SEATTLE – A young man who became belligerent after a fight with his girlfriend was shot to death by police after he pointed his gun toward officers, police said Wednesday.
One of the officer’s bullets entered one of the chambers of the man’s gun, shoving the bullet inside backward, but the man never fired the weapon, a deputy police chief said.
The shooting occurred Tuesday evening after police were called to the Capitol Hill neighborhood by a local business that reported the man had threatened a passer-by. Approaching from different angles, two officers ordered the man to put his gun down.
When he refused and pointed the gun at the officers standing 8 to 12 feet away, they fired a total of about four shots from their .40-caliber Glock handguns. The man was pronounced dead at the scene.
“We reported last night, according to witness accounts, the suspect was believed to have fired on the officers,” Deputy Police Chief Clark Kimerer said. “The handgun has been since evaluated and has been looked at in terms of whether it had been fired; it has not been fired.”
Examination of the weapon did show that a bullet fired by the officers had entered one of the chambers of the man’s gun.
“Physically, I believe, it is impossible to conclude anything other than the fact that the suspect was pointing a weapon directly at the officers,” Kimerer said.
The man’s name was being withheld Wednesday because family had not been notified, according to the King County medical examiner’s office.
Both officers were placed on paid leave, a standard procedure in shootings involving law enforcement personnel.
The man apparently lived nearby, got into an argument with his girlfriend and stormed out of their home with a gun in a holster in the small of his back. He was verbally aggressive and belligerent to people he encountered on the street just before the shooting, Officer Richard Pruitt said Tuesday.
Police were notified by someone in a copy shop who said he saw the man threaten a passer-by, Pruitt said.
Tanya Moore, 26, told a Seattle newspaper she met the man through friends about eight months earlier and had given him a hug only moments before the shooting.
The man had recently completed rehabilitation for cocaine and stimulant addiction and was hoping to attend Seattle Central Community College, a few blocks south of the scene of the shooting, Moore said.
“He’s a nice person, a nice kid,” she said.
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