Mississippi Won’t Prosecute a Deputy Who Killed a Man Yelling ‘Shoot Me’

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS

4:24 PM EDT, July 29, 2024

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi grand jury decided not to bring criminal charges against a sheriff’s deputy who fatally shot a man who was yelling “shoot me,” the state attorney general’s office said Monday.

The Hancock County Sheriff’s Department said three deputies responding to a report of an attempted break-in found Isaiah Winkley, 21, of Coweta County, Georgia, when they arrived outside a home in Kiln on Dec. 10, 2022.

A federal judge reviewed video recorded by an officer’s body camera that showed Winkley holding a steel fence post in one hand and candy in the other as he yelled “Shoot me” several times to the deputies.

One deputy shot Winkley with a Taser that had little effect, and then deputy Michael Chase Blackwell used a gun to shoot Winkley multiple times, wrote the judge, who is overseeing a separate civil case brought by Winkley’s family.

The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation examined what happened, as it does for most shootings involving law enforcement officers, and Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office presented the findings to a Hancock County grand jury last week.

“The grand jury reported that it found no criminal conduct on behalf of the officer involved,” Fitch’s office said in a news release Monday. “As such, no further criminal action will be taken by this Office in this matter.”

The Sun Herald reported in March that federal prosecutors said they would not to bring criminal charges against Blackwell after he agreed to surrender his law enforcement license and certification and not serve as a law enforcement officer anywhere in the U.S.

Winkley’s family filed a federal lawsuit in 2023 against Hancock County and its sheriff’s department. The suit said Winkley, a student at Pensacola Christian College in Florida, was at the home looking for assistance after his car became stuck in mud along Mississippi Highway 603.

The lawsuit is on hold as attorneys for Blackwell appeal an April ruling by U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola Jr. denying his request for qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that shields officials, including law enforcement officers, from lawsuits that seek money for actions they take on the job.

The person who called the sheriff’s department to report a possible break-in said a man outside his cousin’s house was carrying a “come-along” or “chain fall,” which is a portable winch, and that the man seemed not to be in “his right state of mind,” Guirola wrote.

The judge wrote that Winkley “was clearly having a mental or emotional health crisis” and “he never directed verbal threats toward the officers; instead, he begged the officers to shoot him.”

“A reasonable officer at the scene could have viewed Winkley’s actions as nonthreatening because Winkley did not touch his waistband and he could not have grabbed an additional weapon while his hands were grasping other objects,” Guirola wrote.

Winkley had the fence post in one hand and a container of Mentos candy in the other, the judge wrote.