Man fatally shot, Anne Arundel County Police officer injured in altercation in Maryland home
BALTIMORE — Anne Arundel County Police shot and killed a man in a Crofton home Sunday morning after an altercation that left an officer seriously wounded, the department said.
At about 4 a.m., officers were called to the town house in the 900 block of Danville Court. A woman told 911 dispatchers that her adult son had assaulted her and was not letting her leave the home, said Anne Arundel Police spokeswoman Lt. Jacklyn Davis.
When officers arrived, they knocked on the locked front door, but there was no answer. The woman, who was still on the phone with dispatchers, asked that the officers force entry because she couldn’t get to the front door, Davis said.
Officers then entered a locked third-floor bedroom, and located the woman and her son. When officers asked the man to get on the ground, he complied, but when officers attempted to handcuff him, he fought back, Davis said.
Officers used a Taser in an attempt to subdue the man, Davis said, but it was ineffective. Sometime during the struggle, an officer was injured. That officer fired his gun at the man, who was pronounced dead on the scene. The officer was transported to an area trauma center, where he was in serious condition Sunday morning, Davis said.
“These are certainly tough calls that we respond to, and officers are thrust into situations where they have to make critical decisions, oftentimes very split-second decisions, that they have to live with for the rest of their lives,” said Anne Arundel County Police Chief Amal Awad at the scene Sunday morning.
Under a law that took effect in October, the Maryland Attorney General’s Office, with the help of Maryland State Police, will investigate the shooting.
“Our role in this investigation is to piece together exactly what happened, from the time the 911 call was received until our office was notified,” said Thomas Lester, spokesman for the attorney general’s independent investigations division.
Lester and Davis declined to answer questions about whether the man was armed, how many shots were fired in the residence and how many officers entered.
Officials from that office will review officers’ body camera footage from the incident, and will release it within 14 days, Lester said, so long as there are no technical difficulties and the impacted family has had time to review it as well.
Sunday morning, residents, mainly walking dogs, traipsed through the snow-covered neighborhood.
Sarah McCoy, 45, who was out with her dog Rudy, said she awoke at about 4:30 a.m. to use the restroom and saw police lights flashing through her window.
”I don’t think it makes the neighborhood any less safe or any scarier,” she said of the incident. “This stuff can happen anywhere.”
Jewel Crumbley, 22, walked to the crime scene from her home nearby after hearing about the incident. Crumbley said she studies criminal justice at Penn State University but came home for the weekend. She originally moved to the neighborhood when she was about 7 years old.
She recalled that in 2009, a teen was beaten to death in the neighborhood. The teen, Christopher Jones, was riding his bike on nearby Nantucket Drive when he was assaulted by several other teens with ties to a local gang. ”There hasn’t been anything else that’s like crazy that’s happened, so this is kind of shocking for me,” Crumbley said.
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