Also on
Sunday, Senate Republicans outlined a legislative proposal to enact police
reforms — their answer to a sweeping bill introduced last week by House
Democrats.
Brooks’
father, Larry Barbine, told The Washington Post in an interview from his Toledo
home that the family was in shock, unable to accept that his son had been
killed just as his life seemed to be going better than it had in years.
“I can’t
understand why it happened like that,” Barbine said of the shooting. “I heard
of his passing on Saturday. Not his passing, his murder. I’m just devastated.”
In an
interview with “CBS This Morning” two days after her husband’s death, Tomika
Miller, Brooks’ widow, called for the officers involved to be prosecuted.
“I want
them to go to jail. . .. If it was my husband who shot them, he would be in
jail,” Miller said in the interview, which will air in full Monday morning. “He
would be doing a life sentence. They need to be put away.”
According
to a preliminary report by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, officers were
dispatched Friday night to a Wendy’s in Atlanta on a complaint about a man
parked and asleep in the drive-through. The officers performed a sobriety test
on the man, later identified as Brooks. When Brooks failed the test, officers
attempted to put him in custody. The response escalated, and Brooks grabbed an
officer’s stun gun and began running away.
Video of
the encounter appears to show Brooks turning back toward the officer and
pointing the Taser at him, at which point the officer is seen drawing a weapon
from his holster and firing at Brooks.
Paul
Howard, the Fulton County district attorney, told CNN on Sunday that a decision
on whether to bring charges in the case will be made “sometime around
Wednesday.”
“He did
not seem to present any threat to anyone,” Howard said of Brooks. “The fact
that it would escalate to his death seems unreasonable.”
The
police department has fired Rolfe, the officer who shot his gun, and pulled the
other officer, Devin Brosnan, off street patrols. Atlanta Police Chief Erika
Shields resigned Saturday.
Efforts
to reach Rolfe and Brosnan by phone on Sunday were unsuccessful. Vince
Champion, Southeast regional director of the International Brotherhood of
Police Officers, said the union is providing legal services to the officers but
declined to make the lawyers available for an interview and said he was
speaking for the officers.
He said
he did not have much background on the officers and could not opine on whether
the shooting was justified because “we have no investigation.”
“Unlike
the district attorney, the former chief of police and the mayor, I don’t base
my facts and do things just on one video,” Champion told The Post. “I do
investigations, as I’ve done all my life as a police officer, and I get both
sides of the story.”
Champion
was critical of the decision to terminate Rolfe within 24 hours of the
shooting, arguing that it was made to “pander” to rioters and that it denied
the officer his due process rights.
And he
said that after the chief’s resignation, officers in Atlanta now feel they have
“nobody on their side.”
“We are
in a Catch-22 between both sides at this point,” Champion said. “We’ve got the
citizens that we depend on not liking us, we’ve got the administration and the
government that we depend on not liking us. . .. We welcome changing, we always
do. It’s the cities and counties that don’t want to pay for it.”
The
University Avenue Wendy’s where Brooks was shot was in flames Saturday after a
day of protests that continued into Sunday. Authorities announced a $10,000
reward for information about who started the fire.
Dozens of
signs and bouquets of flowers lined the fence around what used to be the
restaurant’s outdoor seating area. Protesters stood on the tables holding signs
and chanting “Say his name!” and “Ray shard Brooks!” Spray-painted tributes on
the walls read “RIP Ray shard.” And just before 5 p.m., a group of bikers
pulled into the parking lot blasting anti-police songs by the 1990s rap group
NWA.
Rolfe,
the officer who shot Brooks, was hired in 2013, while the other officer,
Brosnan, was hired in 2018, according to the Atlanta Police Department.
Rolfe was
assigned to the department’s High Intensity Traffic Team, a special operations
unit aimed at reducing alcohol- and drug-related traffic violations. Members of
the team are “specially trained and equipped to detect and process alcohol
and/or drug-impaired drivers,” according to a police department document,
although it was not immediately clear whether the unit was still in operation.
In May
2019, Rolfe was awarded a silver pin for making between 50 and 99 DUI arrests
within a year, the department said in a Facebook post at the time.
Rolfe was
one of four officers accused of making a false arrest in March 2015. The
Atlanta Citizen Review Board, which investigates allegations of police
misconduct, ruled the claim against him as not sustained, meaning there was
insufficient evidence to support a finding of misconduct, according to a
document on the review board’s website. The allegation against one of the other
officers involved was sustained, with the board recommending he receive
additional training.
