After a Tragedy, A Fight Over Video Footage

Jessica Battle, lead counsel for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, gave the most detailed account of the nation’s deadliest attack on law-enforcement officers in the last eight years as she sought—in two separate hearings this month—to block access to body-camera footage that could answer lingering questions from that devastating day. 

On April 29, four officers, including one Charlotte-Mecklenburg patrolman, were killed trying to serve outstanding arrest warrants on a man in an East Charlotte neighborhood. The man, Terry Hughes Jr., was also killed, and five other officers were wounded. 

Hughes had fired on officers from a U.S. Marshals Task Force with an AR-15 rifle. The 17-minute gun battle unnerved residents, shut down four area schools, and prompted an armored vehicle to rumble through yards and driveways to assist wounded officers. Hughes was shot as he jumped out of a second-story window, holding the rifle and a handgun. 

But amid the grief and trauma from that day, there were questions about how a routine arrest turned into a bloody gunfight. Even after Hughes was dead, officers continued to fire, believing there was a second shooter. Police denied there was friendly fire, but didn’t provide any details until after WSOC-TV aired an investigative report in late May. 

The Assembly joined other news organizations, including The New York Times and The Charlotte Observer, in petitioning for the release of nearly 400 hours of body-camera footage. Attorneys representing the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, various officers who survived that day, and the widows of two of the officers who died all vehemently opposed the release.

One attorney compared news organizations seeking the footage to the practices of TMZ, a celebrity news website that specializes in sensational news, and called the April 29 shootout an “assassination.” 

Battle told the judge, who ultimately denied media outlets’ request for the footage, that there are no lingering questions because police department officials provided as much information as they could during an active investigation. 

“The community knows what happened because the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department has been transparent,” she said. “We’ve been responsibly transparent.” 

Yet some of Battle’s answers raised new questions. She said there was no body-camera footage of the officers’ initial approach to the house because they didn’t activate the cameras until after the shooting started and other officers were called to the scene. 

Battle didn’t explain why the officers did not activate their body cameras sooner, a move that appears to violate the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department’s policies. A police spokesman said because the police department was not the lead agency in serving the warrants, all questions should be referred to the U.S. Marshals Service, which did not respond to requests for comment. 

National and local media covered the grisly aftermath, including profiling the officers killed. President Joe Biden privately met with the families and called the officers “heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice, rushing into harm’s way to protect us.” Gov. Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein attended a press conference the day after the shooting, offering their support.

At the hearings in June, there was a clear tension between respecting the grief and trauma still reverberating more than a month later and a search for the truth of what happened that day. 

Khalif Rhodes, an attorney representing Queen City News, WSOC-TV, and WCNC-TV, said the request was not about sensationalizing what happened; it was about getting at the whole story. 

He pointed out that Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Johnny Jennings insisted in recent public statements that Hughes was the only shooter. But 911 calls revealed a discrepancy between what Jennings had said publicly and what officers on the ground were telling each other over the radio, Rhodes said. 

Eleven minutes after Hughes was shot to death, an officer reported hearing gunfire from inside the house, Hughes said. 

Mike Tadych, who represented The Assembly, The New York Times, Spectrum News, and The Charlotte Observer, said news organizations aren’t interested in re-traumatizing people and showing graphic images. But there are questions about whether law-enforcement officers followed proper policy or if there were equipment failures, he said. It is natural, Tadych said, to have questions about the officers’ conduct and leaders’ decisions that could provide possible lessons or lead to policy changes. 

However, Judge David Strickland of Mecklenburg Superior Court concluded there was no compelling public interest in releasing the footage, according to draft rulings issued last week. Strickland reviewed eight hours of the footage and said it depicted officers being shot and killed, with at least one officer taking his last breath. 

“This Court cannot think of anything more sensitive and personal than the footage it witnessed depicting these events,” Strickland wrote. 

