Police have released a recording of the 911 call by a Wendy’s employee in Atlanta before the death of Rayshard Brooks, who was shot and killed by police.
Brooks, 27, was reportedly asleep in the Wendy’s drive-thru before police arrived.
“I tried to wake him up, but he’s parked dead in the middle of the drive-thru, so I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” the caller in the 911 recording says. “He woke up, looked at me and I was like, ‘You got to move out of the drive-thru.’ Because people can’t — they’re going around him,” the employee said, NBC reported.
Video released from the scene shows Brooks in a physical altercation with two officers before fleeing from them. Officials say Brooks took a stun gun from one of the officers and pointed it at an officer before he was shot.
The Atlanta chief of police has since resigned, and Brooks’s killing was ruled a homicide. The officer who shot Brooks, Garrett Rolfe, has been fired. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) is leading the investigation of the case for Brooks.
At a news conference on Saturday, GBI Director Vic Reynolds said Brooks struggled with the officers as they attempted to arrest him following a failed field sobriety test.
“During the course of that confrontation, Mr. Brooks was able to secure, from one of the Atlanta officers, his Taser,” Reynolds said.
Body camera footage from the incident shows the officers deliberating with Brooks for over 25 minutes before the arrest was initiated.
At one point, Brooks struggles to remember how many drinks he had that evening and asks the officers if he can walk home.
Attorney L. Chris Stewart, a lawyer for Brooks’s family, said the lethal force was not warranted in the case.
“Of extreme concern in the murder of Rayshard Brooks is the fact that he was shot in the back multiple times while fleeing,” Stewart and law partner Justin Miller said in a statement Saturday, NBC reported.