Alabama Police Admit To Killing Wrong Man After Mall shooting. Was A Veteran, Had Gun License

The mother and father of the man shot and killed by police at an Alabama mall on Thanksgiving Day are calling for "equal justice" after they say an officer gunned down their son as he was trying to defuse the chaos.

Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford Jr., 21, was killed by police at Riverchase Galleria mall in Hoover, Alabama, on Thursday night after an altercation between multiple people outside a Footaction store.

"It hurts me to the core. My son is gone and I can't get him back. But you vilified my son like he was a straight criminal on Facebook and National TV," Bradford's father, Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford Sr., said at a news conference on Sunday, referring to police and city officials. "You need to clean up and apologize. I want an apology, his mother needs one, his grandmother definitely needs one."

Police said Bradford Jr. "may have been involved in some aspect of the altercation," which led to an 18-year-old man and 12-year-old girl being struck by gunfire. One of two officers responding to the fight shot Bradford, who they initially said was "brandishing a handgun."

"We regret that our initial media release was not totally accurate but new evidence indicates that it was not," Hoover Police Capt. Gregg Rector said in a statement on Saturday.

The gunman in the incident remained at large on Sunday.

The senior Bradford demanded officials release police bodycam footage and surveillance video from the mall to show his son was needlessly shot in the face by an officer whose deadly actions were immediately praised by the mayor and police chief of Hoover for saving lives.

"I just want everybody to understand this: Thanksgiving will never be the same for me because that's the last time I saw my son," April Pipkins, the mother of the man shot dead by police, said during Sunday's news conference. "My son was a loving, very loving young man. He would give any of you the shirt off his back. And that's true. He loved people, period. He was not a killer."

Bradford Jr.'s uncle, Anthony Thomas, demanded that the police chief and mayor of Hoover resign.

"Somebody has got to have accountability for this and I will never stop fighting until the day I die. I will get justice," Thomas said.

Ben Crump, a lawyer for the family, told ABC News he wants authorities to release video of the shooting, saying it exonerates Bradford and shows the mistake made by police.

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