Authorities in Mississippi have charged two White men accused of chasing and shooting at a Black FedEx driver who was making deliveries in Brookhaven last month. In an interview with the Mississippi Free Press, D’Monterrio Gibson, 24, said he had dropped off a package at an address when he realized a white pickup truck was heading towards his direction from a house that was close by.
What happened next could have been fatal, he said. “In my mind I’m thinking (the driver) is leaving to go to the store or something like that, but then they get extremely close to me and start blowing their horn,” Gibson recalled.
“I proceed to leave the driveway. As I’m leaving the driveway, he starts driving in the grass trying to cut me off. My instincts kick in, I swerve around him, and I start hitting the gas trying to get out of the neighborhood because I don’t know what his intentions are.”
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Gibson also said as he was trying to get out of harm’s way, he encountered another White man who was armed and standing in the middle of the street.
“I drive down about two or three houses. There’s another guy standing in the middle of the street pointing a gun at my windows and signaling to me to stop with his hands, as well as mouthing the word, ‘Stop.’ I shake my head no, I hide behind the steering wheel, and I swerve around him as well. As I swerve around him, he starts firing shots into my vehicle,” he said.
Gibson said multiple shots were fired into his vehicle, and it left bullet holes in the back as well as in packages. He added that the car had been rented by his employers, and he was in his FedEx uniform at the time. And as he was driving out of the neighborhood following the confrontation, he said he observed the White pickup truck was trailing him.
“I just went as fast as I could. He chased me all the way to the interstate,” he recalled, adding that the white pickup truck went out of sight after 10 or 15 minutes.
Gibson reported the incident to two of his managers as well as dispatch. “I reached dispatch and let him know what was going on, and I only had a chance to get a little of the story out when he cut me off and he was like, ‘Were you at this address?’ I said yes,” the Black man said. “He was like, well I just got a call of a suspicious person at this address. I was like, ‘Sir, I’m not a suspicious person, I work for FedEx. I was just doing my job,’” he said.
“I also let him know that they shot at me, and he was like, ‘Well, they didn’t tell me that.’ Of course they wouldn’t. … He told me to save the rest of my story, and he’d take my name down and give it to my supervisor.”
Gibson and one of his managers also went to the Brookhaven Police Department the day after the shooting to file a report. But the 24-year-old Black man said he felt disrespected after a White officer asked if he had done “anything to make them think (he) looked suspicious.”
“I felt disrespected at that point, because even if I did, they still can’t take the law into their own hand,” Gibson told the Mississippi Free Press. “So I told him all I did was my job. If they think that I was suspicious, that was on them. He was like ‘OK, I was just asking.’”
The two White suspects, identified as Brandon and Gregory Case, turned themselves in to authorities on February 1. Gregory faces a conspiracy charge while his son Brandon has been charged with aggravated assault. They were released the next day after posting bail.
“It’s just sad that it happens. It seems to be a copycat duo copying off the Ahmaud Arbery case,” Gibson’s lawyer, Carlos Moore, said. “They saw this man was a Black man, and they just hauled off and shot at him multiple times, at least the younger son did. The older guy tried to entrap him. They were working concertedly to try to entrap and kill this man. I mean, they shot at him several times. It’s amazing that he survived.”
Moore also said he’ll petition the FBI and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations to launch an investigation into the incident. He also said he’ll reach out to the U.S. Department of Justice “to prosecute this as a hate crime.”
