Within 30 seconds of arriving, Brewer had exited his car, confronted a man in the street whose pants were around his ankles and fatally shot him once in the chest.
While the deputy’s body camera did not capture the shooting, the Sheriff’s Office released footage from his car’s dashboard camera on Monday that offered another angle of the encounter, which many in Houston had quickly criticized as a case of excessive force and the latest example of an officer killing an unarmed black person.
In the video, Brewer, who is black, stops his car behind two men having an altercation, with shoving, in the street. The deputy can be heard yelling at Danny Ray Thomas, the man whose pants were down, as he walks toward the car. “Get down, man! Get on the ground,” the deputy screams repeatedly, before, out of the camera’s view, a single gunshot rings out. Thomas, 34, was pronounced dead at a hospital.
On Monday night, Brewer declined to comment.
The shooting came in a month of renewed scrutiny and protests across the country over the use of force by the police. Hours after Thomas was killed Thursday, hundreds of protesters flooded the streets of Sacramento, blockading the entrance of a sports arena, over the death of Stephon Clark, 22, who was shot by officers in his backyard on March 18.
Like those shot in certain other high-profile police encounters before them, both Thomas and Clark were black and unarmed, and their encounters were captured on video and spread widely on social media.
On Monday, the Harris County sheriff, Ed Gonzalez, vowed that the shooting would be fully investigated and said the department had released the dashboard video as a sign of its transparency. The Houston Police Department is leading the investigation of the shooting because it occurred within the city, but the sheriff’s department is conducting a separate administrative review, Gonzalez said.
“We are going to take this very seriously,” Gonzalez said at a news conference Monday. “We are going to review all policies and procedures to see how we can continue to be better and learn from these situations.”
Brewer, who joined the sheriff’s department in 2016, was placed on routine administrative leave after the shooting.
Gonzalez said that Brewer was equipped with a Taser, which he did not use. The sheriff said that deputies had been trained on the use of nonlethal force, including during encounters with people who may have a mental illness.
Relatives of Thomas told The Houston Chronicle last week that he suffered from depression and that two of his children were drowned in August 2016. The children’s mother has been charged with capital murder. “Knowing that he was OK when I woke up every day made me fine,” his sister, Marketa Thomas, told reporters on Thursday. “We’d been through everything together.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
MATTHEW HAAG © 2018 The New York Times