Jury Finds White DC Officer Guilty of 2nd Degree Murder for Killing Karon Hylton Brown. During a Chase Over a Traffic Stop, White Cop Forced Black Man on a Moped Into a Deadly Collision with an SUV

From [HERE] Two D.C. police officers were found guilty of obstructing justice and one of them was convicted of second-degree murder Wednesday in connection with a 2020 vehicular chase that killed a young Black man on a moped and sparked destructive civil unrest by hundreds of demonstrators outside a city police station.

After deliberating for five days in a trial that began Oct. 25, a jury in U.S. District Court in Washington found Officer Terence Sutton, 38, guilty of second-degree murder in the death of 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown, who crashed his rented moped during a pursuit that prosecutors said violated police policy and was conducted in an illegally reckless fashion.

Sutton and his co-defendant, Lt. Andrew Zabavsky, were convicted of conspiracy and obstructing justice in what authorities said was an attempt to cover up the chase and the seriousness of the crash on the night of Oct. 23, 2020. Jurors returned guilty verdicts on all charges against the officers, both of whom are White. Zabavsky, 54, was not charged directly in Hylton-Brown’s death.

At a time of raw racial tensions nationwide following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, the crowd that massed outside the D.C. police department’s 4th District station four nights after the crash was incensed by what it perceived as fatal police misconduct against a young Black man. Protesters broke windows of the station, vandalized police cars and clashed with officers in riot gear, who countered with pepper pellets and stun grenades.

“This has been a difficult case; this has been a contentious case,” Judge Paul L. Friedman told a throng of spectators in his courtroom shortly before 5 p.m. Wednesday, while the jury waited to file in with its verdicts. “Emotions have run high on both sides,” he said in admonishing people in the gallery to remain quiet during the proceeding.

Hylton-Brown’s mother, Karen Hylton, had been ejected from the courtroom early in the trial for openly sobbing during testimony. After the verdicts were read, she erupted in rage, rising from her seat and bellowing obscenities at the two defendants as a bevy of deputy U.S. marshals dragged her from the courtroom kicking and thrashing.

In the circumstances of this case, second-degree murder carries a maximum penalty of 40 years in prison, although advisory sentencing guidelines used by the court almost certainly will recommend a much lesser term. Obstruction of justice is punishable by up to 20 years in prison, and conspiring to obstruct justice carries a maximum two-year sentence.

The three-minute pursuit, in the Brightwood Park neighborhood of Northwest Washington, began at 10:08 p.m. when Sutton, driving an unmarked car with three other plainclothes officers as passengers, attempted to stop the moped that Hylton-Brown was riding. The chase, along a circuitous route in a four-block area, ended when the moped collided with an SUV, and Hylton-Brown suffered fatal head injuries.

While Sutton conducted the chase, Zabavsky drove a marked police vehicle on parallel streets, trying to get ahead of the moped rider and cut him off, authorities said.

When Hylton-Brown darted out of the alley, with Sutton close behind him, the moped collided with a Toyota Scion traveling on Kennedy Street NW. Hylton-Brown was propelled into the air, landing on the pavement and suffering a catastrophic brain injury, according to an autopsy.

Much of the testimony over nearly two months came from experts on D.C. police regulations on vehicular pursuits and the myriad rules for how officers should act toward people suspected of wrongdoing. Jurors were left to answer a few key questions.

Did Sutton violate police policy by chasing Hylton-Brown, and, in a prosecutor’s words, did he carry out the pursuit with “a conscious disregard of extreme danger of death or serious bodily injury” to the moped rider? The allegation that Sutton caused Hylton-Brown’s death through illegal recklessness was the basis for the second-degree murder charge against him.

“That man right there,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ahmed M. Baset told jurors at the start of the trial, gesturing to Sutton at the defendants’ table. “He murdered Karon Hylton-Brown. … He did it with his police car.”

But J. Michael Hannon, Sutton’s defense attorney, argued that the chase was justified because officers had reason to believe that Hylton-Brown was up to no good that night, and he argued that the young man should not have tried to elude the officers. “If he had stopped, he’d be alive today,” Hannon told the jury. “He chose not to. He might have been arrested with a weapon. He might have been arrested with drugs. But he’d be alive.”

In the final seconds of the chase, prosecutors said, Sutton slowed behind the moped in an alley, turning off the police vehicle’s siren and emergency lights, then suddenly accelerated toward Hylton-Brown in an effort to “flush” him out of the alley and into oncoming traffic. “This was a game for Mr. Sutton,” Baset told jurors. “He knew he was playing a game of chicken with Mr. Hylton-Brown,” which caused the young man’s death.

At the 4th District station on Georgia Avenue NW later that evening, Baset said, the officers misled their shift commander by describing the crash as relatively insignificant, downplaying Hylton-Brown’s injuries and omitting any mention of a chase. Sutton also wrote an initial draft of a police report that gave a false account of what had happened, Baset said.

He said the officers’ goal was to forestall an in-depth investigation of the incident, but the plan failed when Hylton-Brown’s injuries proved to be fatal. But Hannon and Christopher Zampogna, Zabavsky’s attorney, argued that the evidence in this trial showed the officers behaved properly at the crash scene and did nothing afterward to intentionally conceal their actions. [MORE]