A Police Officer Shot and Killed a 17-Year-Old Boy as He Fled. Now, His Mother Is Suing.

Last August, a Greensboro, North Carolina, police officer shot and killed a 17-year-old boy during a traffic stop. The boy, Nasanto Antonio Crenshaw, was riding in a stolen vehicle and was apparently attempting to flee when he was killed. Yesterday, the boy’s mother filed a civil rights lawsuit against the police officer who shot her son, arguing that the officer’s use of force was so egregious that it violated her son’s Fourth Amendment rights.

“I hurt every day,” Wakita Doriety, Crenshaw’s mother, told WRAL, a local news station, last year. “I cry all day, every day…. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

According to the lawsuit, the incident occurred last August, when Crenshaw was pulled over by local police on suspicion that he was driving a vehicle that had recently been reported stolen. After being stopped, the defendant—a police officer identified only as “John Doe”—exited his patrol vehicle, and Crenshaw began driving away at a “speed of three to five miles per hour,” according to the lawsuit.

After fleeing, the lawsuit reports that Crenshaw pulled the vehicle into a parking lot, where the defendant followed him. The parking lot was a dead end, and the complaint states that Crenshaw had begun attempting a three-point turn, causing the “driver’s side of his vehicle to swipe the front end of Defendant Doe’s patrol vehicle.” At this point, Crenshaw’s vehicle came to a stop, and the defendant exited his patrol car, commanding Crenshaw to “get on the ground, get on the ground do it now.”

However, the complaint states that Crenshaw began turning the vehicle, facing away from the defendant and his patrol car. At this point, several passengers, also teenagers,