Article from Reason by Joe Setyon.

Newly released body camera footage appears to show that a man in Charlotte, North Carolina, was trying to obey police’s orders to drop his weapon prior to being shot and killed.

On March 25, officers with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department responded to at least one 911 call about a man “pointing [a gun] at employees” of a local Burger King, according to CNN. When officers arrived at the scene, they encountered 27-year-old Danquirs Franklin in the parking lot. Franklin had a gun and would not obey multiple commands to drop it, police said. Eventually, one of the officers, Wende Kerl, shot and killed him.

The shooting sparked considerable controversy in the Charlotte area due to some conflicting witness statements about what happened, The Charlotte Observer reported. The shooting occurred in the same city where Keith Scott was killed by police back in 2016. Conflicting reports about whether or not Scott was armed were never really settled, and the officer who shot him did not face criminal charges.

In Franklin’s case, Kerl’s lawyer and the Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s Office did not want body camera footage to be released. A judge disagreed, ruling that the footage must be released to the public Monday.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons