GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker will announce Thursday whether he is retrying former officer Christopher Schurr in the death of Patrick Lyoya.
The news conference is scheduled to begin at 11:30 a.m. News 8 will stream it in the player above.
Becker previously said he was not going to let a decision on whether to retry the case drag out.
“I’m going to be considerate of the community. This is a big decision, but I’m not gonna rush through it, I’m not gonna sit here and it’s not gonna be June. I don’t have a specific timeline, but I hope to know relatively quickly,” Becker said.
Schurr’s defense attorney, Matthew Borgula, previously said in a press conference that he did not think the case should have been tried in the first place, let alone retried. But, he said, if Becker decides to retry, he is confident it will go in their favor.
“I thought we were going to win the first time around. So, obviously I feel even stronger that we would win should we have to retry this case,” he said.
Mistrial: Jury deadlocks in former GRPD officer’s murder trial in death of Patrick Lyoya
No one ever disputed that Schurr killed Patrick Lyoya, a 26-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The question the jury could not answer was whether it was murder.
“What this boils down to is this was unjustifiable and unreasonable,” the prosecutor told jurors during his opening statement. “It was a crime.”
“This case is about self-defense. This was not murder. This was about self-defense,” defense attorney Mikayla Hamilton said. “(Schurr) acted to save his own life.”
The shooting happened the morning of April 4, 2022, during a traffic stop on Grand Rapids’ Southeast Side. Lyoya had been drinking before he died, a witness testified, and his blood-alcohol content was more than three times the legal limit to drive, his autopsy showed.
Video from the traffic stop shows Lyoya running away from Schurr and an about 2.5-minute struggle between the two, including them grappling over Schurr’s Taser. Ultimately, Schurr, who was on top of Lyoya trying to hold him down, shot him in the back of the head.
“It was happening fast,” Lyoya’s passenger Aime Tuyishime testified on the first day of the trial.
Wayne Butler, who lives near where the shooting happened, testified he saw it happen.
“This isn’t going to end good,” he recalled thinking.
The prosecutor said the shooting was not justified and charged Schurr with second-degree murder in June 2022. He was fired from the police department.
Schurr claimed self-defense. A series of appeals from his legal team meant it was more than three years after Lyoya’s death that the case finally went to trial.
A jury of 14 people — 10 women and four men — was seated April 23, and the trial got underway April 28.
After the jury deliberated for about 21 hours, it told the judge on May 8 it was hopelessly deadlocked. The judge declared a mistrial in the case.
