Authorities say a Georgia police officer was fired and charged with murder a week after he fatally shot a 60-year-old man trying to escape a traffic stop
SAVANNAH, Ga. A state government in Georgia was fired a week ago and charged with murder after he shot a 60-year-old man who was trying to stop a rural traffic, authorities said.
The president of Georgia’s NAACP chapter cited the genocide of Julian Edward Roosevelt Lewis as a chilling example of a Black man who was irregularly murdered by a white law enforcement officer. A lawyer for Lewis’ family said the trooper initiated the traffic stop over a burnt-out tail light and Lewis was shot almost immediately after the trooper forced his car into a ditch.
“Mr. “Lewis never got out of the car and the investigation will show that, but seconds after the accident, he was shot dead, shot in the face and killed,” said attorney Francys Johnson.
Johnson said information was given to the family by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who arrested 27-year-old Jacob Gordon Thompson on charges of assault and assault on Friday. The agency did not provide those details in its own statement regarding Thompson’s arrest.
The GBI said Lewis was fatally shot on Aug. 7 after a yacht in rural Screven County, about 60 miles (northwest of Savannah).
Thompson had tried to pull over a car for a traffic accident when the driver tried to flee, the GBI said in a news release. The agency said the trooper chased the car behind several country roads before performing a maneuver that forced the car to stop in a ditch.
A moment later, Thompson fired one firearm that struck Lewis and killed him, the GBI said. The trooper was not injured.
GBI spokeswoman Nelly Miles confirmed that Lewis was black and the trooper was white, but she declined to comment further on the matter. Richard Mallard, district attorney for the district court that covers Screven County, did not immediately return a phone call.
The Georgia Department of Public Safety said it fired Thompson after he was charged Friday. He had been a trooper for the Georgia State Patrol since 2013.
Thompson’s attorney, Keith Barber, declined to comment on the case’s specifications, but said he believes the former trooper “has an excellent character.”
“I think he’s a nice trooper,” Barber said. “I think at the end of the day he will be released in this case.”
The trooper was charged amid a nationwide scare over racial injustice after George Floyd died in May under a knee from a Minneapolis police officer. In Georgia, authorities also recently charged three white men in the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery as he walked through her neighborhood, as well as two white police officers in the shooting of Rayshard Brooks after he tried to escape a DUI arrest.
“No one should bury a loved one simply by a brushed light from the tail,” the Rev. said. James Woodall, President of the NAACP of Georgia. “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’ wife, Betty Lewis, learned of the troop’s arrest when she left the funeral home after making final arrangements for her husband’s funeral service on Saturday.
“She fell to her knees,” Johnson said. “She said, ‘This is a step toward justice.'”
Lewis was a carpenter who recently helped a local ministry complete a construction project, Johnson said. He said Lewis’ wife told him her husband did not have a gun.
“He was not a perfect member of the Lewis family,” he said, “but as his wife said, ‘he was too good to die the way he did.’
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