DWI arrest turns deadly after struggle

Incident marks the fourth officer-involved fatal shooting in area over past three weeks

A man stopped on suspicion of DWI was fatally shot Friday by the arresting officer after he allegedly grabbed the lawman’s fallen stun gun during a struggle in north Houston.

The incident marked the area’s fourth fatal officer-involved shooting in the past three weeks, according to police reports.

Not all of the people who died were alleged to be in possession of firearms — one had a handgun, another held a BB gun, one had a piece of rebar and the latest appeared to be unarmed before taking the officer’s Taser, authorities said. A 2019 Washington Post analysis of fatal officer-involved shootings around the nation showed that about half involved a suspect with guns.

John Fullinwider, co-founder of the Dallas-based Mothers Against Police Brutality, said there should be alternatives to shooting when the suspect isn’t in possession of a firearm.

“Unless a person has a gun, the departments need to find another way,” he said. “There’s no reason to rush in a situation where a person doesn’t have a gun.”

Harris County Deputies Organization President David Cuevas declined to speak on specific cases, and the Houston Police Officers Union didn’t respond for comment. But Cuevas said officers are able to shoot when the situation is serious enough.

“No deputy goes to work wanting to have to take someone’s life,” Cuevas said. “Sometimes, based on the circumstances, we have to use deadly force.”

The deadly encounter on Friday began about 1:15 a.m., when a Houston police officer tasked with spotting intoxicated drivers clocked a man driving over 90 mph along Interstate 45 just south of Beltway 8, Houston police officials said. The 48-year-old driver eventually pulled into an empty business parking lot off the feeder road.

The officer performed field sobriety tests to determine if the driver was intoxicated, Houston Police Executive Asst. Chief Matt Slinkard said. The driver showed several signs of intoxication, so the officer moved to put him in handcuffs.

“A struggle — and what really turned out to be quite a violent struggle — happened between the officer and the suspect (during the arrest),” Slinkard said.

The officer’s body-worn camera was knocked off during what Slinkard called a “fight.” He fired his stun gun unsuccessfully and dropped it on the ground.

That’s when the driver picked it up as the officer yelled commands for him to get on the ground, Slinkard said. The officer then pulled his gun and fired up to four times, striking the driver more than once.

He started life-saving efforts on the driver as he radioed for paramedics. An ambulance rushed the driver to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

“Any time something like this happens, we consider any loss of life tragic,” Slinkard said. “The officer is pretty shaken up. Our hearts, our thoughts, our prayers go out to the deceased individual’s family.”

The shooting follows three law enforcement encounters that turned deadly last month.

In the most recent, on April 27, an east Houston man who called 911 and told a dispatcher “I’m ready for y’all” was killed by police after he spent more than 30 minutes shooting at random inside a quiet neighborhood.

Officers spotted the man behind a home in the 7900 block of Lane Street, and he began firing his gun before moving to the house’s front porch, Acevedo said.

The man, later identified as 28year-old Christopher Aguirre, eventually raised his gun at officers surrounding the house, which is when three officers with rifles opened fire, police said.

On April 22, a plain-clothes Harris

County sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a man in a Missouri City neighborhood.

The deputy was a member of the Gulf Coast Violent Offenders Task Force trying to arrest a man on a Mesquite capital murder charge around 6 a.m. The deputy was inside a car in the 15100 block of East Ritter Circle, when a neighbor walked up and tapped on the window, according to Harris County Sheriff’s Office Chief Tim Navarre.

The man was carrying a flashlight and a BB gun, which Navarre said looked like a handgun. The man was a neighborhood watchdog who had been tasked with watching over a home on the block that had recently been burglarized, witnesses told detectives.

The deputy pulled his gun and exchanged words with the man, and at some point, the man lowered his flashlight and allegedly raised his gun, Navarre said. The deputy opened fire and struck the man once.

And on April 21, Houston police officers fatally shot 27-year-old Nicholas Chavez after they responded to a call near the 800 block of Gazin Street in Denver Harbor. The caller told police that Chavez was running in front of cars, jumping fences and threatening bystanders with an object they later determined was rebar.

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said the Chavez refused to comply with the officers’ demands and threatened them, leading the officers to shoot the man with Taser rounds and bean bag projectiles. When Chavez started “charging” at them, Acevedo said, at least four officers shot the man with lethal rounds.

A 47-second cellphone video clip showed some of the encounter. It began with Chavez on his knees, appearing to rise to his feet before two shots sounded. He stumbled to his knees again, and 31 seconds into the clip, a barrage of what sounds like at least a dozen shots rang out.

Acevedo said the footage raised questions, and pledged to release full body camera video once his investigators and the district attorney’s office have wrapped up their investigations.

In most shootings such as these, law enforcement officers are typically placed on administrative leave, pending an internal investigation.