“Family of Roger Heard Jr. demands transparency and accountability following fatal shooting at Chattanooga Speedway gas station”
CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS
By Ellen Gerst
Attorneys representing the family of Roger Heard Jr., who was shot by police at a Speedway gas station last month, allege officers used excessive force and violated Heard's constitutional rights by continuing to shoot him once he was on the ground.
They held a news conference Wednesday with Heard's mother, stepfather and local attorney McCracken Poston.
Heard, 34, was shot and killed at the Chattanooga gas station Aug. 11 after police officers in plain clothes attempted to arrest him on warrants, according to a statement from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
Heard's parents spoke to the media Wednesday morning, along with Poston and Atlanta-based civil rights lawyers Jonathan Grunberg and Mark Begnaud. They're continuing calls from the community for additional footage of the shooting to be released publicly, attorneys said, and also seeking records of texts and radio traffic exchanged during the incident.
"Everything they said about my son, the way they put him down, they did not know him as he was, not now," Gloria Lewis, Heard's mother, said during the news conference. "My son was a changed man, trying to provide for his kids and family. They took the joy out of my life."
The officers acted recklessly and irresponsibly when serving the warrant at the Speedway at Third Street and Holtzclaw Avenue, attorneys said in a statement Tuesday.
"The citizens of Chattanooga deserve to know if plainclothes officers in an unmarked police car charging into a crowded gas station with guns blazing is what the Chattanooga Police Department trains its officers to do," the statement said. "And they deserve to know if the job of a Chattanooga Police Department officer is to continue shooting a man who is already lying on the ground shot, wounded and with no weapon in hand."
Officers could have conducted the stop in a quieter, less populated place, displaying lights and wearing uniforms to make it clear they were police, attorneys said Wednesday.
. . . .
Attorneys at Wednesday's news conference said they have not seen a copy of the warrant being served on Heard at the Speedway.
"There wasn't an indication that, say, this was a warrant being served for murder or something like that," Grunberg, one of the family's attorneys, said. "Again, I want to bring it back to the fact that, at the time that warrant was being served, Mr. Heard was not somehow committing a violent crime that was presenting a danger to those around him. He was slowly driving through a gas station when he was stopped."
. . . .
