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 The case dates back to the pre-dawn hours of Sept. 14, 2013, when
a 24-year-old former Florida A&M football player, Jonathan Ferrell,
wrecked his car and went looking for help in a subdivision outside
Charlotte, provoking a 911 call from a young woman who was surprised
to find him knocking on her door in the middle of the night and
feared a home invasion.
Three Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers responded and when
Ferrell approached them, officer Randall Kerrick fired 12 shots at
the man, 10 of which hit, killing him.
Attorneys for Kerrick, who is white, contend that Ferrell had
ignored orders to stop approaching the officers and to lie on the
ground. The other two officers involved in the case, who are black
and were more experienced than Kerrick, did not draw their weapons.
 Police charged Kerrick, 29, with voluntary manslaughter within hours
of the shooting. He was the first police officer in Mecklenburg
County charged in connection with an on-duty fatal shooting in more
than 30 years.
Then-Police Chief Rodney Monroe, who has since retired, said Kerrick
had used excessive force and that the facts of the case warranted
his arrest. A grand jury indicted Kerrick in January 2014. In May,
the city of Charlotte agreed to pay Ferrell’s family $2.25 million
in a civil settlement.
The department's swift action stood in contrast to other police
killings of unarmed black men in the United States over the past two
years, including cases in New York and Ferguson, Missouri, that
prompted months of occasionally violent protests.
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But officers in Baltimore and North Charleston, South Carolina, have
been charged this year following a pair of killings of unarmed black
men.
Jury selection is expected to take several days with the Superior
Court trial forecast to last several weeks. The judge hearing the
case, Robert Ervin, twice denied defense attorneys’ change of venue
motions, saying a jury pool in a neighboring county would be as
likely to have seen pretrial news coverage as one in Charlotte.
A toxicology report found no traces of drugs in Ferrell’s system and
a blood-alcohol level below the legal limit for driving.
(Editing by Scott Malone and Nick Zieminski)
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