North Carolina man fatally shot by sheriff's deputy executing search warrant, officials say

A North Carolina man was fatally shot by a sheriff's deputy in Elizabeth City on Wednesday morning while law enforcement officers were executing a search warrant at the person’s home, officials said.

Andrew Brown Jr. was shot and killed at approximately 8:30 a.m. local time while deputies from the Pasquotank County Sheriff's Office were conducting the search warrant at a home located on Perry Street near Roanoke Avenue, Sheriff Tommy Wooten II said during a Wednesday afternoon news conference

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Wooten II didn’t know Brown’s age and didn’t release the name of the deputy.

WAVY-TV 10 News reported that Brown was shot in his car. Witnesses told the news station he had climbed into his vehicle and had begun to drive away when the deputy struck him.

Police did not provide details regarding whether Brown was armed or the reason for the search warrant. 

The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation is looking into the shooting. The races of the deputies involved were not disclosed, but Wooten said the deputy who struck Brown had been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.

Wooten said that the deputy was wearing a body camera that was on at the time. He declined to say how many shots were fired.

District Attorney Andrew Womble said the State Bureau of Investigation probe would be thorough and "will not be a rush to judgment."

The shooting happened about 8:30 a.m. in the city of nearly 18,000, located 170 miles northeast of Raleigh. WAVY-TV reported that neighbors heard multiple shots fired.

A crowd gathered around the shooting scene, which was blocked off by police tape and with multiple law enforcement cruisers with their lights flashing, according to footage from WAVY.

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Keith Rivers, president of the Pasquotank County chapter of the NAACP, called for an independent investigation into the shooting and criticized the sheriff’s office for taking hours to release details, even after a crowd of about 100 people gathered near the scene.

"When is it going to stop? We just got a verdict yesterday," Rivers told The Associated Press in a phone interview, referring to the guilty verdict handed down Tuesday in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. "Is it open season now? At some point, it has to stop. We have to start holding the people in charge accountable."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.