A picture of Andrew Brown Jr. in a memorial on Saturday. Gerry Broome / AP Hide caption
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Gerry Broome / AP
A picture of Andrew Brown Jr. in a memorial on Saturday.
Gerry Broome / AP
After weeks of legal maneuvers, Andrew Brown Jr.’s family finally got the chance to learn about the final moments in the 42-year-old’s life on Tuesday, before he was last shot by Elizabeth City, NC sheriff deputies in this month.
Questions about Brown’s death have continued since the black man was shot dead in his car by Pasquotank County Sheriff’s MPs as they arrived to conduct search and arrest warrants related to drug charges. It was April 21, just hours after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of the murder of George Floyd.
Brown’s eldest son, Khalik Ferebee, said the videos he was shown Tuesday are similar to the short clips he’d already shown.
“The video I saw last week is pretty much the same as what I saw today. Just a few more details,” said Ferebee.
“But he wasn’t wrong,” he said of his father. “What is in the dark will come to light. … He will get his justice because it wasn’t right.”
Brown’s younger son, Jha’rod Ferebee, also described fatal shooting as an excessive use of force. “My father … didn’t deserve to be killed. … He wasn’t a threat at all.
A trial, he said, would prove that the murder was “in no way justified”.
“It’s impossible,” he added.
Bakari Sellers, one of several lawyers representing the Brown family, reminded reporters and others who watched the press conference of the trauma the family experienced when they saw their loved ones die on police cameras.
“My heart goes out to these two young men who witnessed their father’s murder on video. They went through something in the past two hours that not many of us can ever imagine.”
Although the family only had access to about 20 minutes worth of video in about two hours, Sellers said, “We feel it tells the full story of what happened that day.”
“What we saw in this video was an unjustified murder,” he said, “means further investigation and has some criminal liability.”
Until now, Brown’s immediate family had only had access to a 20-second clip of body camera footage of the fatal shootout. According to an independent Autopsy on behalf of the familyThey described his death as an execution. The investigation found that Brown was hit by five bullets, including the one in the back of the head that killed him.
No footage has yet been released to the public.
Pasquotank County Sheriff’s officials have defended their decision to dispatch a team of seven to arrest Brown on a drug warrant, referring to his criminal record and history of resisting the arrest.
Court documents According to the approval of Brown’s footage for Brown’s son, Khalil Ferebee, there are five body and dashboard camera videos that have been reviewed by Judge Jeffery Foster. It is said that when the MPs arrived, “Brown was trying to escape the scene and escape concern.” This allegedly resulted in at least one and up to three officers shooting at Brown in the car.
The videos are between 3 minutes and 1 second and 34 minutes and 58 seconds long. Of all the available footage, Forster has decided that only the three-minute video will be fully released, showing less than two minutes of the longest of the family’s five videos. Of the others, only about four and a half minutes are posted.
Neither the family nor their lawyers are allowed to make copies of the materials.
The North Carolina Sheriff’s assassination is the latest in a national series of incidents involving deadly officials who sparked protests demanding reforms to law enforcement and social justice.
