SPOKANE — A northern Idaho police officer shot by a man who stole his patrol car died of his injuries Tuesday evening, police said.
Sgt. Greg Moore died at 5:50 p.m. at Kootenai Health in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, police spokeswoman Sgt. Christie Wood said in a statement.
Moore was shot about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday after checking on a suspicious person in a neighborhood, Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White said.
Police arrested a 26-year-old man after a car chase that reached speeds of 125 mph. The pursuit ended when a police dog dragged the man from his hiding place underneath a commercial truck.
Jonathan Renfro appeared in court Tuesday afternoon and was charged with attempted murder, theft of a police vehicle, theft of an officer’s gun and being a felon with a gun. Bail was set at $2 million. He was held in the Kootenai County, Idaho, jail.
Moore, a 16-year veteran of the Coeur d’Alene department, called dispatch to get information on Renfro, White said. Not long after, a resident called police.
The resident “had heard a noise that sounded like a gunshot and they shortly after said that there was a body lying in the street,” White said at an early morning news conference.
“From the information I’ve received so far, it doesn’t look like an ambush-style attack,” the chief said. “This was just a bad guy doing bad guy stuff and our officers doing what they were trained to do — and that’s trying to keep our communities safe.”
Renfro has a long criminal record and was on probation.
After Moore was shot, an officer from nearby Post Falls, Idaho, who was listening to radio traffic about the shooting, saw a Coeur d’Alene police car race by about 90 mph, so he gave chase close to the Washington state line, with speeds reaching 125 mph, Post Falls Police Chief Scott Haug said.
The officer found the patrol car abandoned, and the Washington State Patrol and Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office helped set up a perimeter, Haug said.
A police dog found Renfro about two hours later hiding under a tractor-trailer, wedged off the ground between the axle area and the truck, near a Wal-Mart in Post Falls, Haug said.
“He was engaged by the dog when he would not comply and taken into custody,” Haug said.
White said a motive for the shooting hasn’t been determined.
The Idaho State Police is the lead agency investigating the shooting, said Stu Miller, a spokesman for the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office.
Investigators are collecting evidence from multiple scenes, including dash cam video from Moore’s car, Miller said.
Miller did not know if the weapon used against Moore had been recovered.
Miller said the last report from the officer was a radio message that he was checking out a suspicious person in a Coeur d’Alene neighborhood.
“There was no further contact from him,” Miller said.
Moore was married and had two children, officials said.
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