An Official Says It Was Legal to Shoot and Kill the North Carolina Man Who Killed Four Police Officers
RALEIGH, N.C.— A prosecutor’s report released Thursday says that police were right to use deadly force against a gunman in North Carolina who killed four cops and hurt four others in April.
DA Spencer Merriweather of Mecklenburg County says in the report that there is “no question” that the police officers who killed Terry Clark Hughes Jr. did so to protect themselves and other people. Hughes, 39, shot and killed police officers seeking to arrest him at his home in Charlotte before he was killed. It was the deadliest attack on law enforcement in the U.S. since 2016.
No matter how hard it is to imagine, Merriweather says, “The outcome could have been even worse if police had not responded to an imminently deadly threat with lethal force.”
The district attorney’s office talked to police officers who were at the killing, including 12 Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers who fired their guns, to find out if Hughes should have been killed. The police also put together video from Hughes’s body camera and physical evidence, like the fact that 340 rounds were fired by officers and 29 by Hughes during the killing.
Merriweather’s report said that the long battle that killed four police officers—Sam Poloche and William Elliott of the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction; Joshua Eyer, an officer for Charlotte-Mecklenburg; and Thomas Weeks, a deputy U.S. marshal—was a mess.
Officers from the state Fugitive Task Force went to Hughes’ house on April 29 in the afternoon to serve arrest warrants. The report says that Hughes fled inside his house and started firing at the officers from an upstairs window with an assault rifle.
It was found that Weeks was hit while hiding with Poloche behind a tree in the garden. Police say Elliott and another cop were shot near the fence of the house. The report says that Eyer and Poloche were shot behind the tree while Eyer was trying to help Weeks.
The story says that three more Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers were shot outside the house in different places.
The investigation found that Hughes jumped from the upstairs window of the house into the front yard, where police told him to drop his gun. A state autopsy report says that Hughes was killed when police officers opened fire and hit him 12 times. The district attorney’s office said Hughes had two more 30-round gun magazines in his pocket and a pistol on his hip that he hadn’t used.
It was found that 23 police officers had shot at Hughes during the killing. The report says that none of the four cops who were killed had fired their guns before they were shot.
Hughes’s lover called 911 about 50 minutes after he died to say that she and her 17-year-old daughter were hiding in a closet in the house. When detectives talked to them, they found no proof that they had anything to do with shooting the police officers.