© Smith family photoSylville Smith holds his infant son, who is now 2.
The homicide charge against Haeggan-Brown is only the second filed against an on-duty Milwaukee police officer in modern history.
The criminal complaint says Heaggan-Brown's first shot hit Smith in the arm while Smith was throwing a gun over a fence.
The second shot, which hit Smith in the chest, was fired after Smith tossed the gun and fell to the ground with his hands near his head.
Smith's mother, Mildred Haynes, said she is happy with the decision but thinks the charges should have been more severe.
"He shot him in the arm and shot him again in the chest...To me, he shot to kill," she said.
Heaggan-Brown has said he and his partner were patrolling in the 3200 block of N. 44th St. about 3 p.m. Aug. 13 when he saw a car with an out-of-state license plate and a person leaning into the passenger window of the car.
Heaggan-Brown said those actions were consistent with drug activity, based on his prior training, so he stopped his squad car to investigate.
When he stopped the squad car, Smith got out of the driver's seat and ran.
According to the criminal complaint, the officers' body camera footage captured what happened next:
Heaggan-Brown and another officer gave chase. Smith slipped and fell, then got up, with a gun in his hand. Smith turned his upper body toward the officers. Smith then threw gun over a fence into a nearby yard as the first shot was fired.
The probe into Smith's death was led by the Wisconsin Department of Justice Division of Criminal Investigation in compliance with a 2014 state law that requires a team of at least two investigators from an outside agency to lead investigations of officer-involved deaths.
State investigators sent their reports and accompanying evidence, including body-camera footage, to Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm in September.
Haynes said she saw the video about a month ago that her attorney notified her a couple of days ago that prosecutors planned to charge Heaggan-Brown with homicide.
She said she hopes he will be convicted and ultimately serve life in prison.
In Milwaukee, the last on-duty homicide to result in charges stemmed from the fatal shooting of Daniel Bell, 22, in 1958.
More than 20 years after Bell's death, in 1979, one of the officers involved came forward and said his partner, Thomas Grady, shot Bell in the back of the neck at close range, then planted a knife in his right hand. His partner also said Grady used racial slurs both before and after pulling the trigger.
The only other homicide charge against a police officer resulted from an off-duty incident. Officer Alfonzo Glover shot Wilbert Prado eight times after a traffic altercation in 2005. An inquest jury cleared the officer, but then-District Attorney E. Michael McCann charged Glover with first-degree intentional homicide. Hours after he was charged, Glover killed himself.
In October, a Brown Deer officer was charged with shooting a man in the back after he had been pulled off a Milwaukee County bus. The man survived, but lost part of his lung.
Charges against officers involved in on-duty shootings are filed so rarely in part because officers are authorized to use deadly force if they reasonably believe someone poses a threat to officers or to the public.
"Under our system, the police are not required to be shot at or to be attacked before they can defend their lives or the lives of other people," said Eugene O'Donnell, professor of law and police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
In October, Heaggan-Brown was charged in a sexual assault and prostitution case, accused of raping an intoxicated man one day after shooting Smith, and was fired from the Police Department less than two weeks later.
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