Via Radley Balko, Georgia Preacher Jonathon Ayers is no longer with us. A mere 29 years old, with a wife 16 weeks pregnant, Ayers did what a preacher is supposed to do, helping sinners. For that, he was executed by two plain-clothes officers of the Georgia tri-county drug task force.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
“I’ve rerun it in my mind,” Carpenter [Ayers’ brother-in-;aw] said. “He had used an ATM inside, got into his car and then a black Escalade pulled up and [they] jumped out … If they ID’d themselves, he couldn’t hear them because his windows were up.”
GBI spokesman John Bankhead said witnesses heard the two men identify themselves as law enforcement officers.
The sheriff also told reporters the agents “yelled, ‘Police. Stop.’ ”
Stephens County Sheriff Randy Shirley said the shooting came after Ayers hit one of the agents with his car as he backed up. The second one shot Ayers because the 29-year-old minister had maneuvered his car toward him in a “threatening manner,” Shirley said.
Ayers wasn’t involved in any drug deal. Ayers had done nothing wrong to justify the interest of the drug officers. Ayers is dead. What Ayers did, as is shown in the videotape of the execution, is go into a convenience store and use the ATM, then go to his car and begin to drive away. As he did, a black Cadillac Escalade, a vehicle preferred by drug officers because it makes them feel like drug dealers themselves, pulls up and two officers jump out and start shooting, point blank, at Ayers’ car. And Ayers is now dead.
There is no argument that Ayers had done anything, anything, criminal, precluding the choir from singing that he deserved to die anyway. He didn’t.
The police try to shift the blame by insisting that it was Ayers fault that the cops had to execute him.
But the excuse falls flat in the case of this preacher-man. He committed no crime. He had no reason to fear the police, or worse still, to want to do harm to an officer. His family has tried to understand this as a situation where Ayers didn’t realize they were police, and might have thought they were out to rob someone who had just gone to an ATM. Why Ayers, the innocent man, needs to explain how he reacted to police who jumped out and started shooting at him is beyond me. Unlike cops, preachers aren’t trained in the art of responding to people shooting at them.
There is no explanation, of course, from the Georgia Sheriff as to why his men felt compelled to try to jump Ayers at the gas station, endangering many lives in the process, in the first place. They jumped to the wrong conclusion in the first place (what a surprise), and then exacerbated the situation by their tactical arrogance of expecting their target to understand that he was to submit to their authority. There were 100 better ways to handle the situation, all of which would have left Ayers alive and provided the police with the opportunity to find out that their knee-jerk assumptions of criminality were dead wrong. And they were dead wrong.
Now, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is going to investigate. Too bad there wasn’t time taken to investigate before they executed Ayers. And make no mistake. Preacher Jonathan Ayers was executed.
There is no argument that Ayers had done anything, anything, criminal, precluding the choir from singing that he deserved to die anyway. He didn’t.
The police try to shift the blame by insisting that it was Ayers fault that the cops had to execute him.
Police say they saw Jonathan Ayers with the target of a prior drug and prostitution investigation before they approached him. Stephens Co. Sheriff Randy Shirley, said, “The target was seen meeting with the deceased and at one point getting out of the car of the deceased. They went down from a local establishment down to the Shell Station.”The claim is that Ayers drove his car at an officer in a “threatening manner.” From the video I saw, he drove his car in the same manner everyone else drives their car, but the officer jumped in front of him, as he assumed the shooting position that killed Ayers. But the police had their excuse at the ready. They are well-rehearsed in press statements that shift the blame from their officers firing bullets at innocent people to dangerous evil people who just didn’t listen.
Shirley said that undercover officers then confronted Ayers, after he left the store. “They identified themselves as police and Mr. Ayers backed up into one of the agents, and then pulled his vehicle forward in a fast motion toward the other agent… at which time the agent fired two shots into the automobile,” he said.
But the excuse falls flat in the case of this preacher-man. He committed no crime. He had no reason to fear the police, or worse still, to want to do harm to an officer. His family has tried to understand this as a situation where Ayers didn’t realize they were police, and might have thought they were out to rob someone who had just gone to an ATM. Why Ayers, the innocent man, needs to explain how he reacted to police who jumped out and started shooting at him is beyond me. Unlike cops, preachers aren’t trained in the art of responding to people shooting at them.
There is no explanation, of course, from the Georgia Sheriff as to why his men felt compelled to try to jump Ayers at the gas station, endangering many lives in the process, in the first place. They jumped to the wrong conclusion in the first place (what a surprise), and then exacerbated the situation by their tactical arrogance of expecting their target to understand that he was to submit to their authority. There were 100 better ways to handle the situation, all of which would have left Ayers alive and provided the police with the opportunity to find out that their knee-jerk assumptions of criminality were dead wrong. And they were dead wrong.
Now, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is going to investigate. Too bad there wasn’t time taken to investigate before they executed Ayers. And make no mistake. Preacher Jonathan Ayers was executed.
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This story also highlights an issue that angers me more and more: The repeated half-lie that the officers “identifed themselves as police.” When cops want us to identify ourselves, they want to see a driver’s license or state ID. Yelling “Stop! Police!” is not identifying themselves as police, it’s claiming to be police. Big difference. Especially when someone not dressed in a uniform or arriving in a cop car is running at you and reaching for a weapon and you have half a second to decide how to respond.
What really angers me though is the horrible feeling that I already know how the “investigation” is going to turn out, because we’ve seen it happen before.
Yup to both, and your first point is very important. Of course, what constitutes acceptable/sufficient notice of authority is always determined by the authority itself in the first instance. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a court to hold that yelling “stop, police” alone is sufficient to justify executing someone for their failure to obey.
Windy,
I agree. There is a lack of outrage in this case. Other sites actually defend the officers straight out. I saw the video and I gotta tell you, it’s chilling.
I can only hope that attention comes back on this case and that police procedures are changed. I mean, they could have stopped him outside the store, not yet to his car. They could have gotten a uniform car to pull him over. There is so much wrong with this and I am not sensing the outrage.
I hate to say this, I think there is a racial and a religious component to it. I hope not, but I fear so.