Police Bullet Lands In Suspect's Gun Chamber

what a shot.

SEATTLE -- Police in Seattle said they have proof that a man they shot to death was pointing a gun at an officer.

Police fired four shots, and one of their bullets went directly into one of the chambers of the suspect's gun. The bullet from the .40-caliber Glock police handgun shoved the bullet in the man's .38-caliber revolver backward, according to The Associated Press.

A deputy police chief said he believes "it is impossible to conclude anything other than the fact that the suspect was pointing a weapon directly at the officers."

Police say the man had become belligerent after a fight with his girlfriend.


"My little brother is laying dead on the ground right over there," said Tonya Moore, who described herself as a close friend of the victim. "Alcohol led him to it."

The shooting began almost as soon as officers arrived shortly after 8:15 p.m. Tuesday and found the man, believed to be 18 to 20 years old, outside a bookstore and a copy shop, Officer Richard W. Pruitt said.

Two officers, approaching from different angles, told the man to put down a handgun, apparently a .38-caliber revolver, but witnesses said he opened fire instead.

Standing 8 to 12 feet away, the officers fired a total of about four shots from their .40-caliber Glock handguns, Pruitt said. At least one shot hit him in the torso, and he was pronounced dead at the scene. An autopsy was pending.

"The fact that the individual pointed the weapon at the officers is ... pretty well ascertained at this point," Deputy Police Chief Clark Kimerer told reporters, "because we have evidence that indicates one of the officers' rounds actually hit the suspect's weapon."

Both officers were placed on paid leave, a standard procedure in shootings involving law enforcement personnel.

One shot went up the barrel of the man's gun or hit the front facing of the cylinder, Pruitt said, adding that he knew of no other instance of a shot fired by a Seattle police officer hitting an assailant's weapon.

"It's sure not something we're trained to do," he said.

The man apparently lived nearby, got into an argument with his girlfriend and stormed out of their home with the gun in a holster in the small of his back, then became verbally aggressive and belligerent to people he encountered on the street in the moments before the shooting, Pruitt said.

He said police were notified by someone in the copy shop who said he saw the man threaten a passer-by.

http://www.themilwaukeechannel.com/news/9071524/detail.html