Prosecutors said Hannah Payne, 21, acted like the police when she followed and shot Kenneth Herring for leaving the scene of an accident. (CBS 46 /video screenshot)
The Georgia woman accused of chasing and gunning down a Black man after he allegedly fled the scene of a crash was granted bond Friday.
Hannah Payne, 21, faces a murder charge in the death of Kenneth Herring, A Clayton County judge granted her release on $100,000 bond as she awaits a murder trial stemming from the fatal incident, according to 11 Alive.
Payne is now required to wear an ankle monitor and was ordered to keep away from others involved in the case. She is also barred from carrying a gun.
Her bond comes just days after a judge ruled in a preliminary hearing that there was enough evidence to move forward with prosecuting Paynee in Herring’s death. Prosecutors said the young woman shot and killed the 62-year-old man after he fled the scene of a car accident in Clayton County on May 7.
Herring failed to stop at a red light and slammed into a semi-truck. Payne witnessed the wreck but wasn’t involved in it, though her lawyer initially claimed Herring had hit her car, too.
In court, a prosecutor testified that Herring stayed on scene for at least 20 minutes, but left in the midst of a medical emergency one witness described as “probably like diabetic shock,” the station reported. That’s when Payne tailed the man for nearly a mile, then boxed him in with her Jeep while on the phone with 911.
Ignoring the dispatcher’s orders to stay at the initial scene, Payne instead followed Herring and confronted him — with a gun.
Witnesses recalled seeing Payne “punching” the man and repeatedly yelling at him to “get out of the car!” A scuffle ensued, and ended with Payne being shot.
According to witnesses, Payne, who was still on the phone with 911, told the dispatcher that Herring had shot himself with her gun. Another witness filmed the woman changing her shirt before officers arrived to the scene of the shooting.
The defense argued that Payne was only acting as a “good Samaritan,” and painted Herring as the aggressor in the shooting. Prosecutors thought otherwise and said Payne had acted like a wannabe cop.
“She’s using deadly force; she wasn’t faced with deadly force,” District Attorney Tracy Graham Lawson said at a hearing earlier this week. “You cannot claim self-defense and use deadly force unless you’re not the initial aggressor — she is.”
Herring’s widow, Christine Herring, even likened Payne to George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watchman who gunned down Black Florida teen Trayvon Martin. She expressed disappointment with the judge’s decision Friday.
“She shouldn’t have got a bond, I know that,” she said. “Nobody else got a bond for the same thing.”
Watch more in the video below.
