The widow of a Baptist pastor shot and killed last fall by police in Toccoa, Ga., has filed a federal lawsuit alleging “gross and plain incompetence” displayed by an officer’s use of deadly force.
The lawsuit filed March 15 by Abigail Ayers seeks monetary damages for the fatal shooting of her husband, Jonathan Ayers, 28, last September. He was pastor of Shoal Creek Baptist Church, Lavonia, Ga., at the time he was shot outside a gas station where he had just gotten money from an automated teller machine.
A Stephens County grand jury in December found that Billy Shane Harrison, the police officer who fired the fatal shot, and Kyle Bryant and Chance Oxner, his partners in a multicounty narcotics team working on an undercover drug sting, were justified in the use of lethal force, because the way Ayers drove his vehicle as he attempted to leave the scene put them in reasonable fear for their lives.
The civil lawsuit filed in a federal district court in Gainesville, however, alleges that the officers acted in ways that would cause a reasonable person to believe they were not police officers, but armed criminals.
The lawsuit says the men’s dress and grooming were intended to convince the public they were not police officers but drug dealers as part of their undercover role.
The lawsuit says a police badge around Harrison’s neck was so camouflaged by his T-shirt that it was barely identifiable as a police ID and could easily be confused as a piece of “bling” or decorative jewelry, especially if a weapon were being simultaneously pointed at a startled private citizen. (ABP)
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