A North Carolina deputy shot and killed a Black man while serving a search warrant Wednesday, authorities said, spurring an outcry from community members who demanded law enforcement accountability and the immediate release of body camera footage. Authorities wouldn’t provide details of the shooting but an eyewitness said that Andrew Brown Jr. was shot while trying to drive away, and that deputies fired at him multiple times. The car skidded out of Brown’s yard and eventually hit a tree, said Demetria Williams, who lives on the same street. Also Read: Columbus police officer fatally shoots girl swinging knife Williams said after hearing one gunshot, she ran outside, where she saw other shots being fired at the car. “When they opened the door he was already dead,” Williams told The Associated Press. “He was slumped over.” She said officers tried to perform chest compressions on him. A car authorities removed from the scene appeared to have multiple bullet holes and a broken rear windshield. The Pasquotank County Sheriff’s deputy was placed on leave pending a review by the State Bureau of Investigation, Sheriff Tommy Wooten II said at a news conference. Court records show Brown was 42 years old and had a history of drug charges and a misdemeanor drug possession conviction. Dozens of people gathered at the scene of the shooting in Elizabeth City, a municipality of about 18,000 people 170 miles (274 km) northeast of Raleigh, where they expressed their anger and rallied around Brown’s family members. A large crowd later stood outside City Hall while the City Council held an emergency meeting, some holding signs proclaiming “Black Lives Matter” and “Stop killing unarmed Black Men.” As the evening wore on, a group gathered in the parking lot of the sheriff’s office and a crowd that grew to more than 200 blocked traffic on a main thoroughfare of the city, forcing cars to turn around. “The police didn’t have to shoot my baby,” said Martha McCullen, an aunt of Brown who said she raised him after his parents died. McCullen stood on the stoop of Brown’s rental home, her eyes moist with emotion. “Andrew Brown was a good person,” she said. “He was about to get his kids back. He was a good father. Now his kids won’t never see him again.” Wooten said the deputy shot Brown about 8:30 a.m. The deputy was wearing an active body camera at the time of the shooting, said the sheriff, who declined to identify the officer or say how many shots he fired, citing a pending review by the State Bureau of Investigation. Wooten also did not say what the warrant was for. Williams, the eyewitness who also was among those demonstrating outside City Hall on Wednesday evening, said Brown, who was known by neighbors as “Drew,” wasn’t a violent person. “I didn’t believe that (officers) really did that because he wasn’t a threat to them. He was driving off even though he was trying to get away,” Williams said. During the emergency meeting, Black members of the City Council spoke emotionally about the fears of their community amid multiple police shootings across the country and implored investigators to remain transparent. “I’m afraid as a Black man,” an emotional Councilman Gabriel Adkins told his colleagues. “I’m afraid that I may be the next one that my family might have to see on the news that I was gunned down.” Adkins said businesses in the neighborhood of the shooting had begun boarding up their windows in anticipation of violence. “Not only do we need transparency ... we need accountability,” said City Councilman Darius Horton, who called for the immediate release of bodycam footage, the search warrant and a speedy explanation of what led to the shooting. “We need answers. ... Let’s not hide behind anything.” Others councilors urged the community to remain calm until all of the facts about the shooting are known. Brown’s grandmother, Lydia Brown, and his aunt Clarissa Brown Gibson told The Associated Press that they learned about his death through a TV news report. Both said they want the shooting thoroughly investigated. “I am very upset. Andrew was a good person,” Lydia Brown said. The deputy “didn’t have to shoot him like that.” Clarissa Brown Gibson said: “We want to know if he was served with a warrant, why the shooting over a warrant?” Among those who gathered at the scene of the shooting was Keith Rivers, president of the Pasquotank County chapter of the NAACP. “When is it going to stop? We just got a verdict yesterday,” Rivers said in a phone interview, referring to the guilty verdicts handed down Tuesday in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd. “Is it open season now? At some point, it has to stop. We have to start holding the people in charge accountable.” The State Bureau of Investigation will turn the findings of its review over to District Attorney Andrew Womble, who pledged a thorough and deliberate inquiry. “What we are looking for at this time will be accurate answers and not fast answers,” Womble told a news conference. “We’re going to wait for the full and complete investigation ... and we’ll review that and make any determinations that we deem appropriate at that time. This will not be a rush to judgment.” Elizabeth City is located near where the Pasquotank River empties into the Albemarle Sound. It is home to a U.S. Coast Guard air station, Elizabeth City State University and a medical center, all of which support numerous jobs. The city’s population is more than 50% Black and about 40% white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Nearly 23% of residents live in poverty.

