A routine traffic stop in Texas turned deadly when a police officer shot an unarmed man – and footage of the confrontation has been made public after a family’s fight for information and a lawsuit against the agency involved.
Timothy Michael Randall, 29, was pulled over on September 14, 2022, around 12.30 a.m. for allegedly not coming to a complete stop. His mother didn’t know what happened in the final moments of her son’s life for nearly two years.
Only through federal court filings did she see the shocking dash cam footage; the Rusk County Sheriff’s Office deputy searched the young man, ordered him to keep his hands behind his back before tackling him to the ground and shooting him dead, footage shows. NBC News reported the incident this week, drawing national attention to the shooting of an unarmed man.
“I just smoked a dude,” the officer involved said after the shooting, NBC reported.
The video starts with the blue and red lights of the police vehicle flashing as the car pulls up behind a Nissan Altima on a small road. Rusk County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Shane Iverson exits his police vehicle and approaches the driver’s side of the door.
“How are you doing, sir?” the driver asked as the police officer.
The officer said he pulled over the driver because he “blew through” a stop sign. The driver then objected, saying he came to a “complete stop.”
“I came to a stop,” the driver insists.
“No you didn’t,” Iverson replies, to which the driver presses: “What do you mean?”
The officer asks him to step out of the car as Randall asks the officer if he could show him that he didn’t stop.
Randall, wearing a blue and white hat, a t-shirt and khakis, then stands up next to his car with the driver’s door open. Iverson tells him to turn around, put his hands behind his back, and keep his hands out of his pockets.
The footage captures the officer prying in the driver’s khaki pockets before digging through his pants. Grabbing the driver’s arms as he’s pressed up against the vehicle, the officer urges him to keep his hands behind his back.
“I don’t have anything on me, officer,” Randall said firmly. “Officer, please can you tell me what I’m under arrest for?”
In a quick escalation, Iverson can then be seen sticking his arms under both of the driver’s armpits, and spinning him toward the car door and forcing the young man down to the ground. Iverson then pins him down but Randall manages to get up and the officer follows suit. Randall’s hat goes flying as they both fall backward.
Randall rolls on the grass on the other side of the road before springing up to standing and then appears to start running away from the scene. Meanwhile, Iverson gets himself up on one knee, reaches for his gun as he yells “Get down!” and fires. Randall was shot in his chest under his arm.
Yelling, Randall rams into a white mailbox at the front of a yard before dashing off into the distance. Iverson picks himself up from the ground and starts using his radio to get medical attention.
Panting, the officer walks down the road in the direction Randall fled, but later collapsed.
“Dude, you OK?” he asks. Randall does not respond.
Over the radio, the officer says: “I need an ambulance. Call everybody. I’ve got a shooting.”
Iverson is then captured running back to the Nissan Altima, picks up what appears to be a few of his belongings, and gets back into his police vehicle. He drives down the road, where Randall’s body lies lifelessly.
“It was a f***ing meth pipe, man,” Iversen tells his colleague at the scene as he searched Randall’s pockets. Days after the shooting, Iverson sat with Texas Rangers to explain what happened, claiming he thought Randall had a “weapon in his waistband,” according to a transcript obtained by NBC News. Iverson has since retired, according to the outlet.
Wendy Tippett, Randall’s mother, said she was on the phone with her son when he was pulled over. He was concerned that his temporary paper license plate from Oklahoma had expired, according to court documents. In the case that his vehicle was confiscated, she said she could meet him at the traffic stop. She was just a few minutes away.
“He had called to let me know that he was going to be home a few minutes later,” Tippitt told NBC News. “So I wouldn’t worry.”
When she arrived, she saw police officers setting up police tape. “I had this horrible, horrible feeling,” she said. She later witnessed officers covering her son’s body. “Go home and be with your family,” she recalled one saying.
“My family was laying in the road!” Tippitt told NBC News.
Tippitt spent the next week trying to figure out how a traffic stop led to her son’s death.
“No one was telling us anything,” she told the outlet.
She filed a wrongful suit in federal court against Iverson in October 2023 for excessive force, assault and battery and intentional emotional distress. It wasn’t until May 2024 that she first saw the harrowing footage containing the last moments of her son’s life.
No criminal charges have been brought against Iverson and a grand jury opted not to indict him, according to the outlet.
“No one has said an apology in Rusk County,” Randall’s older brother Douglas told NBC News. “No one has shown remorse.”