A Detroit police officer responding to a block party shooting this summer shot and wounded three people — two described as innocent young women, and a third who allegedly pointed a gun at the officer but was never arrested.
The department first announced the information during a press conference on Wednesday, nearly six months after the June 1 incident on Trinity Street near Grand River and McNichols. Police Chief Todd Bettison said he did not know definitively that the officer was responsible for the shootings until Monday, when “I received information regarding the analysis of ballistic evidence obtained at the scene.”
The unnamed officer — an eight-year veteran of the department — has been placed on administrative duty, Bettison said. The investigation, described as ongoing, will be referred to the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office for possible charges, as is customary in police shootings. The case is being handled by the department’s Homicide Task Force, which is working with the Michigan State Police.
Five of the 93 shell casings found at the scene came from the officer’s gun, Bettison said. Each person she shot was hit once and recovered, Bettison said.
The victims include two women, aged 20 and 23. The third person shot, a man described by Bettison as the officer’s intended target, fled the scene before being found by police at his home and taken to the hospital for treatment. That man was never arrested; Bettison said the department has not yet made any arrests in connection with the shooting.
Officers were alerted to the early morning incident when they stopped someone nearby and heard shots. Someone also called 911 to report a mass shooting.
The incident was part of a series of shootings at block parties this summer. It took a month for a separate shooting in Detroit to kill two people and wound 19, becoming the state’s largest mass shooting in more than a decade.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit police officer shot three people while responding to a block party
