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Andrew "Drew" Brandon Christian

Age : 34

Gender : Male

Race : White

Date : 09/16/2021

Location : Memphis Police Department; Shelby County Sheriff’s Office Multi-Agency Gang Unit

City : Memphis

County : Shelby

State : Tennessee

Agency : Memphis Police Department, Shelby County Sheriff's Office

Officer(s) :Not Disclosed

Cause of Death : Gunshot

Event : Killed by police during arrest

OPEN RECORDS SUMMARY :

On 09/16/2021, a man died during a gunfire exchange as members of the Memphis-area Multi-Agency Gang Unit attempted to serve an arrest warrant at a residence in northeast Memphis. The warrant had been issued in Sumner County, Tennessee. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation confirms the incident in its official 2021 deadly-force case index and identifies the involved entity as the Multi-Agency Gang Unit.
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Members of the unit included a Memphis Police Department officer and a Shelby County Sheriff’s Office deputy. According to the preliminary police account, officers entered the residence while attempting to execute the arrest warrant and were fired upon from inside.
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Police alleged that at least one officer returned fire. The Memphis officer and Shelby County deputy sustained minor injuries while getting out of the residence. The available reporting did not clearly establish whether either officer's injuries resulted from gunfire.
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After the officers withdrew, the man remained inside the residence. He was subsequently found dead from a gunshot wound.
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Critically, authorities initially acknowledged that they did not know whether the man was killed by police gunfire or died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Memphis police publicly said that distinction remained undetermined following the encounter.
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That uncertainty materially affects the classification of the death. The incident unquestionably occurred during an armed police warrant operation in which police fired into the residence, but the early public record did not establish whose bullet caused the fatal wound.
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The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation was called in as the outside investigative agency. TBI's official historical record confirms that it investigated the 09/16/2021 Shelby County incident involving the Multi-Agency Gang Unit. TBI describes its role in such cases as independent fact-finding: documenting the scene, collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses and submitting its investigative file to the District Attorney General, who determines whether officers' actions were legally justified.
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This investigation therefore should have included ballistics capable of resolving the most important factual question in the case: whether the fatal projectile came from a police weapon or from a firearm attributed to the deceased man.
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The later publicly accessible material reviewed for this update does not provide a clear final resolution of that question. It also does not provide a publicly identified officer who fired, the number of police rounds discharged, a final prosecutorial determination, body-camera findings or a publicly established identity for the deceased man.
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The man's identity is especially worth flagging because this is a five-year-old case. Contemporary reporting described him only as a man found dead inside the residence, and the TBI's current historical index still lists the incident without identifying the deceased person. The database should therefore retain Name Withheld unless a reliable identification is located rather than attempting to infer his identity from the Sumner County warrant.
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The reason police were attempting to arrest him is also incompletely documented in the available public reporting. The warrant originated in Sumner County, but the specific charge underlying that warrant was not clearly disclosed in the sources located for this update.
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No later public reporting located for this update establishes that the man's family or an eyewitness publicly contested the police account, and no wrongful-death or civil-rights lawsuit arising specifically from this death was identified.
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OFFICER BACKGROUND
The Memphis Police officer and Shelby County Sheriff's deputy involved in the gunfire have not been publicly identified. Because their identities remain undisclosed, an individual prior-shooting, misconduct, discipline or lawsuit history cannot reliably be attached to either officer.
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The organizational context is more significant. The officers were working as members of the Multi-Agency Gang Unit rather than responding as ordinary patrol officers. The unit was conducting a targeted arrest operation based on an out-of-county warrant when the fatal encounter occurred.
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TBI's involvement is important because Memphis and Shelby County had an established agreement with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation governing outside investigation of police use-of-force cases. TBI's current explanation states that it acts as an independent fact-finder and forwards its completed findings to the appropriate District Attorney General rather than deciding itself whether police conduct was justified.
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The Memphis Police Department subsequently became the subject of extraordinary federal scrutiny following the 2023 killing of Tyre Nichols. That later case exposed serious problems involving specialized police units, supervision, use of force, traffic enforcement and officer accountability. It occurred well after this 2021 death and does not establish misconduct by the unidentified officers in this case, but it is substantive later institutional history relevant to Memphis police practices.
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The unresolved forensic issue in this particular case remains considerably more important than that broader departmental history: police fired during the encounter, the man was later discovered dead from a gunshot wound, and the initial official account expressly could not determine whether police killed him or whether the wound was self-inflicted. The TBI investigation should have generated forensic evidence capable of addressing that question, yet a clear final public resolution was not located in the records reviewed for this update.
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SOURCE LINKS :

https://wreg.com/news/questions-remain-as-tbi-investigates-deadly-officer-involved-shooting-in-northeast-memphis/
https://www.wbbjtv.com/2021/09/17/1-dead-in-home-after-gunfire-exchange-with-memphis-police/
https://www.tn.gov/tbi/crime-issues/crime-issues/officer-involved-shootings.html
https://dailymemphian.com/issue/2021/9/17