JACKSON, Miss. — Latasha Smith says she was lying in bed just after midnight on Dec. 11 when a bullet sliced through her bedroom wall, striking her in the arm.
Smith, 49, remembers dashing out of her apartment, wailing that she’d been shot. Outside, she saw Mississippi Capitol Police officers walking through the complex.
Three months later — with the bullet still lodged in her arm — she continues to wait for answers.
The Mississippi Department of Public Safety, which oversees the Capitol Police, has offered little information about what led an officer to open fire at Commonwealth Village apartments. The state has not given a timeline for releasing more details, including video from the body camera the officer was wearing.
The officer was initially placed on administrative leave after the shooting but has since returned to “active status,” Mississippi Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell said. The Capitol Police chief reviewed the findings of an internal investigation, which has not been made public, and determined that “there wasn’t any criminal conduct” that would warrant keeping the officer on leave, Tindell said.
In the absence of an official report, NBC News has obtained and analyzed more than 25 hours of the apartment complex’s surveillance footage, offering the first look at the seconds leading up to the shooting and the moment the officer appears to open fire at a person who is fleeing.
The videos do not contain audio, and they do not capture the initial car chase that led police to the complex. Eight policing experts — including two former police chiefs, two criminologists and a retired lieutenant who now trains tactical units — reviewed the videos for NBC News and said that based on the footage alone, they cannot determine whether the officer was justified in opening fire.
But the videos do provide a deeper accounting of an incident that has jolted Jackson’s predominantly Black community, at a moment when the…
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