Lewis Kendall in Elizabeth City reports:
About 200 protesters raised signs, flags and fists and walked the streets of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, Wednesday night after a judge ruled that the immediate release of police video footage of Andrew Brown’s killing last week was denied.
The march of the evening meandered through the flat streets of the mostly black city with around 18,000 inhabitants in the coastal plain of the state near the Outer Banks.
The crowd blocked multiple intersections and sang “Release the Tape” and “20 Seconds Not Enough” in reference to the short clip of body camera footage that Brown’s family was allowed to see.
“You’re only making it worse by not being transparent,” said Dustin Sidebottom, 50, an Elizabeth City resident who was arrested Tuesday in protest but was back on Wednesday waving a large Black Lives Matter flag .
Sidebottom said officials’ handling of the Brown case resulted in a breach of trust that was extremely difficult to repair.
“No matter what he did, he didn’t deserve to die,” he added.
Brown, a 42-year-old father of seven, was killed when Pasquotank County police tried to issue arrest warrants on April 21, the day after a former Minneapolis police officer was convicted of the murder of George Floyd other recent police killings, including the deaths of Adam Toledo, 13, in Chicago and Ma’Khia Bryant, 16, in Columbus, Ohio.
North Carolina has its own history of police murders, including the publicly known cases of Keith Lamont Scott and Jonathan Ferrell, both in Charlotte.
In a separate trial earlier this week, Brown’s family and lawyers watched a 20-second clip of body camera footage in which officers shot Brown’s car as he drove away. The family also released the results of a private autopsy that found Brown was killed by a gunshot wound to the back of the head.
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