Lawyer says an Alabama teen who was killed by police was shot in the back

An independent autopsy determined that a teenager who was killed by an Alabama police officer last month was shot in the back, attorneys for his family said Tuesday.

Authorities have not released police body camera video of the June 23 encounter or disclosed the name of the officer who shot 18-year-old Jabari Peoples in the parking lot of a soccer field in the affluent Birmingham suburb of Homewood. They also haven’t released the findings of the county’s official autopsy.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Peoples’ family, said at a news conference that a private medical examiner from Georgia who conducted an autopsy on the family’s behalf found that the teen had been shot in the back and that there was no exit wound. Without the bullet and body camera footage that captured the shooting, Crump said that the preliminary autopsy was inconclusive.

“This family is grasping at straws trying to get the answers. And it is not fair, it is not right and it is not just,” said Crump, who declined to name the medical examiner.

Police said the officer approached Peoples after smelling marijuana and shot the teen after Peoples reached for a gun while they were scuffling. A friend of Peoples who was there contradicted the police account, saying Peoples didn’t have a gun.

Police said the officer’s body camera “clearly captured” the details surrounding the shooting, but the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency hasn’t released the footage, citing the ongoing investigation. A 2023 state law that governs release of police recordings says an agency may choose to not disclose the recording if it would affect an active law enforcement investigation.

Homewood Mayor Alex Wyatt urged the state agency to release the footage on Monday, saying he didn’t have the authority to do so as mayor.

The family’s attorneys criticized the mayor, saying he is legally allowed to watch the video and tell the public what he saw, or release official police incident reports detailing the events that led up to the shooting.

“Just show us what happened to our child, please,” the teen’s father, William Peoples, said at the news conference.