Two months ago, Johnny Hollman, a deacon at an Atlanta-area church died after an encounter with an Atlanta police. At the time, he had called 911 after being involved in a car crash.
While he was expected to receive some help, it’s not what he ended up getting.
According to an investigation from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), after Hollman “became non-compliant,” officers attempted to take the 62-year-old into custody. Then after minutes of struggling between the deacon and Officer Kiran Kimbrough, Hollman became unresponsive and died.
At the time, police revealed that a stun gun did go off, but did not specify if it hit Hollman.
The last person who spoke to the deacon was his daughter, Arnitra Hollman, who claimed she was on the phone with her father while he was being arrested and said that the last words she heard from him were, “I can’t breathe.”
Sound familiar?
Weeks after he died, it was unclear if Hollman’s family would take any legal action, since there was no known footage of the incident.
But after weeks of investigating, video of the incident could be publicly released as early as Thursday and an autopsy revealed that his death was ruled a homicide, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Medical examiner Melissa Sims-Stanley also shared that a heart disease contributed to his death and based on her review of the video and her discussions with investigators, she found that he was unresponsive after he was stunned with a Taser.
Hollman family lawyer Mawuli Davis, said that Hollman told officers that he had asthma and could not breathe.
On Monday, after a meeting with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, Davis said that the family of Hollman believes that Kimbrough should be charged with murder, telling reporters, “Our position is that it was an unwarranted, unjustifiable assault that led to a death. And in my book, that is murder.”
While Willis is still interviewing witnesses, Officer Kimbrough has been fired by the Atlanta Police Department for failing to follow the department’s standard operating procedures, according to Fox 5 Atlanta.