A Fort Worth Police officer early Saturday morning shot and killed a woman standing inside her home. The officers were on site to perform a wellness check at the home after the woman’s neighbor called the department’s non-emergency phone line at 2.25 a.m. to report that the house lights had been left on and the door was wide opened, according to local news outlet WFAA.
Officials with the Fort Worth Police Department confirmed Saturday that the officer who discharged his firearm had been with the department since April 2018, was a white male and the victim was a black female.
As seen in the bodycam footage released by the department, the officer was outside searching the perimeter of the home when he saw someone through the window standing inside. The officer then appears to yell “Put your hands up! Show me your hands!” while simultaneously firing a shot through the window.
“Perceiving a threat the officer drew his duty weapon and fired one shot striking the person inside the residence,” a spokesperson for the Fort Worth Police Department said in a news release about the incident. “Officers entered the residence locating the individual and a firearm and began providing emergency medical care.”
The department also released photographs which show that a firearm was recovered from inside the victim’s bedroom. However, police have not commented as to whether or not the victim was holding the gun when she was killed.
The neighbor who placed the call, James Smith, told reporters after the shooting that he only placed the call to make sure that his neighbor was okay and was shocked to hear a gun being fired.
“I called my police department for a welfare check. No domestic violence, no arguing, nothing that they should have been concerned about as far as them coming with guns drawn to my neighbor’s house,” Smith said. “I don’t know what went on in that house, but I know she wasn’t a threat,” he added.
Smith said he was “shaken” by the incident, which he partly-blamed on himself.
“If I had never dialed the police department, she’d still be alive,” Smith said.
[Video via Fort Worth Police Department]
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