Around noon on June 24, 2022, as heat radiated from the sidewalk under the overhead sun, Saudi Lee walked along West Gwinnett Street after talking to neighbors.
The 31-year-old Black man with long dreadlocks, a tight blue shirt and a pink backpack was between Crosby and Magazine streets when two Savannah Police Department cruisers cut him off. Eleven seconds later, Lee was dead.
Within that brief timespan, Officer Ernest Ferguson, a former prison guard with disciplinary history, brought out his taser and, when Lee started running away, Ferguson fired four bullets into Lee’s back, according to body camera footage viewed by The Current ahead of its public release.
Ferguson, now 29 and residing in Texas, was indicted for murder last week by a Chatham County grand jury and was accused of lying on a police report for saying that Lee pointed a gun at him first before he shot him.
Body camera footage shows that Lee did pull out a gun, but he did not point it at officers.
Ferguson is in jail awaiting a bond hearing on Tuesday. Charges for murder in Georgia require a bond decision by a Superior Court judge. Ferguson has been at the Chatham County Detention Center since Sept. 27 and is in a cell by himself for his own protection, according to Chief Deputy Gary Taylor. He says it’s the sheriff’s office policy for former law enforcement in jail to be separated from the general population.
Keith Barber, an attorney for Ferguson, did not return a call requesting comment on Friday.
Reporting by The Current revealed Ferguson’s troubled past back in 2022, which was missed by SPD when they decided to hire him. Lee family filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Savannah alleging civil rights abuses and negligent hiring.
What the public has never seen, however, is the graphic body camera footage from the shooting. All the Savannah community has known — prior to the indictment — was the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s summary of the shooting. The indictment alleges Ferguson lied to the GBI about what happened.
The footage is considered a “crucial piece of evidence,” according to Chatham County District Attorney Shalena Cook Jones. The Current received approval from a federal judge to view the footage after the city’s lawyer filed it into evidence last month as part of the Lee family’s civil suit.
From stop to shooting
Ferguson and another officer, Mackenzie Randle, are shown on the footage following Lee on June 24, 2022, around the west Savannah neighborhood where he lived, a place that Ferguson had previously described as a “high crime area.”
Lee was walking along Gwinnett Street around noon when Ferguson, who was alone in his police vehicle, decided to stop him.
“All right, let’s go and get him for pedestrian (in the) roadway,” Ferguson said over the radio to Randle, according to the footage.
Ferguson pulled his car up to Lee and then jumped out of the vehicle. Randle parked his police car on the other side of Lee, blocking his exit. Ferguson greeted Lee.
“Everything good?” Lee asked.
“Yeah, everything’s good,” Ferguson replied. Lee told the officer that he was returning to his house.
The video shows that Lee tried to give Ferguson his wallet to show his weapons permit. At the same time, Ferguson took out a yellow taser and Lee began to back away with the wallet still in his hand, according to the body camera footage.
Lee then took a gun out of his holster and immediately started running away from both officers, the footage shows.
Lee can be seen with a handgun while running, but it was not pointed at officers.
What happened next is the basis for the Lee family civil suit. In its legal filing, the city alleges that Lee said “You’re going to have to kill me,” which police lawyers suggest shows Lee’s intent to harm Ferguson and others.
Lawyers for Lee’s family argue that he said something else: “You’re going to kill me.”
Ferguson took out his police handgun and fired four shots. Lee crumpled to the ground.
Minutes passed before Ferguson or Randle administered medical aid. Blood seeped out of Lee’s neck and pooled in the roadway.
After bystanders yelled at Ferguson to help Lee, the officer spent the next several minutes administering chest compressions on him. Lee was not moving.
A plainclothes officer arrived and told Ferguson to wait in his car. He returned to his cruiser, took a police union card out of his wallet, and called the Southern States Police Benevolent Association line asking for “representation.”
The body camera footage ended after that.
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