accounts of what happened. The fatal shooting of Robinson, who was Black and whose family said he had schizophrenia, touched off protests over racial injustice and excessive force, straining relations between local law enforcement authorities and their federal partners.

Robinson’s relatives said that his body had been riddled with 59 entry wounds and 17 exit wounds before it was dragged down a flight of stairs — in what relatives described as evidence tampering. The officers continued shooting Robinson after using a concussion grenade known as a flash-bang that had burned him, his mother, Monteria Robinson, said.

“Someone stood over my son and shot down into his body,” she said. “They all say that my son fell to the ground, so why did they shoot another 80 or more volleys at my son?”

The 21-page indictment, which was returned by a grand jury in Fulton County on Tuesday, did not elaborate on the nature of the charges against the two officers or their actions.

In addition to two counts each of felony murder, Heinze, 44, and Hutchens, 47, were charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, first-degree burglary, two counts of making false statements and two counts of violating the oath of a public officer.

At the time of Robinson’s death, he had been preparing to reenroll at Tuskegee University in Alabama, where he had played football, his mother said.