Orlando police fatally shoot man involved in incident with Marshall’s store loss prevention
Orlando FL May 8 2018 man died after two officers shot at him in a strip mall parking lot on East Colonial Drive Monday afternoon, Orlando Police Chief John Mina said.
Police did not immediately identify the man or the officers.
Two officers were already in the parking lot of the Colonial Plaza Mall, near Bumby Avenue, about 12:30 p.m. responding to a car crash. A loss prevention officer from a Marshall’s store told them there was a crime happening, Mina said.
“We don’t know the specific crime yet,” Mina said.
The officers tried to confront a car with two men and two women in it, Mina said. They fired at the car, hitting the male driver.
“We’re very early in the investigation, I don’t want to speculate. But it does appear that the officers were in fear for their lives,” Mina said.
The man who wasn’t shot got out of the car in the parking lot and was arrested there, Mina said. Officers found the car at Washington Street and Celia Lane, near Dickson Azalea Park and Langford Park. The driver, a man in his 20s, was dead, and the two women were arrested, Mina said.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement will investigate the shooting.
The officers were not injured. One of the other people in the car was injured by breaking glass and the other two were unharmed, Mina said.
Mina declined to say why the officers felt threatened, saying it’s still under investigation.
The department’s own guidelines on using force dissuade officers from firing their weapons into a moving vehicle unless someone inside it is threatening them with another weapon — not the car itself.
“A moving vehicle alone does not constitute a threat that justifies a member’s use of deadly or potentially deadly force, particularly if the sole objective of the driver is to evade capture,” the department’s written directives read. “Members are prohibited from discharging their firearms at a moving vehicle unless a person in the vehicle is immediately threatening the officer or another person with deadly force by means other than the vehicle.”
