A man dies
after two Orlando Police officers shoot at him Monday afternoon in a strip mall parking lot on East Colonial Drive.
A 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 identify the man or the officers.
Two officers already were 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 two women were shoplifting, according to an arrest affidavit. The women ignored the officers’ commands to stop and got inside a gold van with a Texas license plate, the affidavit said.
A witness told detectives the driver accelerated toward one of the officers and “tried to hit or pin the patrol officer against another parked vehicle,” the affidavit said. The officers 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 women were identified as Jocelyn M. Villot, 32, and Brittany L. Chandler, 26. They are facing felony murder, grand theft and resisting an officer without arrest charges. Detectives say they were stealing about $300 worth of merchandise, the affidavit said.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement will investigate the shooting.
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.
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.”