A Cuyahoga County grand jury has declined to charge a Drug Enforcement Agency officer who shot a 20-year-old man on Cleveland’s East Side last year.
According to a statement released Friday by the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office, several witnesses testified to the grand jury.
Among them was DEA agent Ryan Schumacher, who is white, and the man he shot, Trayvon Johnson, who is Black. Schumacher faced two possible counts of felonious assault but no charges were filed.
The only video of the incident, obtained by Cleveland.com from a Cleveland Metropolitan School District camera nearby, shows an unmarked white vehicle parked on an otherwise empty street. Eventually a dark SUV pulls up in front of it.
A man gets out of the dark SUV and approaches the white vehicle. As he moves toward it, the driver of the white vehicle, Schumacher, gets out of the car and appears to fire two shots at Johnson, who then runs toward a nearby house and out of the camera’s view.
Johnson was shot once in the abdomen and survived. Cleveland police officers responding to the scene put him in the back of a patrol car and brought him to a Cleveland Clinic emergency room. Johnson has since recovered.
County prosecutors filed menacing and carrying a concealed weapon charges against Johnson, but those were withdrawn by the prosecutor’s office in October.
Documents filed with those charges revealed that Schumacher, who was not wearing a uniform, said he saw Johnson pull back his jacket to reveal a firearm before shooting him.
