ELIZABETH CITY, N.C. — A North Carolina deputy shot and killed a man while executing a search warrant Wednesday, the sheriff’s office said.
Pasquotank County Tommy Wooten II said at a news conference that a deputy from his department shot Andrew Brown Jr. while serving the warrant with the assistance of another nearby sheriff’s office about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday. He didn’t know Brown’s age, and didn’t release the name of the deputy. Their races weren’t immediately clear.
The deputy was placed on leave pending a review by the State Bureau of Investigation.
WAVY-TV reported that neighbors heard multiple shots fired. Wooten declined at a news conference to say how many shots were fired.
He said that the deputy was wearing a body camera. It could take time for that video to be released since releasing such footage requires a judge’s approval in the state.
A crowd gathered around the shooting scene in the city of nearly 18,000, located 170 miles northeast of Raleigh.
Keith Rivers, president of the Pasquotank County chapter of the NAACP, called for an independent investigation into the shooting and criticized the sheriff’s office for taking hours to release details, even after a crowd of about 100 people gathered near the scene.
“When is it going to stop? We just got a verdict yesterday,” Rivers said in a phone interview, referring to the guilty verdicts handed down Tuesday in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the fatal shooting of George Floyd. “Is it open season now? At some point, it has to stop. We have to start holding the people in charge accountable.”