In the moments before a Prince George’s County police officer burst through the door of Melvin Jay’s apartment with his gun drawn, the man was standing in the middle of his family room.
The lights were off. The blinds were drawn. The TV in the corner glowed.
Jay, according to body-camera footage released by authorities, was facing away from the front door as the uniformed officer — who did not identify himself as police — yelled repeatedly for the 31-year-old man to show his hands. Jay walked around a corner into his kitchen. The officer fired a single shot, hitting the man in the face.
The encounter between the two men, from the moment officer Braxton Shelton entered Jay’s apartment to the moment he fired his gun, lasts roughly seven seconds.
In the month since the Feb. 1 shooting at the Windham Creek Apartments on Suitland Road, law enforcement officials have released little information about what may have prompted Shelton to fire.
The state’s Independent Investigations Division (IID), an arm of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office that investigates police shootings, had initially said the officer was responding to a 911 call of a breaking-and-entering in progress at a unit in the apartment complex.
But on Monday, the attorney general’s office and the Prince George’s County Police Department publicly released body-camera video footage and audio from the 911 call, providing more details of the deadly encounter that, experts say, will force investigators to untangle a web of miscommunications and possible police policy violations to determine if the shooting was justified or a crime.
“The primary issue in regards to whether this shooting was justified is whether or not the officer reasonably perceived an immediate threat to his safety,” said Ed Obayashi, a national expert on police shootings. “Just because you can’t see someone’s hands doesn’t mean that the individual constituted immediate threat.”
Beyond that, Obayashi said, other details related to the 911 call further complicate the investigation: When the caller, who was not at home when he placed the call, reported the alleged burglary at his apartment, he said it was his neighbor that had informed him a stranger was there taking his belongings. In fact, Prince George’s police chief Malik Aziz said Monday, a family member of the caller had told him earlier that day he would be coming to the house to retrieve property.
“This fact was not shared on the 911 call for help,” Aziz said. Additionally, the chief said, the 911 caller did not tell the dispatcher that two other people were also inside the apartment at the time of the report.
Jay’s family declined to comment for this story but authorities said they were able to view the body-camera footage before it was made public. The family has retained the Baltimore-based civil rights law firm Murphy Falcon & Murphy to represent them. The firm has litigated many cases involving allegations of excessive force by police, including that of Freddie Gray, a man who died after he was taken into custody of Baltimore City police, and William Green, who was fatally shot six times by a Prince George’s police officer while seated in the front seat of a cruiser and handcuffed behind his back.
“Our team has begun the initial phase of the case investigation and will refrain from providing further comments at this time,” Ronald Richardson, the lead attorney representing Jay’s family, said in a statement.
In a statement Monday, Thomas Lester, spokesperson for IID, said the state investigation into the shooting is ongoing.
Shaun Owens, a Fraternal Order of Police attorney representing Shelton, did not respond to an email requesting comment. In a statement, FOP president Angelo Consoli said union officials “await the findings of the Attorney General’s Independent Investigations Division,” but that they are “confident” investigators will find “exactly what the video and the known information shows in that while no one wants to see the tragic loss of life, the officer was justified in his actions.”
The 911 call that drew Shelton to the apartment was placed at 5:23 p.m. on Feb. 1, authorities said. In it, the caller — who police have not named but identified as the apartment’s lease holder — told a dispatcher that he was not home but a neighbor had called him to say someone was actively breaking into his home.
“I got somebody breaking and entering in my house,” the caller said, stating that the alleged thief was taking something out of the apartment and that the neighbor had said the man had “dreads.”
“I need the police there right now,” the caller said, “they breaking in my house.”
The caller told the dispatcher that he was making the call from a firehouse, where he was “getting taken care of” for an injury, but that he would be heading back to his apartment soon.
Moments later, at 5:25 p.m., dispatch relays the information to patrol officers.
Shelton responds, arriving at the quiet Hillcrest Heights apartment complex at 5:27 p.m.
The dispatcher relayed what she had heard: “A caller saying he’s being told by the neighbor that someone’s breaking into his apartment.”
“Copy,” Shelton replied. “I’m in the complex, hold me out.”
Video from Shelton’s body camera shows the officer stepping out of his police cruiser and jogging up to the apartment complex. He climbs a flight of stairs and walks up to the 911 caller’s apartment door, which was slightly ajar. The officer did not wait for backup and did not announce he was there — or with the police department — before he pushed open the door, gun drawn, and entered the apartment, according to the video.
Those two choices, Obayashi said, deviate from the standard protocols of most U.S. police departments.
“It would have been standard operating procedure to wait for backup, for obvious reasons,” Obayashi said. “And then announce your intentions and then see what develops.”
Instead, the body-camera video shows that Shelton’s first words were: “Show me your hands!”
“Show me your hands!” he shouted again.
When Jay began rounding around a corner to walk toward the kitchen, the video shows, Shelton yelled again: “Bring your a-- over here!”
Then Shelton, who still had not identified himself, followed Jay around the corner with his gun raised in one hand.
“Show me your … hands,” Shelton yells with an expletive.
“Show me your —” the officer continued, cut short by the piercing pop of his own gun, firing one shot at Jay’s face.
The man immediately fell to the ground.
Shelton called “shots fired” into his radio, just as a second man emerged from a bedroom just beyond the kitchen looking confused. Again, Shelton commanded: “Show me your hands! Who are you?”
The man said he was a visitor, eventually walking out into the family room and laying down near Jay, his hands splayed above his head, as he told the officer that the apartment belonged to his cousin and the man bleeding on the ground was his brother.
Once additional officers arrived, Shelton cleared the rest of the apartment then began rendering aid to Jay. Shelton does not say why he shot Jay — only that the man ran from him and “grabbed something” in the kitchen.
“What’d you go in there and get?” Shelton asked Jay, who could not speak, in the video. The video also shows Shelton checking the coat Jay was wearing, pulling a gun from the right side pocket.
“Yeah, there we go,” the officer can be heard saying.
When asked whether the officer followed department policies by entering the apartment on his own and not identifying himself as police, the department directed questions to the attorney general’s office.
In a video Monday, Aziz said that police later found another gun in the apartment kitchen, near where Jay was shot.
Obayashi said the discovery of guns in the home is not reason enough for the officer to have fired his weapon. Had Jay been retrieving a gun or even shot at the officer, he said, the man may have been acting in justifiable self-defense since the officer had not identified himself.
“The decedent was in his own home,” Obayashi said. “It could have been a viable justification for self defense, given the circumstances of the surprising and unexpected violent entry.”