Before a lawsuit could even be filed by the family of a Screven County man fatally shot by a Georgia State Patrol trooper, the state agreed to a record-breaking settlement of $4.8 million this month.
Although a state grand jury chose not to indict the former trooper, federal law enforcement is still investigating the case independent of the civil proceedings.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office said he couldn’t confirm or deny federal involvement in the investigation, but Andrew Lampros, a founding member of the law firm involved in the settlement mediation, said the investigation is ongoing, though that’s all that is known at this point.
The settlement is for the family of 60-year-old Julian Lewis who was fatally shot by a Georgia Highway Patrol trooper the night of Aug. 7, 2020, on a rural dirt road in Screven County.
Lampros isn’t impatient for final word on the federal investigation. The same prosecutors involved in Lewis’ case were also involved in the prosecution of the three men who chased down and killed Ahmaud Arbery on a Sunday afternoon in Brunswick, Ga.
On Feb. 22, 2022, a day short of the second anniversary of Arbery’s murder, a federal jury convicted Gregory McMichael, his son Travis McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan of hate crimes and attempted kidnapping. The three were previously convicted in state court of murder.
In Lewis’ case, Jacob “Jake” Thompson, a 10-year law enforcement officer, was arrested on state charges of murder and aggravated assault a week after he shot Lewis. Thompson was also fired. But a Screven County grand jury chose not to indict the former trooper in June 2021.
Lewis’ son, Brook Bacon, led a march from Screven County to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Savannah in September to ask for justice for his father. An announcement of a federal investigation soon followed.
Lewis was Black. The former trooper who shot him is White.
As Thompson’s defense attorneys noted during pretrial hearings, Lewis’ death was the same year as the civil unrest following the killings of Arbery in February, Breanna Taylor in March in Louisville, Ky., and George Floyd in May in Minneapolis.
Thompson told his bosses and the GBI agents assigned to investigate the shooting that he shot Lewis because he believed Lewis was about to flee from the side of a road and Thompson’s life would have been in danger. With the wheels turned, Lewis’ car was aimed right at him, Thompson said.
At Thompson’s Aug. 10, 2020, bond hearing, Lewis’ widow, Betty Lewis, spoke. Thompson’s excuse for killing her husband was an “ugly lie” that endangers the lives of Black people when law enforcement is involved, she said. “It plays on the stereotypes that Black men are violent.”
She asked the judge to deny bond.
“If it was Julian asking for bond instead of Jacob (Thompson) that answer would be no. We all know that, even if we don’t want it admitted to,” she said.
Although the Dashcam video of what happened the night Lewis was shot has not been released to the public, Lampros said he saw the video as well as the results of GBI testing of evidence.
“There’s no way that Mr. Lewis posed a danger to the trooper or to anyone else,” Lampros said.
When asked where he was standing when he shot Lewis, Thompson told GBI agents that he was standing in front of his vehicle in the path of Lewis’ 1996 Nissan Sentra when he heard the engine revving and saw Lewis jerking the wheel in his direction, according to hearing transcripts.
But the physical evidence contradicted that statement, GBI Special Agent Dustin Peak testified.
Gunshot residue, blood evidence and the position of both vehicles show Thompson was standing between the driver’s side door and the interior of his vehicle when he fired at Lewis, Peak said. Lewis’ vehicle was parallel to the trooper’s Dodge Charger, facing the opposite direction, with less than 10 feet between the drivers’ side doors. The bullet hit Lewis just left of the center of his forehead, Peak said.
The fatal encounter started that night about 8:30 p.m. when Thompson spotted Lewis’ vehicle on state Highway 301. Thompson said The Nissan had a broken brake light, and he hit his lights and siren to pull Lewis over. Lewis acknowledged Thompson by flickering his turn signals and motioning outside his window with a hand, but Lewis didn’t stop on the highway. He turned onto a dirt road and rolled through a stop sign before Thompson executed a Precision Immobilization Technique, a maneuver in which a suspect’s vehicle is struck by a law enforcement’s vehicle.
According to the Georgia Department of Public Safety policy, the PIT maneuver is considered a potentially deadly use of force, and it must be justified. It can only be employed with consideration of the nature of the offense, the suspect’s potential danger if not stopped, the use of other techniques to stop the vehicle, and the danger PIT could pose if it is and if it isn’t employed.
Thompson’s lawyers presented witnesses at his preliminary hearing to bring out that Lewis didn’t have a valid driver’s license, that he was on probation and that, at the time of his death, he had illegal drugs in his system. As the prosecutor brought out, however, Thompson knew none of that, only that he intended to give Lewis a ticket.
When Thompson used his vehicle to strike Lewis’ Nissan, it spun and came to rest facing the opposition direction. All but one tire was off the road in a ditch, the GBI agent testified.
Although Thompson said Lewis gunned the engine and jerked the wheel as if he intended to continue to flee and endangered the trooper in the process, GBI agents discovered hours after the shooting that Lewis’ vehicle was inoperable. The car wouldn’t start until a battery cable and the air filter were returned to the correct positions.
The agents also documented that the dirt under the tires of Lewis’ vehicle show no signs that any of the wheels had turned after the car came to a stop. The front wheels, the lead GBI investigator testified, were pointed away from the road and away from Thompson.
From the Dashcam video, investigators learned that Thompson shot Lewis within one second of putting his patrol car in park and taking his foot off the gas pedal.
The Lewis family attorney said they were baffled that the Screven County grand jury chose not to indict Thompson. Lampros said he believed the district attorney, Daphne Totter, did a good job with the case.
While Thompson’s attorneys brought it out on cross-examination at Thompson’s preliminary hearing that the GBI agents had no reason to think Thompson had any racial animosity when he shot Lewis, there had been a coupe of prior complaints filed against the trooper, Lampros said. But the incidents of racial profiling were investigated by the Georgia State Patrol and were determined to be unfounded, he said.
According to data collected by the Georgia Department of Public Safety in 2018, the last year the agency collected such data, troopers pulled or used firearms 1,725 times, about 1,000 of those incidents involved Black people, according to the press release prepared by Lampros’s law firm in announcing the recent settlement.
He found the numbers shocking, Lampros said. It means Georgia troopers pulled or used firearms about 33 times a week in a single year. It’s not that troopers are never confronted with dangerous situations, Lampros said, but they mostly enforce traffic violations.
Sandy Hodson is a staff reporter covering courts for The Augusta Press. Reach her at sandy@theaugustapress.com.
