The Atlanta Police Department said early Sunday that an officer had been fired over the fatal shooting of Rayshard Brooks, 27, at a Wendy’s restaurant. The officer, Garrett Rolfe, who had worked with the department since 2013, fired his handgun three times while he was chasing Mr. Brooks, who the authorities said had seized a Taser from an officer and fired it as he ran. Another officer on the scene, Devin Brosnan, who has been with the department for less than two years, was placed on administrative duty.
The Times analyzed eyewitness videos, police bodycam footage and security camera footage of the events to determine what happened in the minutes preceding Mr. Brooks’s death. We synchronized the footage to hear what happened and determine precisely when Officer Rolfe fired his gun, and we reviewed other details of the shooting released by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
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At 10:33 p.m. on Friday, police officers were called to a Wendy’s restaurant at 125 University Avenue in South Atlanta. Mr. Brooks had fallen asleep in his vehicle, which was parked in the drive-through, causing other customers to drive around him, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in a statement.
10:42 p.m. Officer Brosnan arrives and wakes Mr. Brooks.
Officer Brosnan says: “All right, you good? Just pull in somewhere and take a n … All right, you good?” Mr. Brooks parks in a nearby car space.
Officer Brosnan appears to be unsure whether he should let Mr. Brooks sleep in the car or should take further action.
At10:49 p.m., he contacts police dispatch and requests another police officer.
10:56 p.m. Officer Rolfe arrives and consults with Officer Brosnan. Officer Rolfe questions Mr. Brooks, who says he didn’t drive to Wendy’s but was dropped off. Officer Rolfe rejects the statement.
11:03 p.m. Officer Rolfe checks whether Mr. Brooks is armed. He is not.
11:04 p.m. Officer Rolfe performs a sobriety test on Mr. Brooks over the next seven minutes. Mr. Brooks is compliant and friendly with the officers throughout this time. He says he is not too drunk to drive.
Officer Rolfe asks Mr. Brooks to take a breath test for alcohol. Mr. Brooks admits he has been drinking and says, “I don’t want to refuse anything.”
Mr. Brooks asks the officers if he can lock his car up under their supervision and walk to his sister’s house, which he says is a short distance away. “I can just go home,” he says.
11:23 p.m. The two officers have been at the scene for 27 minutes. When the breath test is complete, Officer Rolfe tells Mr. Brooks he “has had too much drink to be driving,” and begins to handcuff him. Less than a minute later, Mr. Brooks is shot.
Police footage and video filmed by a witness, Tiachelle Brown, shows Mr. Brooks grappling with the officers on the ground. Officer Rolfe says, “Stop that. Stop fighting, stop fighting,” and Officer Brosnan shouts, “You’re going to get Tased.”
Mr. Brooks says “Mr. Rolfe, come on man. Mr. Rolfe.” He seizes a Taser from Officer Brosnan, stands up and punches Officer Rolfe. Officer Rolfe fires his Taser gun. The darts hit Mr. Brooks, and Officer Rolfe continues trying to stun him.
Mr. Brooks runs away, holding Officer Brosnan’s Taser gun. Officer Rolfe gives chase, and continues to try to stun Mr. Brooks.
The security camera footage filmed at Wendy’s shows Officer Rolfe chasing Mr. Brooks. In seconds, Officer Rolfe passes his Taser from his right hand to his left hand, and reaches for his handgun.
While being chased, and in full stride, Mr. Brooks looks behind him, points the Taser he is holding in Officer Rolfe’s direction, and fires it. The flash of the Taser suggests that Mr. Brooks did not fire it with any real accuracy.
Officer Rolfe discards the Taser he is carrying, draws his handgun and fires it three times at Mr. Brooks as he is running away. Mr. Brooks falls to the ground.
11:23 p.m. For the next minute, Officer Rolfe and Officer Brosnan stand over Mr. Brooks, who is injured but moving on the ground, and occasionally reach down to him. Officer Brosnan appears to use his radio. Neither officer appears to provide medical assistance to Mr. Brooks. Another police car arrives at the scene.
11:24 p.m. Another video shows Officer Rolfe running back to his S.U.V. and calling for help over his radio. Bystanders denounce the shooting to a third police officer who is at the scene.
11:25 p.m. Officer Rolfe and Officer Brosnan begin to provide medical assistance. Officer Rolfe appears to unroll a bandage and place it on Mr. Brooks’s torso.
11:30 p.m. An ambulance arrives. Eight minutes later, Mr. Brooks is taken to a hospital, where he dies after surgery (Browne, Kelso, and Marcolini 1-4).
[Paste the following on Google to watch a well researched New York Times video of this event]
The Killing of Rayshard Brooks: How a 41-Minute Police ...
Rayshard Brooks' wife Tomika Miller worried about Brooks' safety after other unarmed Black men, such as George Floyd, were killed by police.
