COLUMBUS – The mother of a Black man fatally shot by a Franklin County sheriff’s deputy is demanding answers about her son’s death.
“My son would not have harmed a fly…He had plans, he had dreams,” Tamala Payne told CNN Wednesday.
Payne is the mother of 23-year-old Casey Goodson Jr., who was killed Dec. 4 as he entered his grandmother’s house in Columbus.
Payne told The Associated Press Wednesday her son didn’t do anything wrong and was returning from the dentist and had sandwiches for himself, his 5-year-old brother and his grandmother when he was killed.
The Franklin County coroner says an autopsy found Goodson died of multiple gunshot wounds to the torso and has ruled the death a homicide.
Deputy Jason Meade was working as a member of a U.S. Marshal’s fugitive task force, looking for violent offenders in the Northland area when he reported seeing a man with a gun, according to the sheriff’s office and Columbus police, who are conducting the investigation. Meade pursued the man and police say he fired the fatal shot following a verbal exchange.
Franklin County Sheriff Dallas Baldwin cautioned against a “rush to judgment.”
“We all want the truth, we all want justice, we want to know what happened and I’m just humbly imploring [the public] to wait, let the investigators do their job,” he said in a video statement posted on the office’s Twitter feed.
There is no body-worn camera footage of the since Franklin County Sheriff’s task force officers are not issued body-worn cameras, police spokesman Sgt. James Fuqua said.
The coroner’s final report will be completed in approximately 12 to 14 weeks.
The Columbus Division of Police Critical Incident Response Team will provide all evidence to the Franklin County Prosecutor who will present the findings to a civilian grand jury to determine whether criminal charges should be filed, Fuqua said.