New Mexico Attorney General charges police officer with manslaughter for shooting of Black nurse – JURIST

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez announced Tuesday that Las Cruces police officer Brad Lunsford was being charged with voluntary manslaughter for shooting and killing a Black nurse, Presley Eze. The shooting occurred in August 2022 in a confrontation outside a gas station.

“The killing of Presley Eze is a tragedy and serves as yet another example of poor police tactics resulting in an unjustifiable use of force to subdue an individual resisting arrest for the commission of a minor crime,” said Torrez. “As New Mexico’s chief law enforcement officer, I have a duty to hold everyone accountable for violations of the law and that includes police officers who cross the line.”

Police say that Eze exited the gas station with an item he did not pay for. They questioned Eze and made efforts to detain him, which escalated into a physical altercation. During the altercation, Eze touched Lunsford’s taser. JURIST has viewed a cellphone video that shows Lunsford immediately shooting Eze in the back of the head at point-blank range. Out of respect to the Eze family, the video has not been included in this story.

Civil rights advocates, like Doña Ana County NAACP President Bobbie Green, commended the charges, with Green saying:

We are grateful to New Mexico Attorney General, Raul Torrez for seeking accountability. We know that this will not bring Presley back, but we hope it will bring some comfort to the Eze family. Our thoughts and prayers and our full support is with the Eze family and a young child who is now forced to grow up without his father.

Eze’s killing sparked outrage and controversy in Las Cruces and New Mexico, and advocates have said it is part of a broader pattern of police officers targeting Black people for both enforcement and violence. His family filed suit against the City of Las Cruces in May 2023, saying that the City was not providing video evidence and that they were not cooperating with investigations. “This is not the first incident of violence, police shootings, and killings of unarmed people of color,” Green said in May. “We’ve been trying for almost a year to get a police oversight committee to work with the City of Las Cruces, not against them but with them, and have had nothing but opposition.” 

Police brutality is a major issue in the US, and Black people are disproportionately the victims of such violence. Human rights experts have previously called on international authorities, like the International Criminal Court, to investigate police violence against Black people in the US. The charges against Lunsford come months after a Minnesota court upheld the conviction of Derek Chauvin, the officer who killed George Floyd and sparked the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.