WOODBINE, Ga. – – The family of a Georgia woman who was shot dead while the sheriff’s deputies were executing a search warrant questioned the way officers conducted the operation on Wednesday.
Latoya James, 37, was fatally shot and killed on May 4 after Camden County MPs with a drug-related search warrant forced entry into a home at 4:51 a.m. that day. A man in the house, Varshawn Lamont Brown, was also shot dead and hospitalized for his injuries.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is investigating standard law enforcement shootings in the state. Two days after the shooting, the agency released a video with a body camera in which MPs reported on the dark door of the house and then immediately pushed their way inside.
Several shots were fired within seconds of MPs entering the house. The proxy who carried the body camera carried a shield that blocked much of the video. It doesn’t show who opened fire, and neither James nor Brown are featured in the three-minute clip.
“This is the case when an unarmed black woman is shot dead during a botched or forged search warrant,” Malik Shabazz, an attorney for James’ family, told reporters Wednesday at a news conference in Woodbine, near the Georgia-Florida border.
Shabazz and Reginald Greene, another family lawyer, said MPs didn’t give the house residents enough time to respond before coming through the door.
Greene said the GBI told him that the deputy wearing the shield was the only officer who recorded a video with a body camera while the warrant was being carried out. They called for the rest of the video to be released, which the GBI says is nearly four hours long.
The attorneys compared James’ murder to that of Breonna Taylor, the black woman who was killed in an early morning drug robbery by police in Louisville, Kentucky on March 13, 2020.
James’ mother, Betty Jean James, said her daughter didn’t deserve to die.
“They took my baby. They took their lives and then they took their dignity,” the crying mother told reporters. “They took them away from me. And I want to know why.”
The Georgian authorities did not say what triggered the search warrant.
Camden County prison records show that Brown, 46, was jailed in March for drug driving and again in April for drug possession and failure to give in to an emergency vehicle.
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