“I’m locked and loaded, I’m going to secure my neighborhood”. I wanted them to have a life and be safe, ‘ she said, her voice cracking.
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“I’m on neighborhood watch, ” he said. He turned around and looked at me and the shot went off and I was just, man, this is not happening. It’s 1 in the morning. They have firearms and we’re going to secure our neighborhood. If I were you, I’d send PD as quickly as possible.
The police department did not have time to reach the scene.
“I yelled at them, ‘Please leave the premises, ‘” he said. He said that he “fired a warning shot” but couldn’t be sure whether anybody had been hit.
“I fired my warning shot like I’m supposed to by law.They do have firearms, and I’m trying to protect myself and my family”. “Who shoots a warning shot at a person?” “This is the worst”, said Simone Butler-Thomas who is grieving the loss of her youngest son.
Given that he was in an open-carry state, Thomas would have been legally allowed to have a visible weapon, provided he had the proper licenses. “We were all looking around like, who got a gun?” There’s frigging black males outside my frigging house with firearms.
“Please just send a vehicle”, Copley responded.
By the time the police showed up, 20-year-old Thomas was already dying.
Only minutes later, according to the Post, Copley called 911 again to report that “We got somebody that got hit”, referring to Thomas, who was later pronounced dead at a local hospital.
Chad Cameron Copley, 39, is led out of a courtroom at the Wake County Judicial Center in Raleigh, N.C., Monday, Aug. 8, 2016.
If convicted, Copley could get the death penalty.
As reported by The News & Observer, Copley’s neighbors on Singleleaf Lane nearby Mitchell Mill Road claimed that they don’t have a neighborhood watch program, like Chad claimed.
Twenty-year old Kouren-Rodney Thomas was on his way to a house party with friends Sunday evening when a neighbor spotted the boys and pegged them as “hoodlums”.
The young men were attending a party down two doors down from Copley’s home. Walker and Thomas made a decision to go home – and Thomas began running when he thought he saw police, because Thomas had marijuana.
“I heard the shot, and I’m watching him run and saw him drop”, Walker told The New York Daily News. Caller: “We have a lot of people outside of our house yelling and shouting profanities”. Thomas, who had weed on him, took off running, he said.
On Monday, family members of Thomas said they were devastated by his death. The surrounding Census tract is about 60 percent white and nearly 30 percent black, with a median household income of about $76,000 – well above the state as a whole, according to 2014 Census estimates.
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His mother, Munyir Simone Butler Thomas told New York Daily News she moved her family from the Harlem neighborhood of New York to North Carolina because she felt the city had become too unsafe for her children. “We called him ‘Safety 101″ because he. wouldn’t start the auto unless everybody had their seatbelts on and their cell phones away”.
