Stephon Clark, the unarmed black man shot by Sacramento police officers while holding a cellphone in his grandparent’s backyard last week, was shot eight times, six of which hit him in the back, according to independent autopsy results released on Friday.

The autopsy was conducted by Dr. Bennet Omalu, a private medical examiner hired by the lawyer representing the Clark family. According to Omalu, Clark was shot four times in his lower back, twice in his neck, and once under one of his armpits. Another shot hit Clark in the leg. “His death wasn’t instantaneous,” Omalu told reporters. The findings come one day after a funeral service was held for Clark.

“These findings from the independent autopsy contradict the police narrative that we’ve been told,” Benjamin Crump, the family’s lawyer, said in a statement. “This independent autopsy affirms that Stephon was not a threat to police and was slain in another senseless police killing under increasingly questionable circumstances.”

The Sacramento County Coroner’s office, which is conducting the official autopsy, has not yet released its findings.

On March 18, Clark was shot in the backyard of the home he was staying in with his grandparents. The Sacramento Police Department has said the officers were responding to a 911 call that a man was breaking car windows in the area.

According to a press release issued by the Sacramento Police Department shortly after the shooting, a helicopter tracking a suspect directed the officers to Clark, who ran towards his house after being confronted by officers. The police department said Clark turned and began to “advance forward with his arms extended, and holding an object in his hands.”

The officers, who are said to have thought the object was a gun, then fired 20 rounds at Clark, eight of which hit him. After the shooting, officers waited several minutes for backup before moving to handcuff Clark and beginning medical treatment. And the only item he turned out to have been carrying was a cellphone.

The shooting has sparked public outcry both locally and nationally. For more than a week, protesters have taken to the streets in Sacramento, calling for the officers involved in the shooting to be charged for Clark’s death and noting that Clark is just the latest black man to be shot by Sacramento police in recent years. On Tuesday, the California Justice Department announced that it would investigate the use of force practices of the Sacramento Police Department.

Nearly four years after the death of Michael Brown sparked the rise of Black Lives Matter and brought more attention to racial disparities in police shootings, the Clark case serves as a stark reminder that even as national attention has waned, unarmed black men and women continue to experience deadly encounters with police.

Body camera footage of Clark’s shooting is disturbing

On March 21, Sacramento police released two audio and three video recordings of the incident, including two videos from the responding officers’ body cameras. The footage was shown to Clark’s family prior to its release.

In the first few minutes of the body cam videos, the officers are shown looking for the person suspected of breaking into the cars when they encounter Clark. Halfway through the video, an officer can be heard yelling after spotting movement behind a house. The officer, after seeing a man, then yells “Show me your hands!” and follows the man into a backyard.

[WARNING: This video is extremely disturbing.]

A few seconds later, the officer yells at the man to show his hands. The officer then yells “Gun!”, demands that Clark show his hands once more and both officers then fire several shots. A little over five minutes later, the officers approach and handcuff Clark before beginning medical treatment. The final minutes of the body camera videos are completely silent, as the officers muted their microphones.

The police officers do not identify themselves as law enforcement in the video.

After seeing the videos, Clark’s aunt, Saquoia Durham, told the Sacramento Bee that she doesn’t believe Clark was given a chance to surrender to police. “They said ‘put your hands up, gun’ and then they just let loose on my nephew,” Durham said.

“When they shot him down, they knew they messed up,” she added.

In a statement, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said that it was too early to reach conclusions about what happened the night Clark was killed. “Based on the videos alone, I cannot second guess the split-second decisions of our officers and I’m not going to do that,” he said. “The investigation must be completed.”

There are a lot of questions and few answers about the Sacramento shooting

Even with the release of the body camera footage, what happened immediately before Clark’s shooting remains unclear, and his family and community are demanding answers.

”He was at the wrong place at the wrong time in his own backyard?” Sequita Thompson, Clark’s grandmother, said to the Sacramento Bee on March 20. Thompson also said that though she heard the gunshots, she never heard the police ask Clark to drop what he was holding. Clark’s family also said that they were not immediately told that their relative was the man killed in their backyard.

At a city council meeting in Sacramento on March 20, local activists argued that the police department’s multiple statements on the shooting have only added to the confusion.

“They put one story out that he may have been armed. They put out another that he had a ‘tool bar,’ whatever that is,” Tanya Faison, founder of the Sacramento chapter of Black Lives Matter, told reporters. “Then they put out that he had a wrench, and then they put out that he just had a cellphone. They need to get it together.”

The officers who shot Clark have each served in the Sacramento Police Department for less than five years, and were placed on paid leave while the investigation continues.

Clark’s shooting is the latest in a troubling pattern

Clark’s death follows several high profile police shootings of black men in recent years. According to the Washington Post’s Fatal Force database, some 264 people have been shot and killed by police in 2018. 57 of those people were identified as black in news reports.

Research has shown that there are significant racial disparities in police use of force. While these disparities are most commonly attributed to issues like implicit bias and systemic racism, recent research has also noted that specific factors like high levels of housing segregation and economic inequality also play a role in where police shootings occur and who they affect.

“It’s not just about how individuals interact, but how society is structured,” Michael Siegel, the author of a recent study examining the relationship between housing segregation and structural inequality to police violence, told the Intercept earlier this month.

At this point, it is unclear what the results of the police investigation will be, or if the officers will face charges for the shooting. But when police officers shoot civilians, it is rare that these cases lead to prosecution.

As Vox’s German Lopez has noted, police are given wide latitude to use force and only have to reasonably perceive a threat at the time of the shooting for their actions to be legally justified.