DENVER — Denver Police said Tuesday that when Tasers had no effect officers were forced to shoot and kill a 52-year-old woman who continued advancing toward officers with a knife in her hand.
Three officers fired their weapons at the woman on June 16 near North Broadway and Lawrence Street in Denver. Officers were initially called there at about 11:45 a.m. for a report about a woman standing in the busy intersection with a knife.
"The callers reported the person was yelling and creating a hazard for passing vehicles," Denver Police Commander Matt Clark said in a briefing Tuesday afternoon. "One person advised that the person was yelling at passing motorists to kill them."
A Denver Park ranger in the area also saw the woman, Clark said. The ranger had a police radio and reported to dispatch that the woman was refusing to get out of the road and had an eight-inch knife.
Police initially said the woman was holding the knife in her hand when officers arrived but said Tuesday she was carrying two bags and her hands were empty when they got there. Body camera footage released as part of the briefing shows her pulling out the large knife and moving quickly toward officers shortly after they got out of their cars. Both of whom were armed with Tasers.
In the video, an officer is heard telling the woman to put her hands on her head. She did not do that, and instead, the video shows her appearing to pull out the large knife from her pocket or bag. She then begins advancing toward two officers.
Officers gave commands to the woman in both English and Spanish before two different officers deployed their Tasers. One of them used their Taser twice.
"You'll notice from the video a brief kind of tensing, I would describe it as, and then it stops. And there's a couple reasons either a probe began dislodged or there was movement where it was no longer connected to skin potentially," said Clark.
He said each Taser can be deployed twice and that they have an effective range of 22 feet.
Watch a replay of Tuesday's briefing in the video player below:
When it was clear the Tasers did not stop the woman, the officers were seen tossing down their Tasers and transitioning to their firearms.
"There is something that is said in Spanish to the officers, something, I think translated to mean, kill me, so I think that one might assume that they were asking to be killed but I don't know that that's something we will ever know," said Denver Police Chief Ron Thomas.
"But certainly the presence of the knife, the proximity that that individual got to those officers with the knife, I think makes their response appropriate."
Three officers fired their weapons and the woman was pronounced dead at the scene. One of the officers had been with Denver Police since 2018. The other started there in 2022. Neither had been involved in a police shooting before. The third officer involved is a sergeant who has been with the department since 2001.
Police have unable to locate any of the victim's next of kin.
Police said the investigation into the shooting will be conducted by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the Colorado State Patrol, and DPD. All of it will be under the oversight of the office of the independent monitor, according to Thomas.
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