The family of Emantic Bradford Jr., the 21-year-old shot and killed by police inside a mall in Alabama on Thanksgiving night after being wrongly identified as a gunman, is not happy that the state attorney general has decided to take over the investigation into the death.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the family in the case, lashed out at Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall after he decided to oversee the case into the fatal shooting, calling the move premature and “deeply disturbing,” NBC News reports.
“This could potentially undermine any trust that the Black community has in this process,” Crump said.
That means that Jefferson County’s newly elected district attorney, Danny Carr, the county’s first Black district attorney, will no longer oversee the case. Marshall wrote in a letter to Carr that due to Carr’s “personal relationships” with some of the protesters calling for the officer’s prosecution, his office would take over to avoid any possible conflict. That is even though Marshall acknowledged in that same letter that he did not believe such conflict exists.
“All the family wants is for justice to be served,” Bradford’s mother, April Pipkins, said. “By taking the case from Mr. Carr, we feel they are trying to protect this officer who killed my son.”
Bradford, an independent autopsy revealed, was shot three times in the back by the officer who remains unidentified
Following Marshall’s decision, Crump and Bradford’s family have reiterated their demands for police to reveal the identity of the office responsible and to release the video footage from the mall.