HOUSTON (CN) — Houston police fatally shot Shanetta Guidry Lewis’ son in February 2022 but she can’t let him go.
“I’ve been sitting by his gravesite every day sunup to sundown for two years,” she said through tears on Thursday.
Her son, Charion Lockett, she said, had obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in criminal justice, been accepted by a law school and was preparing to take the LSAT.
He also had no criminal record.
So it was bewildering to the family when a Houston police officer called Lockett around 9:30 a.m. on Feb. 7, 2022 and told him there was a felony warrant for his arrest for an armed robbery.
Lockett told the officer he planned to retain an attorney and turn himself in later that day, Guidry Lewis said in court filings and at a press conference Thursday.
“All along, 15 minutes later, they were outside the door getting ready to kill him,” Guidry Lewis said at Thursday’s event, standing at a microphone with more than 20 of Lockett’s family and friends outside the Bob Casey Federal Courthouse in Houston.
Guidry Lewis claims in a first amended version of a lawsuit she initially filed in March 2022 that about an hour after Lockett spoke to police he was sitting in his car in front of their home when Houston Police Detective Devin Inocencio, driving an unmarked red Buick and dressed in civilian clothes, pulled up, got out of his vehicle and pointed a Glock handgun at Lockett “without ever identifying himself as a police officer, or saying anything.”
The mother says in the filing that along with Inocencio, three other Houston police officers — who also had not identified themselves — started shooting at Lockett as he fled to his home and hit him in the back, killing him.
“Prior to the shooting of Mr. Lockett no officer stated they were the police, ‘hands up,’ ‘you’re under arrest,’ or any other words indicating it was an arrest,” Guidry Lewis claims in her suit.
Ten days later, the Houston Police Department Assistant Chief Belinda Null said in a statement that as officers approached Lockett — who had a concealed carry license — sitting in his vehicle in the driveway of his home, “he stepped out and began firing upon officers as he moved towards his front door. Four officers responded by discharging their duty weapons towards the subject, striking him.”
In their motions to dismiss the suit, the four police officers also say Lockett fired at them.
Minutes after the altercation, Lockett was pronounced dead at the scene. No officers were injured.
The Houston Police Department also included dashcam and body-camera video in their post that shows uniformed officers pulling up and firing towards the home.
Guidry Lewis sued the city of Houston, the four officers involved and HPD Chief Troy Finner in federal court on claims of excessive force, due process violations and municipal liability under the Fourth and 14th Amendment. She also brought assault claims pursuant to Texas law.
U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, a George W. Bush appointee, granted the city’s and Chief Finner’s motions to dismiss in a February 2023 order. But he refused to dismiss the civil rights claims against the four officers, rejecting their defense of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that protects police from liability in federal lawsuits for all but the most blatant misconduct.
The officers appealed to the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. A three-judge panel of the appellate court affirmed Hanen’s order on Wednesday solely based on the case record without convening a hearing.
Announcing the Fifth Circuit’s decision at Thursday’s press conference, Guidry Lewis’ attorney Randall Kallinen said now they can start the discovery process, get other police dashcam and body-camera footage of the scene and depose the defendant officers.
“Because the only videos that were shown are what the city of Houston put together in their little clips to show what they wanted to show. And they put that on YouTube. Those aren’t all the videos. We haven’t seen the records,” Kallinen said.
According to Guidry Lewis in the lawsuit, Houston police obtained the warrant for Lockett after a high school classmate of his named Torrey Brown blamed Lockett and an “unknown Black male” for trying to rob him at gunpoint in November 2021.
Guidry Lewis describes Brown in the suit as a “known criminal with convictions for unlawful carrying a weapon and evading detention” and says he “knew Charion Lockett from high school and had animosity towards him.”
Lockett’s great-uncle Larry Hubbard, a pastor of the Real Faith Missionary Baptist Church, focused on Brown’s background in comments he shouted as he stood among his family members on Thursday.
“Why does the police take the word of a criminal and do a drive-by on a college student, a person who had no record,” Hubbard said. “And the police do a drive-by on the word of a criminal at his house? And then when he retreats they shoot him in the back. Where’s he going? To his safety place, in his house.”
Despite the family’s win allowing discovery, Kallinen warned that if the officers lose at the summary judgment stage they can appeal again to the Fifth Circuit and push for qualified immunity before any trial.
“But we can’t go to the appellate court except at the entire end of the case,” Kallinen said.
Still, the attorney added, “The Fifth Circuit is an extremely conservative court. So the fact that it said 'no, you can’t dismiss this case', that says a lot.”
Guidry Lewis said she has not been back to her home since her son was shot there. And though she acknowledged she has been in and out of a mental institute over the past two years, she said she is “staying hopeful and prayerful” that she will prevail in her lawsuit.
“I’m not going to stop until I get justice,” she said, “because it’s not right to take a person’s one life that they have from them.”
After the press conference, with tears running down her face, she spoke of her daily routine before Kallinen cut her off.
“I’ve been sitting by his gravesite every day sunup to sundown for two years … because my son is gone for no reason at all. So yes it’s been hard for me. I haven’t been back to work. I get there every morning when they open the gate up at the cemetery at 6:30 a.m. and I don’t leave until 7:30 at night. I sit in the sun and the rain and the snow.”
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