Julian Lewis didn’t pull over for the Georgia State Patrol cruiser flashing its blue lights behind him on a rural highway. He 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 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, between Savannah and Augusta. “And I’m just scared.”
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 Thompson 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. An investigative file obtained by AP offers the most detailed account yet of the case, including documents that spell out why the Georgia Bureau of Investigation concluded the 27-year-old trooper’s version of events did not match the evidence.
Footage of the pursuit has never been made public. It was obtained by Louise Story and Ebony Reed, authors of a new book about race and economic inequality titled “Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap.”
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