Police videos released showing homicide suspect fire at officers before killing self
By: Police have released dashcam and bodycam videos showing a homicide suspect firing at police in a cruiser before soon after taking his own life.
Grand Rapids police released the videos Friday, Dec. 2, a day after the shootout in a Southeast Grand Rapids neighborhood near a school.
Patrick Jones, who died, was wanted for murder in the Oct. 11 death of ex-girlfriend Tamiqua Wright.
Police with a fugitive team responded to the area of Jefferson Avenue SE and La Belle Street about noon Thursday on a tip that he could be located there.
Dashcam video shows two officers in an unmarked cruiser turning a corner. They immediately come upon Jones walking on a sidewalk. He then turns toward the cruiser and fires multiple shots without warning.
Bodycam videos show glass breaking inside the cruiser. An officer in the passenger seat returns fire and appears to break the cruiser’s passenger window with gunfire.
“Shots fired. Shots fired. It’s him,” an officer can be heard yelling.
The officer in the driver’s seat hits the accelerator to get away form the gunfire.
“Are you OK?” one of the officers says to his partner.
“Yeah, I’m OK. Are you good?” the other officer says.
“I don’t know,” the officer replies.
The officers then drive to a nearby location and pat each other down to make sure they were not unknowingly struck.
Police said that Jones then ran and continued to fire his gun, a semi-automatic 9mm handgun.
A person at nearby Southeast Career Pathways school later caught Jones on a cell phone video pointing the gun to his head. Police found him dead on Cass Avenue SE near the school.
During a press conference Friday, Grand Rapids police Chief Eric Winstrom said Jones “had a very violent past.”
Jones was on parole and had convictions in 2019 for home invasion, resisting and obstructing police, felonious assault, firearms possession by a felon and carrying a concealed weapon.
Winstrom said he also had previous domestic violence arrests in his history.
The investigation after Thursday’s shooting showed that Jones had a 9mm semi-automatic handgun with a clip in the gun and an extra one on his person. It’s not immediately clear how many shots were fired. Police think at least two private vehicles were struck by his gunfire.
Three Grand Rapids police officers are on administrative leave per standard policy. They include the two officers in the cruiser and another member of the fugitive team.
Winstrom said two officers fired their weapons, but not the cruiser driver.
He said Thursday was the second time in two weeks that someone has fired upon Grand Rapids officers. The other incident involved a man who barricaded himself in a house on Nov. 14 and fired rounds before allegedly stabbing a police dog.
“It’s very uncommon and I hope it gets much more uncommon, but it’s very unsettling,” he said of officers taking gunfire.
He spoke to the two officers shot at Thursday.
“Once you see the video and you see how close these officers came to death, it’s extremely disturbing,” he said.
Investigators are looking into whether anyone helped Jones avoid arrest since Oct. 11.
“We are looking into seeing who was helping him, who was harboring him, because we think that’s a potential criminal offense that did take place,” Winstrom said.