The district attorney in Hunt County, Texas said he plans to have a grand jury weigh a possible indictment of a white police officer charged with murder after fatally shooting a 31-year-old Black man.
“Based on the evidence I’ve seen at this point we will present to the grand jury,” Noble Walker told Reuters, referring to the shooting of Jonathan Price on Saturday by Shaun Lucas, an officer in the Wolfe City Police Department.
Lucas has been charged with murder by the Texas Rangers, according to a statement from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which said a preliminary investigation indicated the officer’s actions “were not objectively reasonable”.
The statement said Lucas had responded to a disturbance call on Oct. 3 when he sought to detain Price, 31, who “resisted in a non-threatening posture and began walking away”.
Lucas deployed his Taser and then fired his service weapon at Price, who later died at the hospital, the statement says.
Lucas, who is being held on $1 million bail, could not be immediately reached for comment.
James Bono, a spokesman for the Texas Municipal Police Association, said Lucas had been supplied with a lawyer hired by the group. He declined to comment on the shooting.
The incident has threatened to turn Wolfe, a city of 1,500 people in North Texas, into the latest flashpoint in a national uprising over racism and police brutality that was set off by the death of George Floyd on May 25.
“Everyone in this community will echo that this shouldn’t have happened to Jonathan, because of the character that he had,” civil rights attorney Lee Merritt, who is representing the Price family, told a news conference on Monday. “However, this shouldn’t happen to anybody and it happens far too often to unarmed Black men, particularly in North Texas.”
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