Mourners line up at famed Ebenezer Baptist Church for Rayshard Brooks viewing

Hundreds of mourners lined up to pay their respects at a public viewing on Monday for Rayshard Brooks, a Black man who was fatally shot by a white Atlanta police officer in the parking lot of a Wendy’s earlier this month. 

Mourners maintained social distance and wore masks at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Rain fell at 3 p.m. as the viewing began, NBC News reported.

Music played in the church as mourners approached Brooks’s gold-colored coffin. 

Brooks’s widow, Tomika Miller, also attended the four-hour viewing at the church where Martin Luther King Jr. was once a pastor. She is pictured above in white. 

Brooks’s closed funeral is scheduled for Tuesday. The Rev. Raphael Warnock, the church’s senior pastor and a Democratic Senate candidate, will deliver the eulogy.

“Rayshard Brooks wasn’t just running from the police,” Warnock will say, according to an excerpt provided by the church, NBC News reported. “He was running from a system that makes slaves out of people.”

Brooks was fatally shot by a white police officer on June 12 after being questioned on suspicion of DUI in Atlanta. The hearse that carried the man’s casket read “Killed in Atlanta, Georgia 2020” over an image of a police badge, the Washington Post reported.

Brooks initially cooperated with former officers Garrett Rolfe and Devin Brosnan, but after an altercation in which Brooks grabbed an officer’s Taser, Brooks fled and Rolfe shot him in the back.

Charges against Rolfe include felony murder, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, criminal damage to property and violation of oath. Brosnan was charged with one count of aggravated assault and two counts of violation of oath. 

An attorney for Rolfe has said that the former officer feared for his life and the lives of the other people in the parking lot of the Atlanta restaurant, NBC News reported.

Brooks’s death comes as protests have erupted across the country sparked the death of George Floyd. Floyd, an unarmed Black man, died last month after a former Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for several minutes during an arrest.