Casey Goodson's Death By Police Officially Ruled A Homicide

Casey Goodson was shot and killed by police last week while entering his own home

Casey Goodson, a 23-year-old Black man, was fatally shot by a sheriff’s deputy working for the U.S. Marshal’s fugitive task force while entering his own home in Columbus, Ohio last week. His death is being ruled as a homicide, per a preliminary autopsy report.

Goodson died Friday from multiple gunshot wounds to his torso, according to a statement released Wednesday by the Franklin County Coroner’s Office. He was returning home from a dentist appointment with Subway sandwiches in hand for his family when the deputy gunned him down on his doorstep, an attorney representing the family said in a statement.

That deputy is Jason Meade, a 17-year veteran of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office. Meade was looking for violent offenders at the time and shot and killed Goodson, who was not the police suspect in question. Goodson was inserting his house key into his door when Meade shot him. Goodson fell into the kitchen, where two toddlers and his 72-year-old grandmother were witnesses to his gruesome death.

In Goodson’s final moments, his family said he staggered inside his home and fell to the ground where he died, leaving his house keys hanging in the door behind him. He also still had a Subway sandwich in-hand at the time of his death.

“My 5-year-old son is the one who called me screaming, ‘Mommy, the police just shot Casey, he’s dead. Please, I’m so scared. Please, hurry up, come get here,’” Goodson’s mother, Tamala Payne, said in an emotional interview on Tuesday.

Mead reported seeing a “man with a gun,” claiming he had seen Goodson running up and down the street waving a firearm. While there aren’t many details surrounding Goodson’s murder available just yet, he did have a gun on his person at the time of the shooting — because he was licensed to legally carry a concealed weapon.

According to the Columbus Police Department, there were no fellow officers who witnessed the shooting, and no civilian witnesses of the shooting itself — only the aftermath. Unfortunately, Franklin County Sheriff’s task force officers are not issued body cameras.

“There’s really nothing that they’ve alleged or said that Casey did on his walk from the car to the house that would justify him being shot,” Sean Walton, the Goodson family’s attorney, told NBC News. “He actually was putting his key into the door when he was shot. The key was hanging in the door even hours after the shooting.”

U.S. Attorney David M. DeVillers, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, the Cincinnati Division of the FBI, and the Columbus Police Department are all currently investigating Goodson’s death. According to CBS News, police have killed an average of one Black man or woman per week in all of 2020. George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were two of the 164 people shot in just the first eight months of this year alone. Goodson is just the latest brutal, police-sanctioned killing of an innocent Black person.

“He had never been in trouble in his life. Everything he did was legal,” Payne said. “My son was more than amazing, and he did not deserve this.”