Prosecutor says officer panicked before shooting man

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – A white Charlotte police officer on trial for the on-duty killing of a black man panicked and didn’t identify himself or give any commands before shooting 12 times at the agitated man seeking help in an unfamiliar neighborhood after a car crash, a prosecutor said during opening statements Monday.

Any agitation by Jonathan Ferrell was because of the September 2013 wreck, which was so violent he lost his cellphone and had to kick out a window to escape. He gave Officer Randall Kerrick no reason to fear for his life and resort to deadly force, prosecutor Adren Harris said.

But an attorney for Kerrick said Ferrell made a number of bad choices after drinking and smoking marijuana following a fight with his fiancee. As officers arrived, he yelled “Shoot me!” Ferrell then charged at Kerrick and two other officers before they could assess the situation and tried to grab Kerrick’s gun when he fell on him after being shot several times, defense attorney Michael Greene said.

“This case is not about race. It never was about race. This case was about choices – Jonathan Ferrell’s bad choices,” Greene said.

Kerrick, 28, is charged with voluntary manslaughter. He faces up to 11 years in prison if convicted. He was charged just hours after the shooting, before black men died during arrests or while in custody in Ferguson, Missouri; North Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, among other places, sparking a national debate on police tactics.

Lawyers for both sides said video from dashboard cameras will support their version of events. That video has never been shown publicly. The first witnesses called by prosecutors Monday were friends and family of Ferrell. They described a man who was not violent or angry.

That was intended to contradict Kerrick’s lawyer, who said Ferrell was upset the night he died after fighting with his fiancee over his future. He went drinking at a bar and smoked marijuana before crashing a car owned by his fiancee’s father, Greene said.

“Who polices the police when they do wrong?” Harris asked jurors, picked in a two-week process. “You do.”

Testimony ended Monday with a paramedic testifying Ferrell was dead when he arrived, with prosecutors showing a photo of him lying face down on the edge of a road, handcuffed in a pool of blood. Several members of Ferrell’s family looked down as the picture was displayed on a big screen.

John Freeze testified he also checked on Kerrick, who showed him a cut on his lip and mumbled that he thought he was about to be sick.

A grand jury initially refused to indict Kerrick, an officer since 2011, on the voluntary manslaughter charge in January 2014, but prosecutors sent the case back a week later because the panel was missing four members. Kerrick was then indicted.

Charlotte agreed to pay Ferrell’s family $2.25 million earlier this year to settle a lawsuit over the shooting.