Julian Lewis didn’t pull over for the Georgia State Patrol cruiser flashing its blue lights behind him on a rural highway. He still 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 mere 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, midway between Savannah and Augusta. “And I’m just scared.”
But 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 the trooper 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.
Ayy, I was up north in '03, but I ran some Sadr City patrols in '04. Vivid memories of watching Cheaper by the Dozen in full kit while we listened to the mortars walking in. And a complex ambush on the way back to BIAP. I was on a 240 in the second truck. There was some musical car horn that seemed to signal it—not La Cucaracha, but something like that; I think one of these days I’ll hear it again somewhere and have a legit ptsd flashback—and a fruit stand or something on the right exploded, and a car behind me somewhere as well, I believe. Then some dudes came out on a balcony behind and to the left and started licking rpgs at us. Good times. Csm got some shrapnel in his ass, which didn’t improve his temper, but at least we got a lot of jokes out of it.
Oh man. My first IED was very strange. We were driving on what we called route kill zone, and there was some traffic. And then we came to an overpass and seemingly everyone else took the off ramp. Came out the other side and just blammo. I saw the vehicle in front of me get pushed a lane over and then disappear into smoke and dust. I locked up the brakes so I wouldn’t smash into them.
Turned out there was a sniper down the road and a can full of guys with RPGs on the bridge behind us. But we had no casualties or significant vehicle damage, so they apparently dipped. We hightailed it to a rally point that was literally 500 meters from where the attack happened. Front vehicle thought we were the ones that got hit.