The Camden County Sheriff’s office released video footage related to the fatal shooting of Leonard Cure, a man who was just freed from a wrongful conviction. The body camera video shows the officer having a meltdown after firing the fatal shot.
The department announced the release of three videos including dash cam and body cam footage of the interaction from Monday evening. Authorities say Cure was pulled over for speeding above 100 mph and reckless driving. The video shows Cure pulling over to the right line. Immediately after stopping the car, the officer gets out of his patrol car, demands Cure to exit his truck and place his hands on the back of the vehicle.
“Put your hands back here!” the deputy shouts. “I ain’t doin’ shit,” Cure responds.
In the video, the deputy reaches for Cure’s arm which he snatches away. The deputy then pulls out a taser and points it at his chest. Cure then complies with the officer’s commands but refuses to put his hands behind his back. Instead, he started asking a series of questions about why he was under arrest instead of just getting a speeding ticket and why he was being threatened with the Taser.
“Hands behind your back. You’re going to jail!” the deputy shouts in the dash cam. Cure tilts his head up toward the sky, pointing as if he’s looking to God and the Taser is deployed at his back.
Read what happened next from Reuters:
At that point Cure and the deputy grapple with each other, with both men grabbing each other around the face and neck, the video shows. Cure is heard saying “Yeah, bitch,” twice as the deputy says “sit down” multiple times, the video shows. The deputy hits Cure with a baton and then fires one shot at point blank range with his service weapon and a pop is heard, according to the video.
After telling Cure to “stay down” after he briefly struggled to sit up, the deputy then handcuffs Cure, prone on the asphalt, and begins to render aid, the video shows. Other uniformed personnel arrive and attempt to revive Cure with chest compressions, but his body is eventually loaded into an ambulance, the video shows.
The officer is seen in the body cam being escorted away from Cure’s body. “What the f-ck?!” he shouted. The video captures him being consoled by other department members as he cried and hyperventilated. One person asked him if he was shot at and checked him for injuries.
Cure’s family retained Benjamin Crump for legal representation and watched the footage with him Wednesday, the report says. In a news conference, Crump said the deputy triggered Cure’s emotional stress from previously being incarcerated and . Cure’s brother, Michael, said in the conference his brother was on his way home after visiting their mother.
“I was uneasy every time he left because I was like, ‘Would he get a traffic stop? Is he going to be a victim of that?’ From the time that he was released, he was never set free. I lived in constant fear every time the phone ring... that they’re going to lock him up, beat him up, or kill him, I live with that. That is torture,” said Leonard’s mother, Mary Cure.
The officer hasn’t been named by the department but he identified himself in the video as Camden County Sheriff’s Deputy Aldridge.