Officers shot and killed a man who had gotten into a fight and had a weapon that turned out to be an air tactical rifle, police said at a news conference.
AURORA, Colo. — A weapon held by a man who was fatally shot last week by Aurora officers was not an AR-15, as was initially reported to police, but was a tactical air rifle, Police Chief Todd Chamberlain said at a news conference on Monday.
Chamberlain said it wasn’t clear whether the weapon had firing capabilities.
The shooting happened Thursday in the 11900 block of East 16th Avenue near the intersection with Oswego Street. Police said officers first responded to a report of a fight in a parking lot. They said they received multiple reports of two men fighting and at least one person with an AR-style rifle.
Chamberlain said the suspect had fought with the other man and attempted to take his car keys. The two men rolled around on the ground for four to five minutes, Chamberlain said, until the suspect picked up a rock and hit the other man in the head.
The suspect then retrieved the tactical air rifle from a van and proceeded to get in an confrontation with and older woman pushing a cart. Chamberlain said the suspect told her he was going to kill her.
Once officers arrived on scene, they told the man several times to drop his weapon, police said. Chamberlain said the man raised the weapon in a “hostile manner” and that one officer fired about two rounds after the man gestured toward the officers with the air rifle.
“What they saw when they arrived on scene, based upon the initial investigation, is exactly what you see in that photo, an individual who refused to listen to verbal commands to drop the weapon,” Chamberlain said Monday. “And I honestly wish he would’ve. I wish he would’ve made a different decision that day. And for whatever reason that decision didn’t occur. So, when our officers responded, they had to respond to what they had. And that’s what they had.”
Chamberlain said investigators don’t believe the man fired his weapon at any point but said there was a sense of urgency because there were children in the area.
The man was taken to a hospital where he later died. No officers were shot, police said. Chamberlain said he does not believe there was a relationship between the two men who were initially involved in the fight.
“I’m sure they wish they had another alternative,” Chamberlain said of the officers involved in the shooting.
He noted that the shooting, which he said began as an apparent attempted carjacking, did not fall under the category for a Crisis Response Team (CRT) response.
The 17th Judicial District Critical Incident Response Team is investigating the shooting.
The man killed in the shooting has yet to be identified.
Two Aurora Police officers who fired their weapons are on administrative leave as the department investigates their involvement in the shooting.
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