A Michigan sheriff’s office finally released body and dash cam videos of the shooting death of Tony Cox, an unarmed 33-year-old Black man who was shot and killed after he was pulled over for running a stop sign and accused of being involved in a “shots fired” call a week earlier.
“They’re essentially just guessing,” said Joel Sklar in a telephone interview with Atlanta Black Star, who is the attorney representing Cox’s family in a wrongful death lawsuit.
“There is no factual basis to connect Tony Cox or the vehicle he was in to the reported shots fired incident.”
“There’s no evidence that any vehicle was involved in a shooting. Nobody saw the shooter. Nobody saw shots from the vehicle. None of that.”
But the video footage released this week by the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office shows deputies were convinced he was the shooter, with one deputy even telling a dispatcher they had “confirmed” he was the shooter.
The videos also show Cox was terrified after he had been pulled over and ordered to get out of the car after he was accused of being involved in the shooting.
“You’re going to kill me?” he asked after a deputy threatened to “blow out his window” when he had rolled it back up when the other deputy ordered him out of the car.
Fearing for his life, Cox drove away from the traffic stop, prompting a pursuit through several blocks in a residential neighborhood, before one deputy got him to spin out of control by using a Precision Immobilization Technique (PIT) maneuver, which is when a law enforcement officer strikes the rear quarter panel of a fleeing car with their own patrol car, causing the fleeing driver to lose control of the car.
“Hands up!” a deputy yelled as Cox stepped out of the car.
The video shows that Cox briefly lifted both arms with his hands clasped together before attempting to run away.
That was when several deputies fired dozens of rounds, killing him instantly. They then tried in vain to find a gun, but there was no gun.
Cox’s sister, Tiffany Macon, said she watched the video of her brother saying he was scared.
“He knew that something bad was about to happen,” she said in a telephone interview with Atlanta Black Star. “He knew things were not going right because of how (the deputies) came in.”
A sergeant then arrived on the scene and told all the deputies to shut off their body cameras, the footage shows.
Sklar said they fired at least 37 rounds, but probably much more.
“One of the bullets struck a police car, one of the bullets struck a house across the street, one of the bullets struck a flagpole,” Sklar said.
“It gives you a sense of how in control these officers were at the time, and they weren’t.”
“They created a remarkably hyper, crazy factual setting not based on any real fact, just based on their suspicions that, ‘my god, there’s a Black man driving a car,’” the attorney said.
It was only a few months ago that an Oakland County judge was fired after she was recorded making racist statements against Black people.
Macon, who lives in Texas, said she last saw her brother during Thanksgiving in Chicago, where the family is originally from.
“He was always a giver, and he loved his nieces,” she said. “Whatever they asked for, whether it was a phone or iPod, he would give it to them. He was that type of uncle.”
Cox was the youngest sibling with two older sisters, so Macon would refer to him as the “Big Baby Boy” because he was 6 feet tall and weighed 390 pounds.
“He was a full-time worker who worked as a robotics engineer and also owned his own trucking company,” Macon said.
Watch the video of the shooting below.
The Shooting
The shooting took place on Dec. 13, 2023, after Cox had left the Carriage Circle apartment complex, a 235-unit where the shots fired call was made a few days earlier.
The shots fired call came from an anonymous woman who called the sheriff’s office saying she heard gunshots.
However, the caller said the shots were connected to a Chrysler Sebring while Cox was driving his girlfriend’s Ford Fusion.
“It’s an entirely different car than Tony Cox was driving,” said Sklar. “Tony Cox died because he had the misfortune of driving in Pontiac while being Black.”
Sklar said when deputies responded to the call, they found no evidence of any shots having been fired, so it could have been just kids playing with firecrackers for all they knew.
The attorney also said deputies used a license plate reader to see which cars were leaving the complex after the initial report, which is apparently how they zeroed in on Cox.
“There are people coming and going all day and night at that complex,” Sklar said. “They had no probable cause to effectuate an arrest.”
Once pulled over, the deputies ordered him to turn off his car.
“I’m scared,” Cox responded with both hands in front of him to show the deputies he was not armed.
“Why do I have to turn off my car?”
Cox then raised the window, which Sklar describes as “passive resistance.”
“In Michigan, you can resist and unlawful arrest, and this was an unlawful arrest from the get-go,” he said.
“He never had a gun, wasn’t involved in any criminal activity, was cooperative at the scene until the officers put him in fear for his own life.”
“He acted out of self-defense because he thought they were going to kill him, and they ended up killing him.”
An autopsy performed by the Oakland County Medical Examiner the following day ruled Cox’s death a homicide after finding nine gunshot wounds on his back. The autopsy also determined Cox had no drugs or alcohol in his system when he was killed.
“This 33-year-old Black male, Tony Cox, died of multiple gunshot wounds during an assault,” wrote Deputy Medical Examiner Bernardino B. Pacris in his report.
“Based on the circumstances surrounding his death, the results of the postmortem examination and the toxicological analysis, the manner of death is homicide.”
Also released this week with the video footage were some of the names of the deputies involved, which had been withheld, including Cody Johnson, Joel Tomaszewski, Steven Webber, Michael McCarty, and Sgt. Ramsey, who was the one who ordered the deputies to shut off their cameras.
“Our family feels like we were robbed of something very precious to us,” Macon said. “Me and my brother and sister were very close. He stayed with me a great deal of his life.”
