Body-camera video shows what happened leading up to Fort Worth police shooting armed man
By: Fort Worth police on Tuesday released body-camera footage of officers responding to a domestic disturbance call that ended with an officer shooting a man on Sunday. Police said that the man pointed a rifle at officers.
The 39-year-old man who was shot was seriously injured. He has not been publicly identified.
In the body-camera video of the incident, officers discuss knocking down the door of an apartment after hearing a woman inside say, “Don’t do it.” Nobody came to the door when the officers knocked.
In a statement introducing the video, Fort Worth Police Chief Neil Noakes said officers feared — because of what they heard and the fact that nobody came to the door — that somebody was in imminent danger inside the apartment.
Body-cam footage showed police kicking in the door and entering the home. They can be heard shouting, “Put the gun down! Put the gun down!”
Officers took cover behind the threshold of the door and when the man approached officers and raised the rifle toward them, “they continued to plead with him to drop the weapon,” Noakes said.
One officer fired at the man and hit him, Noakes said. The man fell to the floor and officers retrieved the rifle he was carrying. Police said the officer fired several shots but did not say exactly how many were fired or how many times the man was hit, and the video released by police is cut immediately after the first round is fired.
Nobody else was injured.
In the body-camera footage, the man can be seen with his left hand holding the rifle past the magazine slot and the other hand in the air. Because of the angle of the video, it is unclear if the man attempted to hold the rifle in a way that would put his hand near the trigger.
Noakes said officers immediately began providing emergency medical care to the man until MedStar paramedics arrived to take him to the hospital.
In their investigation, police learned the man had tried to shoot himself with a shotgun before officers arrived, but there was no ammunition in the gun, according to a previous news release from the department.
The incident occurred about 9:30 p.m. in the 1200 block of Vincent Street. Detectives with the major case unit are investigating the shooting.