Dash camera video and investigative documents are raising new questions about the fatal shooting of a Black motorist by a Georgia state trooper nearly four years ago.

Julian Lewis didn’t pull over for the Georgia State Patrol cruiser flashing its blue lights behind him on a rural highway. He still didn’t stop after pointing a hand out the window and turning onto a darkened dirt road as the trooper sounded his siren.

Five minutes into a pursuit that began over a broken taillight, the 60-year-old Black man was dead — shot in the forehead by the white trooper who fired a single bullet mere seconds after forcing Lewis to crash into a ditch. Trooper Jake Thompson insisted he pulled the trigger as Lewis revved the engine of his Nissan Sentra and jerked his steering wheel as if trying to mow him down.

“I had to shoot this man,” Thompson can be heard telling a supervisor on video recorded by his dash-mounted camera at the shooting scene in rural Screven County, midway between Savannah and Augusta. “And I’m just scared.”

But new investigative details obtained by The Associated Press and the never-before-released dashcam video of the August 2020 shooting have raised fresh questions about how the trooper avoided prosecution with nothing more than a signed promise never to work in law enforcement again. Use-of-force experts who reviewed the footage for AP said the shooting appeared to be unjustified.

  • @borfEnglish
    20•4 days ago

    But if they do that then they’ll go up to three stars and it’s even harder to get away then! When you get up to four stars they shut down the bridges and send helicopters and at five stars they start sending tanks–

    I jest, but the rapid military escalation of conflict in the GTA games is reflective of the “send enough dudes until the bad guy is dead” modus operandi of American law enforcement.

    What I am saying is: either use your guns or make them illegal if you don’t use them anyway.

    The people clutching the guns are the same ones with the “blue line flag punisher skull” tattoos and decals. Maybe if the Black Panther party made a comeback though.