ELIZABETH CITY, N.C. - A North Carolina prosecutor said Tuesday that sheriff’s deputies were justified in fatally shooting Andrew Brown Jr. because Mr. Brown struck a deputy with his car and nearly ran him over while ignoring commands to show his hands and get out of the vehicle.

District Attorney Andrew Womble said at a news conference that Mr. Brown used his car as a “deadly weapon,” causing Pasquotank County deputies to believe it was necessary to use deadly force.

Mr. Womble acknowledged that Mr. Brown wasn’t armed with guns or other weapons. He said the deputies will face no criminal charges after he reviewed a state investigation of the shooting, which sparked weeks of protests.

Pasquotank County Sheriff Tommy Wooten II said in a video statement Tuesday afternoon that the deputies will keep their jobs but will be “disciplined and retrained.”

Mr. Brown’s family released a statement calling Mr. Womble’s decision “both an insult and a slap in the face.” Attorneys for the family who watched body camera footage have said repeatedly that Mr. Brown was trying to drive away from deputies who were trying to serve him with drug-related warrants and posed no threat.

The prosecutor declined to directly release copies of bodycam video of the April 21 fatal shooting, but he played portions of the video during the news conference that media outlets broadcast live.

The multiple angles of the footage, projected onto a screen behind Mr. Womble, depicted a chaotic scene of about 44 seconds. After six deputies approach Mr. Brown’s car with guns drawn, the video shows one of them putting his hand on the driver’s side door, then yelling and recoiling as Mr. Brown’s car backs up.

Seconds later, the same deputy appears to be in the path of the car as Mr. Brown moves forward, though it’s not clear how fast the car is moving. The deputy appears to avoid a direct hit after pushing his hand onto the moving car’s hood and quickly moving aside. Gunshots are then heard, and officers appear to continue firing as the car moves away from them.

The quality of the projected video, even replayed later on news websites that filmed it, made it hard for a viewer to glean the level of detail described by either the Brown family or the prosecutor when they watched the footage in person.

During his news conference, Mr. Womble said the deputy who tried to open Mr. Brown’s car door was jerked over the hood when the car backed up, and the deputy’s body was struck by the vehicle. The deputy then had to push off the hood with his hand “to avoid being run over” when Mr. Brown drove forward, Mr. Womble said. He said that was when the first shot was fired by a fellow deputy.

“I find that the facts of this case clearly illustrate the officers who used deadly force on Andrew Brown Jr. did so reasonably and only when a violent felon used a deadly weapon to put their lives in danger,” Mr. Womble said, referring to Mr. Brown’s car.

Attorneys for the Brown family decried Mr. Womble’s conclusion.

“To say this shooting was justified, despite the known facts, is both an insult and a slap in the face to Andrew’s family, the Elizabeth City community and to rational people everywhere,” the attorneys’ statement read. “Not only was the car moving away from officers, but four of them did not fire their weapons — clearly they did not feel that their lives were endangered. And the bottom line is that Andrew was killed by a shot to the back of the head.”

The FBI is pursuing a separate investigation. A spokeswoman declined to comment on its progress.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, urged federal officials to thoroughly investigate. In a statement Tuesday afternoon, he reiterated past comments that Mr. Womble should have stepped aside for an independent prosecutor to take over.

“Public confidence would have been better served with a special prosecutor and by quickly making public the incident footage,” Gov. Cooper said.

Some two dozen people gathered outside the municipal building where Mr. Womble spoke, and many expressed disappointment with his decision.

“Andrew Brown Jr. is the victim,” said Keith Rivers, president of Pasquotank County Branch NAACP. “It’s not a district attorney’s job to defend sheriff’s deputies. It is his job to get justice for the victim. It is the court’s job to decide whether or not it was reasonable or unreasonable.”