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Grand jury declines to indict officers in Georgia man's killing
The law enforcement officers involved in the shooting death of a black man in Savannah, Georgia, in January will not face state criminal charges, a grand jury said in a report Wednesday. But it noted that the U.S. Justice Department last week opened an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death.
Boyd’s death quickly drew scrutiny because of conflicting claims about whether Boyd was holding a weapon at the time he was shot.
The Savannah Police Department’s interim chief initially said Boyd had fired on officers, but a later statement from police said only that he had “confronted officers with a gun.” After that, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said it was a BB gun.
In its report, the grand jury — which said it had nine black jurors, nine white jurors and one Hispanic juror — said the BB gun looked like a real pistol, and that eight officers had fired at Boyd.
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“It is the opinion of the grand jury that the shooting of Ricky Boyd was justified as being reasonably necessary to prevent Ricky Boyd’s perceived imminent use of unlawful deadly force against law enforcement officers nearby,” the report said.
Of the contradictory statements from officials, the report said the police had been releasing information “as it became available” from preliminary reports, adding that it was “provided in good faith to the media.”
Body camera footage of the episode has not been released. The grand jury said that only two Savannah police officers were wearing operational body cameras at the time, and only one of those was in the front yard during the shooting.
William R. Claiborne, the civil rights lawyer representing Boyd’s relatives, said that family members felt they had been lied to by the police, the district attorney’s office for Chatham County, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
He added that the officers who shot Boyd had not been named and that certain details had never been made clear, including the number of times Boyd was shot, and why the BB gun was not found to have identifiable DNA or fingerprints on it.
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“The family wants the truth,” Claiborne said. “They are solely focused on the truth at this point. We want all of this information out and in public, so the public can draw their own conclusions.”
He added that members of the Boyd family did not testify before the grand jury because they had “absolutely no trust in this process.” In their report, the jurors said they had listened to the family’s recorded statements to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
The grand jury said a “federal investigation may delay public disclosure” of the files from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and grand jury transcripts. It said the Chatham County district attorney had informed them that the Justice Department had begun an investigation into Boyd’s death last week.
A spokeswoman for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said Wednesday that the agency had completed a “thorough, complete investigation” of the shooting, and that the full case file would be available for release once the case was closed. She said she had no details about a federal investigation.
The Chatham County district attorney and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
JACEY FORTIN © 2018 The New York Times
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