Attorneys representing the family of a Black man fatally shot in the back of the head as he drove away from authorities have launched a federal lawsuit seeking in excess of $30 million in compensatory and punitive damages, the Brown family legal team announced on Tuesday. Attorneys accused officers in the suit obtained by NBC News of “intentional and reckless disregard of his life” in the death of Andrew Brown Jr., a 42-year-old father of seven. 

“All individual defendants did so with shocking and willful indifference to Brown’s rights and with conscious awareness that it could cause Brown severe bodily harm or death,” attorneys said in the suit. 

Warning: Videos in this story contain profanity and disturbing footage of a police shooting that may be triggering to some viewers.

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Brown, who had both hands on the steering wheel when deputies opened fire on him, was killed on April 21 outside his home in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, after law enforcement officers tried to serve him a drug-related arrest warrant. Officials have been slow to release body-camera and dash-camera video of the shooting even after both prosecutors and a state autopsy report ruled Brown’s killing “justified.” “Mr. Brown’s death, while tragic, was justified because Mr. Brown’s actions caused three deputies to reasonably believe it was necessary to use deadly force to protect themselves and others,” Pasquotank County District Attorney Andrew Womble said during the news conference in May. 

Womble also said in ruling the shooting justified that when Brown got into his vehicle it constituted a threat. “When you employ a car in a manner that puts officers’ lives in danger, that is a threat,” Womble said. “And I don’t care what direction you’re going—forward, backwards, sideways. I don’t care if you’re stationary, and neither do our courts and our case law.”

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Brown’s family attorneys have maintained that local authorities’ interpretation of the shooting Investigator Daniel Meads, Deputy Robert Morgan, and Cpl. Aaron Lewellyn were involved in is inaccurate. “Let’s be clear. This was a execution,” attorney Chantel Cherry-Lassiter said in April after viewing an earlier released 20-second clip of police footage blurring the deputies’ faces. “Andrew Brown was in his driveway. The sheriff’s truck blocked him in his driveway so he could not exit the driveway.

“Andrew had his hands on his steering wheel. He was not reaching for anything. He was not touching anything.” 

Harry Daniels, an attorney on the Brown family legal team who spoke at a news conference about the lawsuit on Wednesday, emphasized that filing the lawsuit gives them federal subpoena authority to get all video, recordings, and records in the case. “And no district attorney, no county administrator, and no state court can stop us from doing that because the federal law trumps the state law in North Carolina,” Daniels said. “This lawsuit was easy to draft because the facts in this case (are) very easy. Anybody can see it was an unlawful killing, a murder of Andrew Brown.”

Daniels went on to refute Womble’s earlier point that case law supports the presumption of a threat the minute a suspect employs a car. Daniels said state case law established since 2005 in a federal 4th Circuit Court of Appeals case maintains that a person can not shoot someone driving away from him or her. In the case, the individual admitted to trying to hit officers, but once he left “fleeing away, they had no authority to shoot him,” Daniels said.

“That’s exactly what happened to Andrew Brown,” Daniels said. “That’s exactly what happened.”

Bakari Sellers, another of the Brown family’s attorneys, said at the press conference: “We didn’t feel as if we could get justice in the sheriff’s office and we didn’t feel we could get justice in the state court, so we had to come where we believe lady justice is blind.”

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