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.
In my opinion shooting back raises the likelihood of getting out alive as you are not just a sitting duck.
And I to think people generally don’t want to murder. But what people want more than not to kill is to not be killed.
So use your gun or lose your gun. Doesn’t make sense otherwise.
Okay, you just killed a cop. What do you think happens next? Do you think its over and done with, just go home for the day? No, you are, at best, going to be arrested and put on trial for murder. It doesn’t matter if you were justified or not. And when they arrest you, it will be at gun point. So, will you let them arrest you at gun point or will you start shooting the police again?
You’re also assuming your some badass who will walk away without getting shot also or in any way injured. Not to mention the emotional toll of killing someone has on most people.
Trial for killing a cop in America? They going to send the entire department and turn you, your house, and family into swiss cheese.
You drive in the garage and give the stolen car a new paint job, and then you are back to zero stars.
Was it GTA we were talking about or real life?
The alternative is you’re dead …did u not read the story?
Okay so why have guns then for the average person when they don’t get used to defend themselves against the governing forces at hand? Shooting at random adults and children is okay but shooting cops is over the line?
Shoot governing forces or ban guns is my point. And everybody replaying just ignores the ban guns part.
How old are you?
You’re assuming that the cops percieve you as a threat and are guaranteed to kill you no matter what you do. I won’t deny that’s happened but its very far from the norm. In a lot of cases the cops are stupid, or negligent or scared and prematurely react without foresight. Add a civillian possessing a gun and and flagrantly threatening to use it and you turn a situation that could be disarmed into a inevitable violent conflict.