Mississippi won’t prosecute a deputy who killed a man yelling ‘shoot me’

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi grand jury decided not to bring criminal charges against a sheriff’s deputy who fatally shot a man who was yelling “shoot me,” the state attorney general’s office said Monday.

The Hancock County Sheriff’s Department said three deputies responding to a report of an attempted break-in found Isaiah Winkley, 21, of Coweta County, Georgia, when they arrived outside a home in Kiln on Dec. 10, 2022.

A federal judge reviewed video recorded by an officer’s body camera that showed Winkley holding a steel fence post in one hand and candy in the other as he yelled “Shoot me” several times to the deputies.

One deputy shot Winkley with a Taser that had little effect, and then deputy Michael Chase Blackwell used a gun to shoot Winkley multiple times, wrote the judge, who is overseeing a separate civil case brought by Winkley’s family.

The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation examined what happened, as it does for most shootings involving law enforcement officers, and Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office presented the findings to a Hancock County grand jury last week.

“The grand jury reported that it found no criminal conduct on behalf of the officer involved,” Fitch’s office said in a news release Monday. “As such, no further criminal action will be taken by this Office in this matter.”

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