HPD officer kills knife-wielding suspect
A Houston police officer on Saturday shot and killed a knifewielding suspect who had just allegedly stabbed and killed an elderly woman outside a Walgreens in Braeburn, Chief Art Acevedo said.
The stabbing and subsequent shooting happened around 10 a.m. Saturday near 8600 South Braeswood, police said. It is at least the fifth shooting involving a Houston police officer since April 21. Mayor Sylvester Turner said he will personally review footage from the case, as he did for the most recent two.
“I will tell you in both of those cases, the police officers did what they were supposed to do,” Turner said.
Acevedo said the officer in this case did so as well, shooting a suspect who didn’t follow his instructions and approached him with a knife. The chief said he reviewed footage from the officer’s body camera in this encounter and surveillance tapes from Walgreens that he said captured the entire event. He determined the officer was justified in the shooting, though he will be placed on administrative leave amid a more thorough investigation.
“This is tragic, but the tragedy here is that a woman has died, from a guy who attacked her, for no reason other than to steal from her and attempt to carjack her,” Acevedo said. “The tragedy is that these young people, the employees at Walgreens, had to witness this.”
Those employees told police the elderly woman purchased something inside the store and then went to her car. Some employees saw the suspect outside, according to the chief.
“Employees felt he had a negative energy or something suspicious about him,” Acevedo said. In the hour or so before that, police had received calls about a man matching his description asking customers at a Fiesta Mart across the street for money and scaring them with a knife. Acevedo said they weren’t able to locate him at the time.
Before the concerned Walgreens employees could call police, the man allegedly stabbed the woman with a 6-inch blade outside her car and started “rifling through her stuff,” Acevedo said. Another woman, in her 30s, went to check on the victim, whom she described as “a little old lady.”
The Samaritan was applying pressure to the woman’s chest when she realized the suspect was now inside the victim’s car, trying to start the ignition.
“What kind of makes me angry is that this suspect didn’t just stab an 80-year-old woman, he then goes down and starts rifling through her stuff, and then tries to steal her car,” Acevedo said.
Around that time, the officer pulled into the Walgreens parking lot, Acevedo said. He was planning to use the restroom, but witnesses flagged him down and told him a stabbing suspect was inside the car.
The officer, a nine-year veteran of the force, drew his weapon and ordered the man to get out of the car, according to the chief. The suspect did not comply for about 15 seconds, and then the video shows he “starts going towards the officer with the knife,” Acevedo said.
The officer fired two rounds at the suspect, who was later pronounced dead at the scene. He was in his 30s. Acevedo said the woman was brought to Memorial Hermann Hospital, but she succumbed to her injuries.
Neither the victim nor the suspect have been identified.
“You just can’t make sense of this,” Acevedo said. “A woman has lost her life because some guy decided he wanted whatever she had on her, and to think a guy stabbed a little old lady. I can’t tell you the emotions I’m feeling right now.”
At least eight officer-involved shootings have occurred in the Houston area since mid-April, with six of those resulting in deaths. On April 21, Nicolas Chavez was killed after a 14-minute encounter with police in Denver Harbor.
Acevedo held a news conference Friday to dispute allegations about another case on Scott Street. On Saturday, he gave an impassioned defense of officers’ actions generally and cited troubling statistics about a rise in murders in Houston. He said the elderly woman marked the 125th victim of the year, a nearly 50 percent increase over last year, according to the chief.
“So where’s the outrage for that?” the chief said. “Our men and women don’t get to choose what they go to.”
The officer was shaken up, but the chief said he’s thankful no one else was injured.
“Our officers, when they see something like this, it hurts them,” Acevedo said. “We believe we know who this person is. That’s because an officer who works this beat knows who it is. That’s the spirit of community policing. We’re not an occupying army. We are homegrown, from the community.”