Just as the guilty verdict was about to be read in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, police in Ohio shot and killed a Black teenager in broad daylight during a confrontation. The shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant, 16, who was swinging a knife during a fight with another person in Columbus, is in some ways more representative of how Black and other people of color are killed during police encounters than the death of George Floyd, pinned to the ground by Chauvin and captured on video for all the world to see. Also Read: Columbus police officer fatally shoots girl swinging knife Unlike Chauvin’s case, many killings by police involve a decision to shoot in a heated moment and are notoriously difficult to prosecute even when they spark grief and outrage. Juries have tended to give officers the benefit of the doubt when they claim to have acted in a life-or-death situation. While Tuesday’s conviction was hailed as a sign of progress in the fight for equal justice, it still leaves unanswered difficult questions about law enforcement’s use of force and systemic racism in policing. The verdict in the Chauvin case might not be quickly repeated, even as the list of those killed at the hands of police grows. “This was something unique. The world saw what happened,” said Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill, who has examined over 100 use-of-force cases there. To have video, witnesses, forensic evidence and multiple police officers testify against one of their own is unique and “demonstrates how high the bar has to be in order to actually have that kind of accountability,” he said. Convictions like Chauvin’s are extraordinarily rare. Out of the thousands of deadly police shootings in the U.S. since 2005, about 140 officers have been charged with murder or manslaughter and just seven were convicted of murder, according to data maintained by Phil Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University. “This is a success, but there are so many more unjust murders that still need reckoning, that we still need to address,” said Princess Blanding, a Virginia gubernatorial candidate whose brother was killed by a Richmond police officer. Marcus-David Peters, who was Black, was fatally shot by a Black officer during a mental health crisis after he ran naked onto an interstate highway and charged at the officer. Also Read: Protests erupt after Wisconsin police shoot another Black man In Columbus, Bryant has been swinging a knife wildly at another girl or woman pinned against a car when the officer fired after shouting at the girl to get down, according to police and body camera video released within hours of the shooting. The mayor mourned the teen’s death but said the officer had acted to protect someone else. Kimberly Shepherd, who lives in the neighborhood where Bryant was killed, had been celebrating the guilty verdict in Floyd’s killing when she heard the news about the teenager. “We were happy about the verdict. But you couldn’t even enjoy that,” Shepherd said. “Because as you’re getting one phone call that he was guilty, I’m getting the next phone call that this is happening in my neighborhood.” In Chauvin’s case, by contrast, cellphone video seen around the world showed the white officer pressing his knee to the Black man’s neck for more than nine minutes as Floyd gasped for air. It sparked protests across the U.S., and Chauvin’s fellow officers took the extraordinary step of testifying against him. “As we look to future prosecution, the question is going to be: Is this perhaps the beginning of a new era, where those walls of silence are not impenetrable?” said Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor and executive director of the reform-minded group Fair and Just Prosecution. Chauvin’s case could also make future juries more skeptical of police, she said. The day after Bryant was fatally shot, at least two other people were also killed by police in the United States. On Wednesday morning,a deputy fatally shot and killed  a Black man while serving a search warrant in eastern North Carolina. Authorities wouldn’t provide details of the shooting but an eyewitness said that Andrew Brown Jr. was shot while trying to drive away, and that deputies fired at him multiple times. And in the San Diego suburb of Escondido, police said an officer fatally shot a man who was apparently striking cars with a metal pole. On Thursday, a funeral will be held for Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black motorist who was shot during a traffic stop this month in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, just a few miles from the courthouse as the Chauvin trial unfolded. In Chicago last month, 13-year-old Adam Toledo was fatally shot less than a second after he tossed a gun and began raising his hands as an officer had commanded. Police officer Kim Potter, who is white, has been charged with second-degree murder in Wright’s shooting. The former police chief said Potter mistakenly fired her handgun when she meant to use her Taser. She resigned from the police force afterward and was charged with second-degree manslaughter. Wright’s family has called for more serious charges, comparing her case to the murder charge brought against a Black officer who killed a white woman in nearby Minneapolis in 2017. The Cook County state’s attorney’s office will decide whether to charge Eric Stillman, the white officer who shot Toledo on March 29 in Little Village, a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of Chicago’s southwest side. The boy, who was Latino, appeared to drop a handgun moments before the officer shot him. The graphic video of the boy’s death sparked outrage, but some legal experts have said they don’t believe Stillman could or should be charged under criteria established by a landmark 1989 Supreme Court ruling on the use of force by police. Instead of just prosecuting officers after shootings happen, more must be done to prevent such encounters from happening in the first place, said Eugene Collins, who was a local organizer for the NAACP’s Baton Rouge, Louisiana, branch when Alton Sterling, a Black man selling CDs in front of a convenience store, was shot and killed by a white police officer in July 2016. The two officers involved in the encounter weren’t charged in his death. “We’re pulled over more, stopped and frisked more,” said Collins, now head of the NAACP branch. “It’s about putting responsibility on the policymakers.” Activists say the fight for police reform and a more just legal system is far from over. Rachael Rollins, the first woman of color to become district attorney in Massachusetts, said it must start in part by breaking down the misconception that questioning the police or suggesting ways they can improve means “you don’t back the blue.” “The police have an incredibly hard job, and believe me, I know there are violent people that harm community and police but that’s not all of us. So we have to acknowledge that it’s not working and we have to sit together to come up with solutions, but it’s urgent,” said Rollins, the district attorney for Suffolk County, which includes Boston. “I’m afraid, I’m exhausted and I’m the chief law enforcement officer so imagine what other people feel like,” she said.

