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Prosecutor Charges Ex-Milwaukee Cop Who Fatally Shot Sylville Smith With Homicide

An independent investigator said Smith threw his weapon away before he was fatally shot.

Prosecutors charged a former Milwaukee police officer on Thursday with homicide in the fatal shooting of a Black man in August that set off a riot, the Washington Post reports.

Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm alleges that video evidence shows that Sylville Smith threw away his weapon and was on the ground when Dominique Heaggan-Brown shot him in the chest.

Heaggan-Brown, who is also Black, faces up to 60 years in prison if convicted on the first-degree reckless homicide charge.

A special agent with the state’s Department of Justice investigated the shooting and based much of his report on body camera footage.

According to the criminal complaint, the video shows Smith, 23, throwing his gun over a fence between two houses when confronted by the police. Heaggan-Brown, 24, fired a single shot while Smith was tossing the gun, hitting him in the right biceps.

Smith fell to the ground, and Heaggan-Brown fired a second shot two seconds after the first shot, hitting him in the chest.

Heaggan-Brown claimed in an interview with investigators that he shot Smith the second time because he reached toward his waist. However, the footage shows that Smith was unarmed and had his hands near his head at the time of the second shot, the complaint states.

Days later, during the rioting, a man contacted the police and accused Heaggan-Brown of rape.

After investigating the allegation, the police arrested Heaggan-Brown in October and charged him with sexually assaulting two incapacitated men, taking nude photos of unsuspecting victims and trying to pay for sex.

Prosecutors charged him with second-degree sexual assault, as well as two counts of soliciting prostitution. The Milwaukee Police Department fired him after that arrest.

SOURCE: Washington Post

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71 Black Men And Boys Killed By Police

Continue reading 71 Black Men And Boys Killed By Police

71 Black Men And Boys Killed By Police

UPDATED: 2:39 p.m. ET, Jan. 7, 2020 -- Police shooting and killing Black males is all but a centuries-old American tradition among law enforcement in the U.S. But the fact that this apparent rite of police passage is still thriving in 2019 and only seems to be gaining momentum and not slowing should give any American citizen pause as an increasing number of Black people -- especially males both young and old -- continue to be added to a growing list of victims with what seems like a new shooting every week. MORE: Police Shootings And The Public Execution Of Black People Most recently, police in Cobb County, Georgia shot and killed a teenager who they said was identified as a "murder suspect." When cops went to serve a warrant to Samuel David Mallard at his home, the 19-year-old reportedly fled before officers stopped he vehicle and "Issued verbal command," according to a press release from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI). What came next, though, was unclear -- except for the part where four police officers all fired shots at Mallard, who local news outlets said vaguely "did not cooperate" with law enforcement. Conveniently, the GBI also announced that "a gun was found in Mallard’s vehicle," although there were no reports that alleged gun ever posed a threat to the lives of the officers involved. Some of the other victims' names include, but certainly aren't limited to, Tamir Rice; Botham Shem Jean; E.J. Bradford; and Michael Brown. But two of the most recent names that can tragically be included in this deadly equation are Michael Dean, a 28-year-old father who police shot in the head on Dec. 3, 2019, and Jamee Johnson, a 22-year-old HBCU student who police shot to death after a questionable traffic stop on Dec. 14, 2019. One of the most distressing parts of this seemingly nonstop string of police killings of Black people is the fact that more times than not, the officer involved in the shooting can hide behind the claim that they feared for their lives -- even if the victim was shot in the back, as has become the case for so many deadly episodes involving law enforcement. In a handful of those cases -- such as Antwon Rose, a 13-year-old boy killed in Pittsburgh, and Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old killed in Sacramento, both of whom were unarmed -- the officers either avoided being criminally charged altogether or were acquitted despite damning evidence that the cops' lives were not threatened and there was no cause for them to resort to lethal force or any violence for that matter. Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who has been retained in so many of these cases, described the above scenarios in his new book, "Open Season," as the "genocide" of Black people. As NewsOne continues covering these shootings that so often go ignored by mainstream media, the below running list (in no certain order) of Black men and boys who have been shot and killed by police under suspicious circumstances can serve as a tragic reminder of the dangers Black and brown citizens face upon being born into a world of hate that has branded them as suspects since birth.

Prosecutor Charges Ex-Milwaukee Cop Who Fatally Shot Sylville Smith With Homicide  was originally published on newsone.com

Dominique Heaggan-Brown , Milwaukee Police , Milwaukee riot , police shooting , Sylville Smith

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