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Elizabeth City residents protested after Andrew Brown Junior died
Photo: Gerry Broome / dpa
The family lawyers of an African American man killed in North Carolina accuse the police of having "executed" the man. The attorneys said Tuesday that an independent autopsy revealed that Andrew Brown Junior was shot in the back of the head. A total of five shots hit him while he was in the car. Four shots hit his arm, the shot in the back of the head was ultimately fatal. The lawyers denounced that it was an outright execution. They said that Brown did not want to flee, but only wanted to get to safety because the officers shot him. He is innocent.
Brown, 40, was shot dead last Wednesday in the small town of Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Pasquotank District Sheriff Tommy Wooten said the incident occurred while officers were executing a search warrant. Wooten did not provide any precise information about the course of the crime or the reason for the search warrant. According to local media reports, the unarmed family man Brown got into his car during the search and wanted to drive away. Thereupon was shot.
An official autopsy is pending, although the death certificate confirms that Brown died of a shot in the head. The FBI field office in Charlotte announced that it has opened a nationwide investigation into the shooting and said in a statement that it would work with federal attorneys at the Justice Department to see if federal laws have been violated. The officer who fired the shots is on leave until further notice, according to the police.
The case came shortly after the sensational guilty verdict against white ex-cop Derek Chauvin in the case of the slain African American George Floyd.
The killing of the unarmed 46-year-old in the state of Minnesota almost a year ago led to mass protests against racism and police violence in the USA.
In the past year alone, 243 black people were shot dead by police in the United States, according to a Washington Post database.
kim / dpa / Reuters
