Atlanta police have fired the white officer who shot and killed a black man Friday night after the suspect apparently grabbed the officer’s taser and tried to escape avoiding arrest for alleged drunk driving.
The department has also placed a second officer on administrative leave.
These actions come a day after Atlanta police chief Erika Shields resigned following another death of an African American man in police custody, sparking a night of violent protests in Atlanta.
Police dash and body cam video shows 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks asleep in his car and blocking the drive-thru lane of a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant.
It took a few moments for officer Garrett Rolfe to waken the dozing Brooks.
The video shows the two having a cordial conversation, but Brooks didn’t seem to know exactly what city he was in and thought he was at a Burger King instead of a Wendy’s. At one point, Brooks told the officer “I know you’re just doing your job.”
When Officer Devin Brosnan arrived, Brooks failed a breathalyzer, was handcuffed and appeared to resist arrest.
The officers wrestled him to the ground, demanded he stop fighting and warned Brooks that he was going to get tasered. Brooks apparently grabbed one of the officer’s tasers and pointed it at the police as tried to run off. Rolfe opens fire at least three times and Brooks falls to the ground.
Fellow officers attempt to comfort Rolfe as an emergency team tends to Brooks, who was pronounced dead at a hospital.
The shooting set off a day of protests in Atlanta Saturday which started peacefully but turned violent. Demonstrators tried to block an interstate highway and the Wendy’s restaurant where Brooks was shot was burned to the ground.
Thirty-six people were arrested, and police are looking for the suspect who started the Wendy’s fire.
Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields resigned Saturday even as the investigation into the shooting had barely begun.
“I have served alongside some of the finest men and women in the Atlanta Police Department. Out of a deep and abiding love for this city and this department, I offered to step aside as police chief...It is time for the city to move forward and build trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve."
A lawyer for the Brooks family, L. Chris Stewart, says he wants Officer Rolfe to be charged with “an unjustified use of deadly force, which equals murder.”
“You can't say a taser is a nonlethal weapon...but when an African American grabs it and runs with it, now it's some kind of deadly, lethal weapon that calls for you to unload on somebody,” Stewart said.
But the only African American member of the U.S. Senate – South Carolina’s Tim Scott - says more questions need to be asked.
“The question is when the suspect turned to fire the taser, what should the officer have done?” Scott told CBS’s Face the Nation, adding that what happened in Atlanta “is certainly a far less clear one than the ones that we saw with George Floyd and several other ones around the country.”
Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Paul Howard tells CNN his office will decide later this week what kind of charges, if any, Rolfe would face.
"(Brooks) did not seem to present any kind of threat to anyone, and so the fact that it would escalate to his death just seems unreasonable," Howard said. "If that shot was fired for some reason other than to save that officer's life or prevent injury to him or others, then that shooting is not justified under the law," he added.
The death of Brooks comes as the entire country is grappling with the issue of how police treat African American men suspected of even relatively minor crimes.
Many Americans regard last month’s death of George Floyd in Minneapolis as the last straw in a number of such incidents.
Floyd died after an officer held his knee on Floyd’s neck when Floyd was suspected of trying to spend a counterfeit $20 bill. His death set off protest marches in nearly every major U.S. city and in several European capitals.
