RICHMOND, Va. — An armed suspect fired first at two police officers and they were justified in returning gunfire and killing the suspect, the police chief said Thursday.
Richmond Police Chief Alfred Durham said it was not a racially charged shootout as some in the community have made it out to be. The suspect was a black man. One of the officers is black and the other is white.
“This is not Ferguson,” the chief said, referring to the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a white officer a year ago in Ferguson, Missouri. The officer was cleared in that case, but the shooting set off protests and unrest.
In the Richmond shooting Wednesday night, officer Ryan Bailey and officer Jacob DeBoard responded to a report of an armed man in an area west of downtown, police said. They approached 20-year-old Keshawn Hargrove, a convicted felon, and he fled, police said.
As the officers chased him, one witness said Hargrove fired over his shoulder as he was running away. The officers fired at Hargrove and he was killed by a single gunshot, Durham said. It’s not clear which officer fired the fatal shot.
“My officers did what they had to do,” the chief said.
The chief said results of an internal investigation will be turned over to the Richmond prosecutor, who will determine whether the officers acted appropriately. That could take between 30 to 45 days, the chief said.
Bailey, who is black, was wounded in the arm but is expected to recover fully.
Durham faced an angry crowd of about three dozen people, most of them black, at the shooting scene on Wednesday night. The crowd demanded answers and questioned whether police used too much force.
Officers across the nation have come under greater scrutiny recently as videos and other evidence has shown blacks being mistreated, injured or killed by white officers.
Lenora Gaither was one of those in the crowd.
“There’s too much of this going on,” Gaither said.
A witness told the Richmond Times-Dispatch (http://bit.ly/1ORDyRc ) that he saw police approach the suspect in an alley.
“They wanted to ask him something — I don’t know,” said Lois G. Ambriz, who was working a construction job in the area. “He started running away from them.”
Ambriz said the man knocked over a trash can as he ran and ducked behind a parked car. That’s when the shooting started.
He didn’t see who fired first but heard the officer “screaming really bad” after he was shot, Ambriz said.
Ambriz said the suspect ran about 50 feet, firing shots over his shoulder, and was shot by the second officer. He estimated the incident lasted less than a minute and that at least 15 shots were fired.
Police said an officer responding to the scene crashed his car into a pole, flipping the vehicle in a gas station parking lot. The officer was not seriously injured.
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