Columbus police shot and killed a teenage girl who swung at two other people with a knife Tuesday, according to bodycam footage from the officer who fired the shots just minutes before the verdict in George Floyd’s killing was read. Officials with the Columbus Division of Police showed a segment of the footage Tuesday night just hours after the shooting took place in a neighborhood on the city’s east side. The decision to swiftly release the video was a departure from protocol as the force faces immense scrutiny from the public following a series of recent high-profile police killings that have led to clashes. Also Read: Floyd verdict gives hope, if only fleeting, to Black America The 10-second clip begins with the officer getting out of his car at a house where police had been dispatched after someone called 911 saying they were being physically threatened, Interim Police Chief Michael Woods said at the news conference. The officer takes a few steps toward a group of people in the driveway when the girl, who was Black, starts swinging a knife wildly at another girl or woman, who falls backward. The officer shouts several times to get down. The girl with the knife then charges at another girl or woman who is pinned against a car. From a few feet away, with people on either side of him, the officer fires four shots, and the teen slumps to the ground. A black-handled blade similar to a kitchen knife or steak knife lies on the sidewalk next to her. A man immediately yells at the officer, “You didn’t have to shoot her! She’s just a kid, man!” The officer responds, “She had a knife. She just went at her.” Also Read: Biden to America after Floyd verdict: 'We can't stop here' The race of the officer wasn’t clear. The girl was taken to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead, police said. It remains unclear if anyone else was injured. Police did not identify the girl or her age Tuesday. One family member said she was 15, while another said she was 16. The shooting happened minutes before the verdict in the killing of George Floyd was announced. Protesters who had gathered peacefully after that verdict to call for police reform and accountability quickly shifted their focus to the killing of the girl. The crowd of about 100 could be heard chanting outside police headquarters as city officials offered their condolences to the family and acknowledged the rarity of showing bodycam footage so soon after a police shooting. Woods said state law allows police to use deadly force to protect themselves or others, and investigators will determine whether this shooting was such an instance. Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther mourned the loss of the young victim but defended the officer’s use of deadly force. “We know based on this footage the officer took action to protect another young girl in our community,” he told reporters. Meanwhile, outside the briefing, hundreds of protesters pushed past barriers outside police headquarters and approached officers as city officials were showing the bodycam video inside. Many chanted, “Say her name!” While others signified the victim’s age by yelling, “she was just a kid!” Officers with bicycles pushed protesters back and threatened to deploy pepper spray on the crowd. The shooting happened about 25 minutes before a judge read the verdict convicting former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin of murder and manslaughter in the killing of Floyd. It also took place less than 5 miles from where the funeral for Andre Hill, who was killed by another Columbus police officer in December, was held earlier this year. The officer in Hill’s case, Adam Coy, a 19-year veteran of the force, is now facing trial for murder, with the next hearing scheduled for April 28. Less than three weeks before Hill was killed, a Franklin County Sheriff’s deputy fatally shot 23-year-old Casey Goodson Jr. in Columbus. The case remains under federal investigation. Last week, Columbus police shot and killed a man who was in a hospital emergency room with a gun on him. Officials are continuing an investigation into that shooting. Kimberly Shepherd, 50, who has lived in the neighborhood where Tuesday’s shooting took place for 17 years, said she knew the teenage victim. “The neighborhood has definitely went through its changes, but nothing like this,” Shepherd said of the shooting. “This is the worst thing that has ever happened out here and unfortunately it is at the hands of police.” Shepherd and her neighbor Jayme Jones, 51, had celebrated the guilty verdict of Chauvin. But things changed quickly, she said. “We were happy about the verdict. But you couldn’t even enjoy that,” Shepherd said. “Because as you’re getting one phone call that he was guilty, I’m getting the next phone call that this is happening in my neighbourhood."