A Houston woman was repeatedly shot inside her friend’s apartment by deputies responding to a call at a neighboring unit about an intruder, an incident that her attorney, the national civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, said “should have never happened.”
The woman, Eboni Pouncy, was injured in the Feb. 3 shooting and is recovering, Crump said in a statement.
Body camera footage from two Harris County sheriff’s deputies showed them approaching the apartment of Pouncy’s friend. The videos, released Saturday along with a video statement on the incident, show one of the deputies banging on the door and yelling, “Sheriff’s office!”
Both deputies move away from the front door toward the windows.
One deputy can be heard in the footage saying that she sees someone coming to the door and shouting, “Gun!” The deputies begin firing their weapons repeatedly, reload and continue to fire, the videos show.
The sheriff’s office said a handgun was later recovered inside the apartment near the entrance.
While Crump acknowledged Pouncy was holding her legally registered gun, he added in a statement Monday that “this newly-released body cam footage is evidence of the unnecessary and excessive force used against” his client.
“The video shows the deputies that responded to Eboni’s friend’s house shot first and asked questions later,” Crump said.
In an earlier statement, he compared it to the shooting of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman who was fatally shot by police in Louisville, Kentucky, during a botched 2020 raid at her home.
“It is concerningly clear by the video and Eboni’s injuries that deputies were not justified in shooting her five times,” Crump wrote on X on Monday. “We demand that the deputies involved be immediately held accountable for the terrible injuries that Eboni suffered due to their impulsive actions.”
The sheriff’s office said deputies were called to the Pines of Woodforest Apartments around 2:10 a.m. after a woman reported that someone was inside her apartment, the sheriff’s office said in a video statement.
The first deputy on the scene cleared the apartment and made sure it was “safe and secure,” according to authorities.
After a second deputy arrived, someone in a neighboring unit flagged down the deputies and said that someone had broken into a different apartment.
Both deputies went to that apartment, which belonged to Pouncy’s friend. There, deputies reported seeing “the front window screen removed, broken glass and the blinds raised, near the front door,” the sheriff’s office said in a video statement.
Crump said the window was shattered because Pouncy’s friend had forgotten her house key so the women had broken the window to get inside.
“A neighbor heard the glass shatter and informed the already-present deputies of the sound,” he said in a statement.
Pouncy, fearing it was an intruder, grabbed her handgun and approached the door, according to Crump. Shortly afterward, she was shot by the deputies.
The shooting remains under investigation by the sheriff’s office homicide unit. The Harris County District Attorney’s Office and the sheriff’s office internal affairs unit are conducting their own independent investigations. The two deputies involved have been placed on administrative leave.