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Two Atlanta-area law enforcement officers were charged this week with felony murder for their roles in a confrontation in 2016 with an armed Black man who was shot nearly 60 times as they tried to arrest him, according to court documents.
The officers — identified in an indictment as Eric A. Heinze, a deputy U.S. marshal, and Kristopher L. Hutchens, a Clayton County police officer — were members of a fugitive task force that had been serving an arrest warrant for the man, Jamarion Robinson.
The task force members told the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that Mr. Robinson had fired a handgun at them two or three times on Aug. 5, 2016, after the officers broke through the door of his girlfriend’s apartment in East Point, Ga., a Fulton County suburb of Atlanta.
Mr. Robinson, 26, had been wanted on charges of attempted arson and aggravated assault of a police officer, according to the officers, who said that he still refused to drop his gun after being shot. Three task force members shot at Mr. Robinson, state investigators said.The family of
Mr. Robinson has contested law enforcement accounts of what happened that afternoon. The fatal shooting of Mr. Robinson, who was Black and whose family said he had schizophrenia, touched off protests over racial injustice and excessive force, straining relations between local law enforcement authorities and their federal partners.
Mr. Robinson’s relatives said that his body had been riddled with 59 entry wounds and 17 exit wounds before it was dragged down a flight of stairs…Read more.
