Was Andrew Brown Jr 'executed'? Black man, 42, shot dead by cops was charged with 100 crimes dating back to 1988
ELIZABETH CITY, NORTH CAROLINA: Andrew Brown Jr had a long history of aggressive encounters with police, including a 2016 incident in which he battled officers and was tasered. At the time of his death, he was facing another possibly lengthy jail time in connection to a November 2020 arrest for allegedly selling drugs.
The Black father-of-seven, who was shot dead by sheriff's deputies in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, last month, had a rap sheet going back to his childhood and was jailed at least eight times. Relatives maintain that Brown was unarmed and have labeled his death an "execution".
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Over the course of three decades, Brown, 42, faced more than 100 charges, ranging from misdemeanors for breaking and entering, making threats, and assault with a deadly weapon to six felony drug convictions, according to court records obtained by the Daily Mail.
Brown's first felony arrest for first degree trespass occurred when he was 16 years old, according to the news outlet. As per state records, he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and robbery the same year, but the case was later dismissed. He had picked up the first of hundreds of drug offences by 1996, starting with marijuana possession.
'Career criminal'
He was convicted of several felonies for possession and intent to distribute cocaine, as well as a variety of other drug offenses, between April 1999 and April 2010. The "career criminal", the Mail said, had a violent class in July 2016 when he was tazed during an encounter with Pasquotank sheriff's deputy, Jay Winslow. Brown was also investigated for a series of assaults dating back to his adolescence, many of which were directed at his female partners.
Additionally, from 1997 to 2016, Brown, was charged with resisting a public officer, otherwise known as resisting arrest or obstructing a police officer, on at least six occasions. He was accused of using his vehicle to escape in two of those cases, foreshadowing the fatal April 21 encounter when he was shot in the back of the neck while apparently attempting to drive away from deputies, the Mail reported.
'An execution'
Brown's murder, the latest in a string of high-profile, deadly encounters between cops and African Americans, has been dubbed an 'execution' by grieving family members. The fatal incident was caught on several bodycam videos, but a judge has so far refused to release the entire two-hour video, allowing only mourning relatives to watch snippets in private.
Family members insisted that Brown had his hands on the wheel - "visible at all times" - prior to the shooting outside his home after seeing six separate clips on Tuesday. He only tried to flee after Pasquotank County deputies opened fire, putting his BMW in reverse to back up and never posing any kind of threat to them, according to the family's attorney, Chance Lynch.
"At no point did we see any police officers behind his vehicle. At no point did we see Mr Brown make contact with law enforcement," he told reporters, describing what followed as a "massacre by a firing squad," and demanded that the deputies involved be served long prison sentences. According to an independent autopsy conducted by Brown's family, he was shot four times in the arm and once in the back of the neck.
'He wasn't a violent person'
“He wasn’t a violent person,” Daniel Bowser, who said he and Brown were friends for almost 30 years, told The News & Observer. “He didn’t mess with guns, he didn’t tote no guns," he said, adding: "I don’t care what they put out there, he didn’t deserve to die.”
The issuance of the warrant, according to prominent civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, who is also representing Brown's family, was an effort to assassinate Brown's character. "The people who killed Andrew Brown, they want to protect their identity and protect their rap sheet," Crump said.