EDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been changed to reflect the officer’s job status at the time of the incident.
A police officer shot and killed a man near the Oxon Hill neighborhood of Prince George’s County, Maryland, on Friday.
Police said that at around 12:45 p.m., a man was in the lobby of a building on Owens Road near Southern Avenue that he had been previously banned from as recently as Thursday.
An off-duty Prince George’s County police officer, who was working as a security guard at the complex, saw and recognized the man while the two were in a corridor of the building. The officer told the man to leave, and the two got into a verbal argument that escalated as they stepped outside.
The confrontation turned physical, and eventually the man reached into a bag and produced what looked like a handgun, said Prince George’s Police Chief Malik Aziz. The officer asked the man to drop the weapon, police said, but the man instead attempted to fire it. The gun did not go off, and the officer pulled out a taser and fired two rounds to subdue the man, but Aziz said the man did not stop.
The man then produced what appeared to be a long gun, police said, at which point the officer pulled out his service weapon and fired. The man was shot several times and died as a result of his injuries.
An initial investigation found that both the handgun and long gun that the man was carrying were replicas, although Aziz said they looked real.
Aziz said witnesses told officers that the man had been banned from the building for behavioral issues, such as making threats against people there.
The officer was injured in the incident, but police said he is expected to recover.
