GLYNN COUNTY, Ga. — The south Georgia prosecutors who gathered to review the fatal police shooting of Caroline Small had more than a century of courtroom experience.
Still, the violence that unfolded on the screen shocked them into silence.
The video showed eight police bullets piercing the car windshield of the unarmed Georgia mother as she was pinned against a utility pole and surrounded by police cars.
The consensus in the courthouse conference room was that the two Glynn County police officers who pulled their triggers had committed a crime.
"This was a murder, and it was covered up," David Peterson, one of the prosecutors, said.
Small had committed no crime that morning; she drove off when an officer walked up to check on her in a mall parking lot.
She drove erratically at low speeds, and was eventually blocked in by a utility pole and several patrol cars.
On dashcam video, one officer can be heard saying that if she moved again he was going to shoot her, then two of them did.
"There's two little kids out there that don't have a mama," said Jonathan Miller, who resigned his job as a prosecutor to run against the district attorney, in part because of her handling of the Small case.
The prosecutors said what happened instead derailed the case and fundamentally shook their beliefs in the justice system and the rule of law.
They felt compelled to break ranks after a Channel 2 Action News/Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation in July exposed records showing how their former boss stacked the case in the officers' favor.
WJAX
