The black man shot dead during a police raid on his North Carolina home was a known drug dealer — with a 30-year rap sheet stretching more than 180 pages, according to records.
Andrew Brown Jr. — who was shot dead last Wednesday in a car outside his Elizabeth City home — had the lengthy rap sheet dating back to May 1988, according to a search warrant and other records obtained by Fox News.
Officers in the Albemarle Drug Task Force are “familiar with Brown and know him to be a source of supply of ‘crack’ cocaine, cocaine, heroin/fentanyl and methamphetamine,” the warrant stated, according to Fox.
The raid was requested because officers believed his home area was “being used to store, package and distribute narcotics, namely ‘crack’ cocaine,” the warrant reportedly stated.
Two vehicles regularly seen at the residence were also believed to be used to store, traffic and distribute illegal narcotics, the warrant stated.
The search warrant was requested after a confidential informant claimed he’d been buying drugs from Brown for more than a year, the documents stated.
The informant then made a “controlled purchase” of cocaine and later meth that were captured on camera, the warrant said.
The search warrant was signed off on by North Carolina Superior Court Senior Resident Judge Jerry Tillett on April 20 — the day before the fatal raid, Fox said.
Civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, who is representing the family, argued that authorities have released the warrant information to “assassinate” Brown’s character and deflect from what the family has called an “execution.”
“They released a warrant … assassinating his character, but Andrew Brown didn’t kill anybody,” Crump told MSNBC.
“The people who killed Andrew Brown, they want to protect their identity and protect their rap sheet,” he said of the officers who have yet to be identified.
“But they want to blast Andrew Brown’s rap sheet out there because that’s the playbook — to assassinate the character of black people once they kill us because they want to say, ‘They’re not worthy of your consideration, America,'” he argued.
Earlier on Monday, Brown’s family was shown footage of his death for the first time and called the shooting “an execution.”
The footage shows he was shot in the back of the head and had his hands on his car steering wheel when deputies opened fire, other attorneys for his family said.
The mayor of Elizabeth City declared a state of emergency in anticipation of the release of the bodycam footage to the public.
