An independent autopsy commissioned by the family of Jabari Peoples showed the slain teen was shot in the lower back, slightly above his buttocks, attorneys said Tuesday.

The 18-year-old college student died June 23 during a confrontation with a Homewood police officer in a city soccer park.

Attorneys for Peoples’ family called a Tuesday press conference to show a diagram from a private autopsy conducted by a medical examiner in Atlanta.

The legal team is led by Birmingham attorney Leroy Maxwell and national civil rights lawyer Ben Crump.

While lawyers showed the post-mortem diagram, they said there was little more they could draw from the examination without context that they say could be provided through the release of body camera and dash cam footage.

They also seek other supporting documents, such as police reports and records from the Jefferson County Coroner/Medical Examiner’s office, which conducted the official autopsy.

“I emphasize it is a preliminary finding because we don’t have all the evidence,” Crump said, “and you cannot draw conclusions until you get all of the evidence.”

“We need to see the video before we can have conclusions,” he said. “This helps the family at least have some questions answered, but it’s not conclusive yet.”

Read full coverage of the case here.

The family and the attorneys have sought to see the video footage since the shooting three weeks ago.

The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency is leading the probe and maintains that release of the footage – even to the family if not the public as a whole – would hinder the investigation.

“If the goal here is transparency, and the goal is justice – and the goal should always be transparency and it should always be justice – this isn’t a hard ask,” Maxwell said.

“It’s not a hard ask for the Peoples’ family, it’s not a hard ask for the community, it’s not a hard ask for the state. Give us the evidence.”

Atlanta attorney Eric Hertz said investigations of law enforcement done by law enforcement have a natural bias.

“Society is judged by how the most powerful treat the most vulnerable,” Hertz said, “and in this situation, young Mr. Peoples was the most vulnerable.”

Hertz said the medical examiner in Atlanta found that based on the preliminary information, the possible entry of the gunshot wound was in the lower back.

Hertz said the private autopsy showed no exit wound, and an X-ray of Peoples’ body did not show any projectile still in his body.

“We need the bullet,” he said. “We need to know where the bullet is because it’s not in the body.”

“The bullet appeared to come in through the back,” he said. “Bullets go in a straight line, they don’t ricochet when it’s soft tissue like this.”

“If this bullet went in a straight line, then we’re looking at the heart and the lungs and the part where it comes out in the chest or lodged inside the chest,” he said.

“And that, preliminary, is what we want to find out because that would be the cause of death.”

Asked how a bullet could strike Peoples’ heart if it entered in the lower back and traveled in a straight line, Crump said, “We don’t know and we don’t want to make assumptions but obviously the medical examiner (in Atlanta) has thoughts, but she won’t relay those thoughts conclusively because the video would tell us exactly the position he was in when the shot was fired.”

“This makes us think even more about what happened,” Crump said, “but most importantly, it underscores again why we got to see that video.”

“We’re grasping at straws because we don’t know any of that information,” Crump said, adding that they need to know the trajectory and “power of the bullet.”

Maxwell within days of the shooting announced Peoples had been shot in the back.

That conclusion came from a “charting” of the body, which he said was later confirmed by the private autopsy carried out last week.

The Jefferson County Coroner’s Office said it cannot release its autopsy findings, at the request of ALEA.

Officials there said they could not say whether the Alabama medical examiner viewed the video footage or retrieved the bullet during the autopsy.

Peoples was a 2024 graduate of Aliceville High School where he was standout track athlete and football player.

Peoples had just finished his freshman year at Alabama A & M where he was studying computer information and criminal justice with hopes of becoming a law enforcement officer, specifically a detective.

He was shot to death that Monday night in Homewood Soccer Park.

Homewood police say a veteran officer, who has not been publicly identified, approached the vehicle to investigate because of a recent increase in criminal activity in and around the city’s athletic complexes.

The officer, police say, smelled marijuana and ordered Peoples and his female friend out of the vehicle.

Police say the encounter ended with Peoples resisting, breaking away from the officer as he tried to handcuff him, and grabbing a gun from the driver’s side door pocket.

The officer shot Peoples, who was pronounced dead a short time later at UAB Hospital.

Peoples’ family and attorney Maxwell disagreed with that narrative, saying that Peoples wasn’t armed and didn’t resist.

The Homewood Police Department turned the investigation over to ALEA, which is standard policy for many officer-involved shootings.

ALEA denied the family’s request to see the footage, saying release of the video footage would jeopardize the ongoing investigation.

Though Alabama state provides a way for families to view body camera and dash cam videos, the same law also allows law enforcement to withhold the footage for investigative purposes.

There have been several protests following the fatal shooting, including at the Homewood Police Department, ALEA’s office in west Homewood, Homewood City Hall and during the World Police and Fire Games in the Birmingham area.

About two dozen protesters on Tuesday marched from Friendship Baptist Church in Homewood’s Rosedale community to City Hall. Homewood police blocked the roads for the protesters to safely march.