Dash camera video and investigative documents are raising new questions about the fatal shooting of a Black motorist by a Georgia state trooper nearly four years ago.

Julian Lewis didn’t pull over for the Georgia State Patrol cruiser flashing its blue lights behind him on a rural highway. He still didn’t stop after pointing a hand out the window and turning onto a darkened dirt road as the trooper sounded his siren.

Five minutes into a pursuit that began over a broken taillight, the 60-year-old Black man was dead — shot in the forehead by the white trooper who fired a single bullet mere seconds after forcing Lewis to crash into a ditch. Trooper Jake Thompson insisted he pulled the trigger as Lewis revved the engine of his Nissan Sentra and jerked his steering wheel as if trying to mow him down.

“I had to shoot this man,” Thompson can be heard telling a supervisor on video recorded by his dash-mounted camera at the shooting scene in rural Screven County, midway between Savannah and Augusta. “And I’m just scared.”

But new investigative details obtained by The Associated Press and the never-before-released dashcam video of the August 2020 shooting have raised fresh questions about how the trooper avoided prosecution with nothing more than a signed promise never to work in law enforcement again. Use-of-force experts who reviewed the footage for AP said the shooting appeared to be unjustified.

  • jpreston2005@lemmy.world
    0·
    4 days ago

    For Bacon, Lewis’ son, the lack of charges is an open wound. He worries no one will remember what happened given the passage of almost four years — and the number of others killed by police under questionable circumstances.

    At this point, the damage is done. A child has to grow up without his father. They had the trooper in jail for 100 days, paid the Bacon family 4.5 million, and only agreed not to prosecute the trooper because he signed a pledge to never work in law enforcement again. So they know he F-ed up, but what’s with the slap on the wrist for the trooper? He shot this black man in the forehead, 1.6 seconds after stopping his patrol car. I don’t even understand why he got out of his car so quick after successfully pitting the guys car. The guys car is perpendicular to the road, in a ditch, with your squad car behind it. Why are you jumping out with your gun drawn? God, you’d think he’d be jumping out to make sure the driver was OK, but nope.

    Someone driving intoxicated should be punished, not murdered.