GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) — A Michigan police officer who killed a man with a shot to the back of the head is testifying in his own defense Friday at his second-degree murder trial.
Christopher Schurr settled into the witness box on the fifth day of trial in Kent County court.
There’s no dispute about how Patrick Lyoya, a 26-year-old Congolese immigrant, was killed in Grand Rapids in 2022. The issue for jurors is whether they believe that Schurr’s life was in jeopardy when Lyoya got control of his Taser.
They physically struggled to exhaustion for more than two minutes after a traffic stop in a residential neighborhood. Lyoya, a Black man, was pulled over for driving a car with a different license plate and then failed to produce a driver’s license.
He tried to evade Schurr while on foot and the Grand Rapids officer chased and caught up with him. Video shows the confrontation ended when Lyoya was shot in the back of the head while facedown on the ground. Schurr had repeatedly demanded that he stop resisting and give up the Taser.
The trial in Grand Rapids has mostly been a battle of experts.
Use-of-force experts testifying for the prosecutor said deadly force was not necessary to end the conflict. But several senior Grand Rapids officers, summoned by defense lawyers, said Schurr was at great risk when Lyoya got ahold of the Taser, a weapon that fires electrically charged probes to temporarily subdue an aggressor.
Schurr, 34, was fired by city officials at the recommendation of police Chief Eric Winstrom after he was charged in 2022. At the time, Winstrom said his recommendation was based on video of the encounter, the prosecutor’s review of a state police investigation and Schurr’s interview with internal investigators.