The judge said he also considered testimony from two widows who received threatening letters celebrating their husbands’ deaths. He wondered how releasing the footage would impact a 12-year-old boy who Googled his father’s name and found video of his death on YouTube. 

New Details Emerge

On June 4, Battle, dressed in an all-white suit, stood in a Mecklenburg courtroom filled to the brim with more than 200 law-enforcement officers, some of whom lined both sides of the room.

She revealed that three different Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers shot Hughes. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police declined to identify the officers, saying their names were part of a criminal investigative record that is not public. 

Also for the first time, Battle said task force officers had noted that an elderly man left in a car around noon on April 29 while they surveilled the house. Battle said that man was later identified as the father of Hughes’ girlfriend, and that he lived in a large tent in the backyard. She said that the tent obstructed the view of some officers when they fired at the house, thinking a second shooter was firing at them. 

At the time the officers were shooting, Hughes’ girlfriend and her daughter were hiding in a closet inside the house; they were not injured. 

Battle and police officials provided additional details about the shooting only after WSOC-TV aired an 11-minute investigative report on May 22. Reporter Evan Donovan reviewed footage from cell phones and a helicopter drone, as well as 911 radio communication, to create a timeline showing that seconds after Hughes was killed, officers reported being fired on by what they believed was a second shooter. 

Donovan raised questions about whether there was accidental friendly fire, which Jennings, the police chief, had previously denied. 

Nearly two weeks after that report, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department held a press conference during which Deputy Chief Tonya Arrington emphatically stated that there was no second shooter and no evidence of friendly fire. She said officers saw movement in a second-story window, and they fired at the windows to provide cover so that others could get wounded officers from the scene. 

The Lawyers Spar

In both hearings, Battle excoriated news organizations, arguing that people in the community are not interested in seeing the video or in knowing anything more about what happened. She called a recent Charlotte Observer story about Hughes a “glorified obituary.” 

Battle criticized Rhodes, one of the attorneys representing the media, for bringing up a November 2023 incident in which an officer struck a woman he was taking into custody in the face, and then punched her in the leg 17 times. An internal investigation found that the first three strikes were justified and that the rest weren’t. 

Rhodes argued that body-camera footage revealed more of the story about what happened that day. And releasing the body-camera footage in the April incident would accomplish the same thing, he said. 

Battle disagreed. There was compelling public interest in that incident, she said. 

“We did have people questioning the police, questioning what they saw on their cell phone videos from that day. We do not have those questions [in the April 29 incident]. We have the public saying the exact opposite.”

She read aloud comments posted to online stories about the 911 calls. She noted that WSOC-TV pulled its investigative piece raising questions about friendly fire the next morning from its website, and replaced it with a scaled-down version; by the afternoon, the story had disappeared, in apparent response to backlash, she said.

Mike Oliveira, WSOC-TV’s news manager, told The Assembly that the station stands by the accuracy of its report but pulled the video and audio out of sensitivity to the families of the officers affected. He said the station is still pursuing the story. 

George Laughrun, an attorney for some of the officers, was blunt about his feelings on the media: “They just want clicks.” He called the shooting on April 29 an “assassination” and mentioned that someone had put up a sign at Hughes’ house, with the words “FTP,” which he said stood for “F— The Police.” 

But the most emotional part of the hearings came when Ashley Eyer, whose husband died from the shooting, spoke from the witness stand, her voice shaking as she read a prepared statement. 

“I’m not okay,” said Eyer, the widow of Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer Joshua Eyer. “I’m not okay.” 

She told Strickland she is trying to hold herself together while also protecting her 2-year-old son. She constantly wonders why her husband was taken away, but is struggling to accept it. She said she hasn’t seen the body-camera footage from that day and she never wants to see it. 

“Please, please do not make me see it,” she said. 

For now, she won’t. And neither will anyone else. 

Michael Hewlett is a staff reporter at The Assembly. He was previously the legal affairs reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal. You can reach him at michael@theassemblync.com.