Friday’s
shooting has drawn national attention. Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost in her
bid for Georgia governor in 2018, said protesters were right to demand
accountability and should continue to push for change until meaningful reforms
are made.
“There’s
a legitimacy to this anger. There’s a legitimacy to this outrage. A man was
murdered because he was asleep in a drive-through, and we know that this is not
an isolated occurrence,” she said on ABC News’s “This Week.”
Sen. Tim
Scott (R-S.C.) noted that Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms had acted swiftly
in the wake of the shooting. Scott said it was hard to parse whether the police
had used excessive force.
“The
question is, when the suspect turned to fire the Taser, what should the officer
have done?” he said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
Lawyers
for the Brooks family have said that Brooks was celebrating his daughter’s
birthday earlier that night. Brooks had been looking forward to the party all
week, according to Barbine.
“The
night he got killed, he had had a few drinks and he was heading back. He had
called me and he was telling me about the birthday party, and how he was glad
to be with the kids. I asked him, ‘How are you and your wife coming along?’ and
he said, ‘I’m back in good graces.’ And I told him, ‘That’s where you need to
be,’” Barbine said.
Brooks
was born and raised in Atlanta. He had some troubled years, Barbine said, but
had recently settled down, straightened out his relationship with his wife, and
was getting into a routine of working hard and showing up for their kids.
Kiara
Owens, Brooks’ 26-year-old half-sister, said in an interview that Brooks worked
in construction and traveled for the job, working gigs in Ohio, Mississippi,
Texas and Florida. He had no real permanent residence for this reason, often
staying in hotels or with family friends while in Atlanta, she said.
“I don’t
fully fault the officers, I don’t fully fault my brother,” she said of the
shooting. “Everyone was just trying to make it home that night.”
Bottoms
announced Saturday that Interim Corrections Chief Rodney Bryant would take over
leadership of the department as interim chief until a permanent replacement is
found.
Bryant
spent a long career in law enforcement, and held several high-level leadership
roles in the Atlanta Police Department before retiring from it in April 2019
and later taking a role as acting head of the Atlanta City Detention Center.
Bottoms said former chief Shields would remain with the department in a
still-undetermined role.
Amid the
mounting calls for change at the national level, Senate Republicans plan to
release a proposal on Wednesday that addresses officer misconduct, training and
tactics, and a system for local departments to better report cases in which
officers’ actions result in serious injury or death, two of the legislation’s
authors said Sunday.
Scott and
Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who have been working on the GOP’s answer to a
bill released by House Democrats last week, both endorsed a ban on chokeholds
Sunday. But while Scott stressed on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that both chambers
of Congress and the White House “want to tackle the issue,” it is not clear
whether such a ban will appear in the GOP bill.
In a bid
to hold individual officers more accountable for their actions, the House
Democrats’ proposal includes a provision to change the doctrine of “qualified
immunity,” making it easier to sue officers who “recklessly” violate civil
rights, whether or not they did so with intent. Scott called that provision a
nonstarter.
“The
president sent the signal that qualified immunity is off the table. They see
that as a poison pill on our side,” Scott said on “Face the Nation.” “So we’re
going to have to find a path that helps us reduce misconduct within the
officers. But at the same time, we know that any poison pill in legislation
means we get nothing done.”
Protests
continued in several cities over the weekend. In New York, thousands of
demonstrators dressed in white marched Sunday to draw attention to violence against
black transgender people.
In
California, activists and local authorities have demanded investigations into
the hanging deaths of two black men in recent weeks.
On
Saturday, Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger requested that
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra investigate the death of Robert
Fuller, a 24-year-old black man who was found hanging from a tree last week
near city hall in Palmdale, about an hour north of downtown Los Angeles.
Becerra’s
office did not respond to a request for comment Sunday. According to the Los
Angeles County medical examiner-coroner’s office, a decision on the cause of
Fuller’s death has been deferred pending additional investigation.
More than
215,000 people have signed a petition demanding a full investigation, and at a
briefing by city authorities on Friday, local residents questioned why Fuller’s
death was originally classified as a suicide.
Authorities
are also investigating a separate incident in which Malcolm Harsch, a
38-year-old black man, was found hanging from a tree near a homeless encampment
in Victorville, about an hour east of Palmdale, on May 31.
The San Bernardo County Sheriff’s Department is conducting a death investigation but
told the Victorville Daily Press on Saturday that no foul play is suspected.
An online
petition for a probe into Hirsch’s death had garnered more than 16,000
signatures as of Sunday night.