Miller said Brooks was often profiled by police because he had tattoos on his face.
“I’ve always said, 'Baby, I don’t ever want that to be you,'" Miller said during an emotional press conference with Brooks' family Monday. "And he was always like 'no, it's going to change, it's going to change.' He always tried to stay positive about everything."
On Friday, Miller's fears became a reality.
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Family members remembered Brooks as a loving father of three daughters, ages 8, 2 and 1, and a 13-year-old step son.
He took his daughter Blessing to get her nails done and pick up something to eat in celebration of her eighth birthday hours before he was killed.
The following day, Blessing had a birthday party with cupcakes and put on a special birthday dress, anticipating that her father was taking her skating.
"Blessing, Memory and Dream will never get to see their father again," Brooks' niece Chassidy Evans said Monday. “Not only was he a girl dad, loving husband, caring brother, and most importantly to me, my uncle I could depend on. Rayshard Brooks was silly, he had the brightest smile, and biggest heart and loved to dance since we were kids.”
His first cousin Gymaco Brooks said he had seen Rayshard just a week and a half ago when he stopped by while Gymaco played chess with Brooks' older brother.
Gymaco said they all caught up and shared a few laughs and drinks.
“He was always happy, he was always smiling,” Gymaco Brooks said. “Life shouldn’t be this complicated. Life shouldn’t be where we have to feel some type of way if we see a police or somebody of a different color.”
Family attorney, L. Chris Stewart, said the officer who shot Brooks should be charged for “an unjustified use of deadly force, which equals murder.”
Stewart said attorneys were with the family Saturday and watched the children "play and laugh and be oblivious to the facts that their dad was murdered."
“You can’t have it both ways in law enforcement,” Stewart said. “You can’t say a Taser is a nonlethal weapon … but when an African American grabs it and runs with it, now it’s some kind of deadly, lethal weapon that calls for you to unload on somebody.”
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Crystal Brooks, who said she is Rayshard Brooks' sister-in-law, joined protesters outside the Atlanta Wendy's on Saturday night.
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Miller pleaded for the public to peacefully protest. Meanwhile she grieves the loss of the man she says was her best friend.
“I can never tell my daughter 'Oh, he’s coming to take you skating or swimming lessons,'" Miller said. “It’s going to be a long time before I heal. It’s going to be a long time before this family heals” (Ellis 1-3).
Rayshard Brooks's life was one that was dedicated to hard work and his family, according to those who knew him.
The 27-year-old spent most of his life in the Atlanta area with several siblings and cousins. He married Tomika Miller eight years ago and they had three children: Blessing, 8, Memory, 2, and Dream, 1. Brooks also had a 13-year-old stepson, Mekai.
Brooks worked many jobs and in the spring of 2019 he landed in Toledo, Ohio, a former employer told ABC News. Ambrea Mikolajczyk, co-owner of Ark Restoration, said one of her employees recommended Brooks and he quickly proved himself a hard-working member of their small team.
From carpentry to flooring, Brooks helped restore old homes and other properties with huge enthusiasm, according to Mikolajczyk. She noted that even though he didn't have a car, he was always the first person to show up to work every morning.
Rayshard Brooks
"I remember him saying, 'My name is Ray Brooks. I work hard. I can do whatever you need me to do if you just show me how to do it.' And that's what he did," Mikolajczyk told ABC News.
Brooks was living in Toledo to help take care of his father, who had had a heart transplant, according to Mikolajczyk. She was in touch with Brooks' father over the last few days and she said the two spent their time recollecting and strengthening their bond.
"I just talked to his father. He said they were doing a lot of firsts when [Ray] was here," Mikolajczyk said. "He had taken him fishing. He had never seen snow, so when it snowed they went sledding."
Brooks left the company and Toledo in December to go back to his family in Atlanta, but indicated that he was going to return after "getting some ducks in order," according to Mikolajczyk.
She said he kept in touch with a lot of the Ark Restoration team over the last couple of months and talked highly of his family.
"He was an amazing individual. He took care of his family and friends," Mikolajczyk said (Pereira 1-2).
Those who knew him remembered Mr. Brooks, 27, as a caring father and a dancer more distinguished by enthusiasm than ability. His mother-in-law, Rochelle Gooden, said he had loved old rhythm-and-blues songs and liked to barbecue.
“He always took me as Mom, and I always took him as Son,” she said. “I never called him Rayshard, I called him my son.”
At his funeral, the Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, said Mr. Brooks “wasn’t just running from the police.” (Mr. Warnock was later elected to the U.S. Senate.)
“He was running from a system that makes slaves out of people,” Mr. Warnock said. “This is much bigger than the police. This is about a whole system that cries out for renewal and reform.”
