A prosecutor said Wednesday that Andrew Brown Jr. hit North Carolina sheriff’s deputies with his car before they opened fire and killed him a week ago while serving drug and arrest warrants at his Elizabeth City home.
It was the first time any official in the case indicated Brown did anything to threaten law enforcement officers.
The latest development came during a court hearing in which Superior Court Judge Jeff Foster denied a media request to immediately release the footage to the public, which has continued to demand answers about what exactly happened that led to Brown’s death.
In the ruling, however, Foster ordered that Brown’s son Khalil Ferebee and other immediate family members be allowed to view redacted footage from dashcam and body cameras worn by four of the officers involved within 10 days. Foster also declared the officers’ faces must be blurred in the videos before their release.
The videos will be held from release to the family for no less than 30 days and no more than 45 days, which will allow ongoing investigations to be completed, Foster said. The court will consider release at that point, depending on any potential charges.
Earlier, District Attorney Andrew Womble told the judge in the hearing that he viewed body camera video and disagreed with a characterization by Brown family attorneys that the unarmed man’s car was stationary when deputies began shooting.
Womble said the video shows that Brown’s car made contact with the Pasquotank County deputies twice before shots could be heard on the video.
“As it backs up, it does make contact with law enforcement officers,” he said, adding that the car stops again. “The next movement of the car is forward. It is in the direction of law enforcement and makes contact with law enforcement. It is then and only then that you hear shots.”
Womble argued that body camera video from the shooting, a portion of which was shown to the family on Monday, should be kept from the public for another month so that state investigators can make progress on their probe of the shooting.
Lawyers for the Brown family, on the other hand, continue to express outrage that the full body camera footage remains concealed from the public now a full week after the shooting.
Pasquotank County Sheriff Tommy Wooten II, who petitioned the judge late last week, was seen Wednesday morning entering an Elizabeth City courtroom where he was expected to ask for the release of the video, which would finally shed more light on how the shooting unfolded.
The hearing was held a day after the FBI regional office in Charlotte announced that it had opened a federal civil rights investigation into the case.
From the beginning, Wooten and other officials have promised transparency in the case but refused to release the video, saying they lacked the legal authority to do so.
Under North Carolina law, a judge must generally sign off on the release of law enforcement body camera footage. Leaders of the Elizabeth City government have demanded the release of the footage, and a coalition of media filed a petition in court to make it public. The state’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper also issued a statement calling for the swift release of the footage.
“Only a judge can release the video,” Wooten said last week. “That’s why I’ve asked the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation to confirm for me that the releasing of the video will not undermine their investigation. Once I get that confirmation, our county will file a motion in court ... to have the footage released,” he said.
On Monday, Brown family attorneys described the shooting as “an execution” following the family’s first viewing of a heavily redacted version of body camera footage which showed Brown had his hands on the steering wheel throughout the entire episode.
Only one officer’s body cam footage was shown to the family, and no other footage or dashcam video was presented, according to attorneys.
“We do not feel that we got full transparency,” attorney Ben Crump said Monday. “We only saw a snippet of the video... They only showed one body cam video, when we know there were several videos.”
For days, witnesses at the scene had been the only ones to provide any early accounts of the shooting in which Brown was mortally wounded as Pasquotank County sheriff’s officers executed a search warrant about 8:30 a.m. April 21 at Brown’s residence just west of the Outer Banks.
Family members said Brown, a father of seven children, had no weapons and was unarmed at the time.
On Tuesday, the results of an independent autopsy revealed Brown, an unarmed Black man, was shot five times and killed by a single gunshot to the back of the head when North Carolina sheriff deputies opened fire on his car as they moved in to serve drug and arrest warrants.
Brown sustained four shots to his right arm, which were non-fatal wounds, attorneys said. As he attempted to escape the gunfire by pulling his car out of a driveway at his home, he was shot in the back of the head, killing him, Crump said, citing an independent pathologist hired by Brown’s family to examine his body.
On Tuesday, Crump also shared a video from Elizabeth City Council on social media showing a band of deputies in tactical gear riding in the bed of a sheriff’s pickup truck as they rounded a street corner on their way to Brown’s home.
Seven deputies have been placed on leave since the shooting.
Information provided by The Associated Press was used to supplement this report.
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