By Paul Woolverton
The Fayetteville Observer
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — A former police chief who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York thinks a Fayetteville police officer acted appropriately when he shot and killed Nijza Lamar Hagans in January 2013.
Separately, lawyers for the city of Fayetteville on Monday ended their effort in federal court to keep secret from the public a video of the shooting following its publication last week by The Intercept online news website and other media outlets, including the Observer. The person who leaked the video has not been identified.
Hagans’ father Reggie Hagans has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city over Nijza’s death.
Officer Aaron Lee Hunt, who is American Indian, shot and killed 22-year-old Nijza Hagans, who is black, during a traffic stop in a residential driveway off South Virginia Avenue of Morganton Road. Hagans had a gun poking out of his pocket, Hunt said afterward, and appeared to reach for it before pushing the car’s door into Hunt and jumping out.
Hunt fired three times at Hagans’ front as Hagans came out of the Ford SUV and rushed past him, the video shows. He fired two more times at Hagans’ back as Hagans tried to run away.
Autopsy evidence appears to show he was hit twice from the front and twice in the back.
“Once a person is armed ... then he is immediately a threat, and poses a deadly threat to life and limb of the officer,” said Associate Professor John DeCarlo of the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay. DeCarlo watched the video of the shooting.
When Hagans pushed the car door into Hunt and moved out of the car toward Hunt, DeCarlo said, Hunt couldn’t know if Hagans intended to shoot him, fight him or run away, “but we know that he has a gun and the outcome couldn’t possibly be good. So the officer is not required to get shot at in order to take action.”
Under North Carolina law and federal court rulings, the shots to Hagans back are permissible, DeCarlo said.
“It’s a shame that anyone has to lose their life over a traffic stop,” he said. “However, the totality of the circumstances clearly say that he remains an armed suspect, still able to turn around and shoot you, even though he’s running away.”
DeCarlo is a former chief of police in Branford, Conn.
The lawsuit contends the traffic stop was illegal, conducted as a pretext to search Hagans’ vehicle as part of a pattern of racially motivated traffic stops by Fayetteville police officers.
“At no time during his encounter with Defendant Hunt did Nijza Lamar Hagans point, hold, brandish, reach for, display, or otherwise use or threaten to use a weapon of any kind,” the suit says.
The city was trying to keep the video of the shooting from being made public. State law allows police departments to keep from the public videos such as this one, made by camera on the dashboard of Hunt’s police cruiser. It says in court papers that in lawsuits such as this, normally it obtains a court order telling plaintiffs’ lawyers, such as Billy Richardson and Chuk Umerah in Hagans’ case, they must not share the video with anyone. But the city failed to do that this time.
After the city’s lawyers realized this, they requested that the video and other items be returned by Richardson and Umerah. The city followed up with by filing a motion to ask a judge to make Richardson and Umerah give up the materials. In court papers, the city’s lawyers contend that Richardson and Umerah were obliged to keep the video and four other items of evidence secret until the judge made a decision on the matter.
The paperwork also says that Richardson proposed an out-of-court settlement in which the video would be kept secret.
Richardson, in papers filed last week, counters that the video and other materials weren’t required to be kept secret and the city’s lawyers waived their option to keep the video privileged from public dissemination.
With the publication of the video last week, the city’s lawyers conceded that their request is now moot.
Jimmie Buxton, head of the Fayetteville branch of the NAACP, viewed the video last week.
The organization has been outspoken in cases in which it thinks police officers were wrong in police shootings. But in this case, Buxton said, the organization is withholding comment while the lawsuit is pending.
“I just suggest that anybody that’s interested, needs to see the full tape and hear the sound” of when the shots were fired, Buxton said.
Copyright 2015 The Fayetteville Observer