Report: Deadly shooting justified

State inspector general clears Hartford cop in Ogman death

In a newly released report, the state inspector general found that the shooting death of 30-year-old Shamar Ogman by a Hartford police officer was justified.

Ogman, a young father who suffered from mental illness, was shot by officer Ashley Martinez in a parking lot the day after Christmas in 2020 after police followed him through city streets urging him to drop the rifle he was wielding, records show.

Connecticut Inspector General Robert J. Devlin Jr. wrote in his 40-page report of the incident released on Wednesday that the shooting was “objectively reasonable and justified.”

“Officer Martinez used deadly force to defend other officers from what she

reasonably believed to be the imminent use of deadly force against them,” Devlin wrote.

In the moments before his death, Ogman was hiding behind a green dumpster at the back of a parking lot not far from his home. His head was illuminated by officers’ flashlights, the rest of his body hidden, as multiple officers begged him to drop the rifle he had aimed at them, records show.

“Nobody needs to get hurt, put it down,” one officer shouted.

“We don’t want to shoot you but we’ll have to, we will if we have to,” yelled another.

“Just drop the gun, babe,” said officer Martinez. A few seconds later she spoke into her radio again.

“Shots fired,” she said. In those moments in the dark, Ogman did not drop the gun but kept it fixed on police until Martinez, ducked behind a six-foot tall wooden fence that lined the lot, heard what she thought was the racking of the rifle. She fired one shot that struck Ogman on the side of his mouth, the bullet lodging in his skull, according to a report released by the inspector general’s office on Wednesday.

She and other officers rushed to Ogman’s aid, pulling him out from behind the dumpster and immediately calling for help over their radios, as seen in videos included in the report.

He was rushed to Hartford Hospital where died from the single gunshot wound. A medical examiner determined that his cause of death was a gunshot wound to the neck and his death was ruled a homicide, officials said.

As officers pleaded with him to drop the tan rifle they later found on top of the dumpster beside a magazine, Ogman shouted back at them.

“Let’s go, I’m ready,” he said. Earlier, he’d told them repeatedly to “shoot,” records show.

Before leading police on a chase through his neighborhood, wielding a handgun and rifle as he ran through bushes and jumped over a fence, he told his girlfriend’s brother-in-law Antonio Greensword that he wanted to die, the report said.

Greensword, who was trying to calm him down, told police that Ogman said he would “rather them kill me than kill myself ” — referring to the officers who were responding to the area near his home. That his daughters would be better off without him.

In a report released Wednesday, Devlin wrote that Ogman’s death was an example of a psychological “phenomenon” often referred to as “suicide by cop.”

This type of incident unfolds, Devlin said, when a person behaves in a way that poses a risk of death or serious injury to others with the intent of forcing police to use deadly force. The inspector general’s office said recent data suggests that this behavior is used in about one-third of officer involved shootings.

The 40-page report says that in suicide-by-cop situations, officers often have the opportunity to talk a person down without jeopardizing police or public safety. This was not one of those times, his office determined.

In December 2020, Ogman was facing a return to prison, just a few years after he’d spent a decade behind bars. He’d been arrested twice in the weeks leading up to his death. He was recently fired from his job at a Trader Joe’s distribution center in Bloomfield and his relationship with Shannon Busby, the mother of his 14-month-old daughter who he lived with, was on the rocks. With the Christmas season triggering memories, he was grieving the loss of his 10-year-old daughter who had died a few years earlier of an asthma attack while he was in prison.

Busby told police that on the night of Dec. 26 Ogman received a phone call that appeared to upset him. He was on house arrest at the time, wearing an ankle monitor and awaiting his next court date.

“The look on Shamar’s face and his demeanor was very concerning,” she told police.

Noticing he was stressed, Busby asked him to come upstairs to look at what his kids had gotten for Christmas. Then she asked her brother-in-law to check on him. He tried, she said, but Ogman “wasn’t able to snap out of it.”

Busby’s sister, who was visiting for the holidays, called 911 to report that Ogman was “acting very deranged,” according to police and official reports.

Ogman told Greensword about his recent arrests and fears of a return to prison as Greensword tried to take the weapons from him.

“Don’t do that big dog,” Ogman responded.

“Around five minutes later, the police started to show up [to the area of Gilman Street]. Shamar said things like, ‘It’s better if I’m not here. I’d rather them kill me than kill myself. I’m not going back to jail,’ ” the report said.

When Busby got on the phone with police, she had an inkling of what might happen.

“Please tell officers, ‘Do not kill my daughter’s father,’ ” she begged a 911 dispatcher in a recording included in the report.

As Busby listened from her home trying to figure out what was going on, Ogman led police on a chase that ended in the parking lot where officers hid behind nearby parked cars, trying to convince him to drop his weapons.

In her account of that night, Martinez said that Ogman yelled something along the lines of ‘Let’s go. I’m ready,’ ” as he aimed his rifle toward officers.

Martinez said she watched through the scope of her rifle and saw Ogman raise up his rifle, rack it and point it directly at Hartford Police Department officer Christopher Larson.

“Martinez believed that Ogman was going to shoot at officers and attempted to fire her rifle,” the report said. But her rifle was in safety mode, so it did not shoot. She ducked back behind the fence, put her rifle into fire mode, and looked back out. Ogman was still aiming the rifle at her fellow officers, the report said.

All of the Hartford Police Department officers involved in the incident were wearing body-worn cameras, the videos captured on those cameras and surveillance cameras in the area were included in Devlin’s report.

Footage from Martinez’s body-worn camera shows her telling Ogman to put the gun down multiple times. Then she yells, “He’s pointing it” and fires.

Their investigation, said Devlin, found that Martinez believed that Ogman was going to kill or severely injure people.

Under Connecticut law, an officer’s use of deadly force is justified only if the incident meets four criteria: the officer honestly and sincerely believed that they or another party were facing deadly force; that the belief that they faced deadly force was reasonable given the circumstances; that they believed their use of deadly force was necessary to defend themselves or others; and that it was reasonable for them to believe that deadly force was necessary.

Devlin’s investigation found that Martinez used deadly force “to prevent Ogman from shooting other police officers.”

Devlin recommended in his report that the act of suicide by cop “deserves more study and training” and listed recommended readings on the topic in his report.

“As the studies make clear, the most effective weapon in some suicide by cop situations is communication,” he concluded.