MARTA officials contend the teenager killed by an transit officer Saturday night was armed, despite contradictory claims by the dead man's brother who said he witnessed the shooting.
"We think this was a legitimate and justified [shooting] incident," MARTA spokesman Lyle Harris said.
Harris said witnesses reported Joetavius Stafford, 19, was armed when Officer Robert Waldo, 31, shot him about 10:20 p.m. Saturday at the Vine City rail station.
The dead man's brother, meanwhile, said he was shot three times in the back. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is investigating the incident.
Rodney Stafford told Channel 2 Action News that his sibling was involved in a melee when a shot was fired by somebody in the crowd. He contends that Waldo ran toward the fight and shot his brother after he halted.
"My brother threw his hands up. MARTA police shot him in the back. Pow," Stafford told Channel 2. "And my brother lying on the ground, just looking at me and I was looking at his gunshot wound. As I'm looking at that, MARTA police shot him two more times in the back."
The shooting happened near the Georgia Dome where high school football games were played Saturday night.
Harris would not comment further on details, citing the GBI investigation. The Fulton County Medical Examiner's office completed an autopsy on Stafford but the office declined to release information on his wounds.
Waldo has been placed on administrative leave with pay.
Dale Mann, director of the Georgia Public Safety Training Center, said that even if it turned out that Stafford was unarmed, the shooting could still be ruled justifiable.
Mann said the law requires a "reasonableness test," in which investigators look at the shooting from the perspective of the officer, who is often placed in "tense, rapidly evolving situations." If the officer reasonably believed somebody was armed and placed either the officer or the public danger, the shooting could be called justified, Mann said.
The GBI conducted 100 investigations last fiscal year into police use of force, 24 of those involving shootings. The GBI does not decide whether a shooting is justified but presents its investigation to the police department and the local district attorney for determination.
The Fulton County District Attorney's office in 2009 indicted Atlanta Police Officer Reginald Fisher for aggravated assault after he shot and severely wounded a man after he mistook his cellphone for a handgun while working an off-duty job at a Mechanicsville apartment complex. A jury acquitted him of aggravated assault in August.
"In shootings, sometimes things change in the fraction of a second," Mann said. "You have to develop the information through investigation and from the most objective witnesses you have. ... Family members are not always the most objective witnesses."
For instance in 2006, a DeKalb County grand jury that investigated a spree of police shootings found that MARTA Officer K. Sims was justified in shooting and wounding a car burglar at the Brookhaven MARTA station. Sims contended that the man tried to stab her with a screwdriver while she was grappling with him and they fell into the car.
The grand jury, however, criticized Sims for trying to grapple with him with one hand while holding her gun in the other. It also criticized the MARTA internal affairs investigation and praised a GBI investigation.
There have been at least four other MARTA police shooting since 2000, which averages to less than one every two years. In 2006, three days before the Sims shooting, two MARTA officers shot and killed a man who allegedly attacked one of them at the Midtown MARTA station.
In 2008, MARTA officers shot and wounded a homeless man in Woodruff Park near the Five Points Station who reportedly cut one of them with a knife.
Staff writer George Mathis contributed to this article.
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