Responding to a couple of telephone reports, an officer shot a 16-year-old man brandishing a gun, which turned out to be an air gun “very similar to a real one,” police said. The incident happened in Leonardtown, a Maryland town 100km southeast of Washington. The teenager, according to the first reports, also had a knife.
The agent confronted Peyton Ham outside his home. According to a witness quoted by investigators, the boy was “in shooting position” and allegedly pointed the weapon at the policeman, who shot and wounded him. According to another witness, the young man then pulled out a knife trying to get up and the officer shot him again after having unsuccessfully ordered him to drop the weapon. The request for help was immediate, but the boy arrived dead at the hospital. Both the agent and the victim are white. The policeman, who had been on duty for two years and seven months, was suspended pending the conclusion of the investigation. She was not wearing a body cam at the time of surgery, so now the police are trying to track video of the surrounding area.
Yet another episode of violence at a time of great tension in the country. Today a group of protesters gathered to protest outside the home of Kim Potter, the former agent who killed 20-year-old African American Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, a suburb of Minneapolis. The house, as the Wall Street Journal explains, is located in Chaplin, a nearby center. Law enforcement had already erected concrete barriers and metal fences to protect the house, with a few patrol officers guarding, and Potter was out of the house as a precaution. The 48-year-old former agent faces criminal charges according to local media: the charges may already be disclosed today.