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Mr. Brooks was 18 feet 3 inches away when the first shot was fired. Prosecutors said that as Mr. Brooks lay dying, Officer Rolfe kicked his bleeding body and the other officer, Devin Brosnan, stood on his shoulder. The officers, both of whom are white, failed to render aid for more than two minutes, prosecutors said.
In a rare move, officials acted quickly after Mr. Brooks’s death, firing Mr. Rolfe, the officer who shot Mr. Brooks, and charging him with murder and aggravated assault. At a news conference announcing the charges against Mr. Rolfe, prosecutors said that the officer declared, “I got him,” after firing the fatal shots at Mr. Brooks.
Mr. Rolfe faces 11 counts, including murder, and Mr. Brosnan faces three counts, including aggravated assault.
In August, Mr. Rolfe sued the mayor of Atlanta and the interim police chief over his dismissal from the police force, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
The prosecutor who filed the charges against Mr. Rolfe was voted out of office in November, and his successor in late January formally asked the state attorney general to transfer the case against Mr. Rolfe to another county, arguing that her predecessor’s “conduct made it impossible” to prosecute. The request was denied in early February (Ortiz 1-3).
Garrett Rolfe
The Atlanta police chief, Erika Shields, resigned shortly after Mr. Brooks’s death, but her department had been rattled by other recent controversies. On May 30, less than two weeks before the killing of Mr. Brooks, Ms. Shields fired two officers who used a Taser on two college students and dragged them from their car during a George Floyd protest.
In January [2021], Ms. Shields was hired as police chief of Louisville, a city rife with racial tension that ballooned after Louisville police officers shot Breanna Taylor during a botched raid on her apartment in March.
In addition to Ms. Shields’s resignation and charges against the officers involved, the killing of Mr. Brooks also inspired weeks of protests and unrest in Atlanta as well as across the nation (Ortiz 4).
Garrett Rolfe, the Atlanta police officer who was fired from his job after fatally shooting a Black man, Rayshard Brooks, in a fast-food parking lot, was reinstated on Wednesday by the city’s Civil Service Board, which found that Officer Rolfe’s firing violated his due process rights.
Officer Rolfe was terminated one day after the shooting, which came a few weeks after the police killing of another Black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis. The killing of Mr. Brooks led to a new round of demonstrations across the United States, including in Atlanta.
Though reinstated to his job, Officer Rolfe is being placed on administrative leave until the resolution of murder and aggravated assault charges he faces for the June 12 shooting, according to a city news release. Though criminally charged, Officer Rolfe has not yet been indicted, a step needed for the case to move forward. …
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The decision by the Civil Service Board to reinstate Officer Rolfe turned not on whether the shooting was justified, but on whether the city had followed proper procedures when firing him. …
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… in its written order on Wednesday, the board noted that Officer Rolfe was not afforded the opportunity to adequately respond to the city’s notice that it intended to fire him. The decision cited the testimony of Sgt. William Dean of the Atlanta police’s internal affairs division, who said that the firing “seemed rushed.”
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In a statement, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms defended the city’s move to fire Officer Rolfe so quickly, given the level of anger and pain in the streets of Atlanta, a majority African-American city.
“Given the volatile state of our city and nation last summer, the decision to terminate this officer, after he fatally shot Mr. Brooks in the back, was the right thing to do,” Ms. Bottoms said. “Had immediate action not been taken, I firmly believe that the public safety crisis we experienced during that time would have been significantly worse” (Fausset 1-2).
Works cited:
Browne, Malachy, Kelso, Christina, and Marcolini, Barbara. “How Rayshard Brooks Was Fatally Shot by the Atlanta Police.” The New York Times, updated May 5, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/us/videos-rayshard-brooks-shooting-atlanta-police.html
Ellis, Nicquel Terry. “'Baby, I Don't Want That To Be You': Rayshard Brooks' Wife Feared for His Safety.” USA Today, updated June 15, 2020. Net. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/14/rayshard-brooks-marked-daughters-8th-birthday-before-police-shot-him/3186684001/
Fausset, Richard. “Atlanta Officer Who Fatally Shot Rayshard Brooks Is Reinstated.” The New York Times, May 5, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/atlanta-rayshard-brooks-garrett-rolfe.html
Ortiz, Aimee. “What To Know about the Death of Rayshard Brooks.” The New York Times, May 6, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/article/rayshard-brooks-what-we-know.html
Pereira, Ivan. “Rayshard Brooks Remembered for Hard Work and Dedication to Family.” ABC News, June 15, 2020. Net. https://abcnews.go.com/US/rayshard-brooks-remembered-hard-work-dedication-family/story?id=71254647#:~:text=who%20knew%20him.-,The%2027%2Dyear%2Dold%20spent%20most%20of%20his%20life%20in,year%2Dold%20stepson%2C%20Mekai.
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