Sheriff’s Office in Georgia to release footage of the deputy-involved shooting of Florida man Leonard Cure

It was Leonard Cure’s worst fear, like so many exonerees, that one day he would be sent back to prison.

And it was his mother’s worst fear too, any time he stepped out the door, that the justice system would take her son away again, so much so that she told him to have a way to record video in his car in case he was ever stopped by police.

So much so that, when officers arrived at her door on Monday, she told them first, “police killed him.”

“Before they could tell me,” Mary Cure told reporters at a news conference outside the Camden County Courthouse in Georgia Wednesday afternoon. “Because I lived in fear and so did he.”

Her son, a former Broward County, Florida, resident, had served over 16 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. He was freed in 2020 after the Broward State Attorney’s Office reviewed his case and vacated his charges, the first man exonerated under its new Conviction Review Unit.

On Monday, a Camden County Sheriff’s deputy shot and killed Cure during a traffic stop. He was on his way home from visiting his mother in Port St. Lucie. His family says that he was livestreaming the interaction when he died, but the footage was deleted. They don’t know who is responsible.

“It is God-awful that he would escape that injustice to have his life claimed by more bias,” Ben Crump, the Cure family’s attorney, said Wednesday. “We absolutely do not believe, if he was a white citizen, he would’ve been killed for a traffic stop.”

Minutes before the Wednesday news conference, the Sheriff’s Office announced on Facebook that it would release body camera and dash camera footage of the shooting later Wednesday. The family would review the footage first, Cure’s brother, Michael said at the news conference.

The statement comes after Crump, a well-known civil rights and personal injury attorney who has previously represented the families of Trayvon Martin, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among others, announced that he would be representing Cure’s family and demanded the release of the footage.

Cure was “extremely intelligent,” charismatic, and forgiving, his brother Michael said.

“He forgave the idiots that locked him up,” he added. “That’s how forgiving he was.”

The day in 2003 when Cure was arrested for the robbery, he was living with Michael, working two jobs, his brother said. He would wake up at 5 a.m. to take the bus.

That day, he was at an ATM miles from the armed robbery at a Walgreens near Dania Elementary School only a half-hour before it occurred, and at his construction job less than a half-hour later. A receipt from that ATM became crucial evidence of his innocence.

But a jury at the time found him guilty anyway.

Over the course of Cure’s years locked away for an armed robbery he did not commit, his mother and siblings drove across Florida from prison to prison, visiting him.

Throughout that time, he struggled, his mother said. At one point, he was stabbed in the back close to his kidney. She would go without hearing from him, wondering if he was dead or alive. Sometimes she would drive all the way to the prison, only to be told she couldn’t visit him that day.

He was offered plea deals and rejected them all, maintaining his innocence.

Finally, in 2020, the Broward State Attorney’s Office brought his case before a judge. He was free.

But the system continues to fail exonerees after they are released, experts and advocates say. For the few years after his release, Cure struggled with severe PTSD, according to Crump, as many exonerees do.

Cure would rarely talk about his time in prison, his mother said. But one morning, she said, she was making him breakfast when he broke down and cried.

“They took my life,” she recalled him saying. “They took it.”

‘There is a problem here in Camden County’

“I love you and I’ll see you soon,” Cure told his mother as he left her home on Monday. But she felt uneasy, she said, the same unease she always felt when he left her, that he might get stopped, taken back to jail, or worse.

“This was her worst fear,” Crump said of Cure’s mother. “Now that he proved they lied on him before, that police were going to do him in. This was her worst fear.”

Some say she had good reason to feel that way. Cure’s death is part of a pattern of injustices in Camden County, advocates say, including during traffic stops and in the county jail.

“Let’s be clear,” Timothy Bessent, president of the NAACP in Camden County, said at the news conference Wednesday. “There is a problem here in Camden County with law enforcement. This is not the first incident. And we do understand it won’t be the last.”

The insurance carrier for the Sheriff’s Office dropped the county because of the amount of lawsuits filed against them, according to The Current. The majority of claims arose out of incidents at the jail.

And in January of this year, a deputy was criminally charged after pulling a woman over for running a stop sign, then ramming her head into a car, The Current reported. That deputy was fired.

Black people in Camden County don’t trust the police, Bessent said. He wants the Department of Justice to get involved.

The officer who shot Cure has been placed on administrative leave during the investigation. Neither the Sheriff’s Office nor the Georgia Bureau of Investigations have released his identity.

In a statement Monday, the GBI said that Cure had resisted the deputy after he told him he was under arrest. Cure was driving over 100 mph, the Camden County Sheriff’s Office said in their update Wednesday.

The deputy tased him and used his baton, but Cure “assaulted” him, the GBI said.

The Sheriff’s Office is releasing the video footage “in an effort to be completely transparent as to what happened, and how the incident escalated to the point of extreme use of force,” the statement said.

Capt. James Bruce, the spokesperson for the Camden County Sheriff’s Office, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel earlier on Wednesday that it would “probably be a little while” before the incident report for the shooting was complete.

As for the livestreaming, Crump said he is still looking for answers. Officers have not released Cure’s phone, his family said.

Asked why he thought the Sheriff’s Office moved so quickly to release the footage Wednesday, Crump said, “The court of public opinion is very helpful for Black and brown and marginalized families, to get the same justice that others enjoy without effort.”

----