A white Georgia State trooper was fired and charged with murder on Friday in the shooting of a black driver last week.
Jacob Gordon Thompson, 27, was arrested on charges of assault and assault after he fatally shot Julian Lewis, 60, last Friday when Lewis tried to escape a traffic stop in Screven County, the George Bureau of Investigations announced Friday.
Thompson tried to stop Lewis in his Nissan Sentra for what his family lawyer said was a brushed light of tail. When Lewis refused to pull over, Thompson began chasing a car behind several streets.
Finally, Thompson used a so-called PIT maneuver, shortly before pursuing intervention technique, which could cause a driver to lose control during a hunt and come to a standstill.
Lewis came to a halt in a ditch, at which point Thompson apparently hit him in the head with a single round. Lewis was pronounced dead at the scene.
“Mr. “Lewis never got out of the car and the investigation will show that, but seconds after the accident, he was shot, shot in the face and killed,” Francys Johnson, the lawyer for his family, told the Associated Press.
Thompson wrote in an incident report that he shot Lewis in the head because he was afraid he would overpower him, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
“At one point, I heard the engine running on the violin’s car at high speed,” he wrote in the report, according to the outlet.
“I saw him in the aggressive way of driving from front to front and to the cartridge,” Thompson said.
“It appeared to me that the fighter was trying to use his car to injure me. Fearing for my life and safety, I once fired my weapon. ”
But Johnson told the Journal-Constitution that Thompson unnecessarily escalated the situation when he used his car to force Lewis off the road, a dangerous procedure typically reserved for the most at-risk cases.
“No one should bury a loved one simply by a brushed light from the tail,” Rev. said. James Woodall, president of the NAACP of Georgia, to the AP.
“This was a case of racial profiling. We are not necessarily happy now. Yes, the man was arrested, but we’re ready to die. ”
Johnson said Lewis was a carpenter and had recently completed a project for a local ministry.
Thompson will be booked into Screven County Jail and the investigation is still ongoing, the George Bureau of Investigations said.
“I think he’s a nice trooper,” Thompson’s lawyer Keith Barber told the AP. “I think at the end of the day he will be released in this case.”
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