Family says police ‘rushed to judgment’
Parents say son fatally shot on Thanksgiving “for no reason at all”
The family of a black man killed by a police officer after a shooting at an Alabama mall packed with holiday shoppers demanded justice for the young man they said was killed “for no reason at all.”
Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford Jr., 21, was fatally shot Thanksgiving night by a Hoover police officer at the Riverchase Galleria, a sprawling, two-story shopping mall 10 miles south of Birmingham.
Hoover police acknowledged that Bradford “likely didn’t fire the rounds” that wounded an 18-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl moments before Bradford was killed. The teens were hospitalized in stable condition.
“It hurt me to the core,” Bradford’s father, Emantic Bradford Sr., said at a news conference Sunday. “They vilified my son like he was straight criminal.”
The family hired Florida civil rights lawyer Benjamin Crump to clear their son’s name. Crump said Bradford was trying to calm the situation when the officer, whose name had not been released, “rushed to judgment” and killed him.
“He saw a black man with a gun, and he made his determination that he must be a criminal,” Crump said. “They concluded their investigation while E.J. was on the mall floor, bleeding out, dying.”
Crump demanded that police release video from the scene. He said it would tell the “whole story.”
The family said they found out about the shooting via social media and police never notified them or apologized.
“They killed him for no reason at all,” said Bradford’s aunt, Catherine Jewell. “They did him wrong.”
Scores of protesters marched through the mall Saturday, holding a moment of silence and chanting, “No justice, no peace.”
“When we found out about this incident, there were questions from the jump,” said Carlos Chaverst, an activist in Birmingham who organized the protest. “They killed an innocent black man.”
Police initially issued a statement saying two men were engaged in the “physical altercation” when one drew a gun and shot the other, also wounding the girl standing nearby.
The statement said officers assigned to the mall responded to the shooting and encountered “a suspect brandishing a pistol and shot him.” Bradford was pronounced dead at the scene.
Later, police spokesman Gregg Rector issued an update.
“New evidence now suggests that while Mr. Bradford may have been involved in some aspect of the altercation, he did not fire the rounds,” Rector said.
He said at least one gunman remained at large.
“We regret that our initial media release was not totally accurate, but new evidence indicates that it was not,” the Hoover Police Department said in a statement. “Investigators now believe that more than two people were involved in the altercation.”
The case was handed over to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency.
“They were so quick to rush to judgment,” Bradford Sr. said of Hoover police. “I knew my son didn’t do that. People rushed to judgment. They shouldn’t have done that.”
“He saw a black man with a gun, and he made his determination that he must be a criminal.” Benjamin Crump Civil rights lawyer