More questions arise over Tate-Brown case

Brandon Tate-Brown's family continues to get rare peeks behind the curtain at the inner workings of an investigation into the police-involved shooting that claimed his life.

But those glimpses have only led to more questions about the controversial case.

On Friday, Tanya Brown-Dickerson and her attorney, Brian Mildenberg, ventured to police Internal Affairs headquarters in Northeast Philadelphia to review more evidence from the investigation.

They left Internal Affairs perplexed over inconsistencies that seemed to emerge in a handful of statements from four eyewitnesses who were in Mayfair on Dec. 15, when Tate-Brown was fatally shot after he fought with two patrol cops on Frankford Avenue near Magee.

The Police Department has maintained that Tate-Brown was pulled over for driving a 2014 Dodge Charger without its lights on, and was asked to exit the vehicle after one of the officers spotted a handgun near the vehicle's center console.

But Mildenberg said tonight that one witness claimed Tate-Brown denied having a gun, even as the officers pointed their weapons at him and demanded to know where his gun was.

None of the witnesses saw Tate-Brown with a gun, or heard him acknowledge having one, Mildenberg said.

A "good Samaritan" who drove past the scene stopped his car and got out to help the officers, because he himself was either an off-duty law enforcement officer or security guard, Mildenberg said.

That man told Internal Affairs that one of the officers who was involved in the fatal-shooting told him that Tate-Brown had been stopped because his vehicle matched one that had been involved in an "earlier incident."

Mildenberg said this reason for the stop directly contradicts one of the cops, who told Internal Affairs that Tate-Brown was pulled over for only having his daytime running lights on.

"This is the very first time we have heard the police officer's apparently true reason for pulling Brandon over," Mildenberg said.  "The true reason, according to this eyewitness, who is reporting what the police officer stated to him immediately after the event, was that Brandon's car allegedly matched the description of a vehicle involved in an earlier incident."

Tate-Brown told the officers that he worked at Hertz Rental Car, and was using the Dodge with his manager's permission.

When the officers ran the plates, they found the car registered to Dollar Rental Car – and asked Tate-Brown to step out of the car because of the inconsistency.

Mildenberg said Dollar Rental is owned by Hertz.

Some of the witnesses said Tate-Brown was carrying an unknown "shiny metallic object," but that was his cell phone, Mildenberg said.

The attorney said he and Brown-Dickerson reviewed the statements "under protest" because they were not allowed to take notes.

"Telling a lawyer he or she cannot use a legal pad is like telling a journalist he or she cannot use a pen, or telling a surgeon he or she cannot use a scalpel," Mildenberg said in an email.

He again called on the Police Department to release the statements and video surveillance footage of the incident to the public, something Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey has said he will not do, in part because the case is still being reviewed by the District Attorney's Office.

But Ramsey did allow Mildenberg and Brown-Dickerson to review the surveillance footage two weeks ago at Internal Affairs, and to return again Friday to read the statements.