2 weeks ago
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Two unrelated emergency 911 calls ended in separate police shootings in suburban Washington late Sunday morning, authorities said, with a victim in a reported domestic dispute in Herndon, Va., and another in a reported home invasion in Prince George’s County also critically hurt.
At about 9:55 a.m. in District Heights, Md., Prince George’s County police responded to a report of a home invasion and a person stabbed inside a residence in the 1800 block of Addison Road South, Police Chief Malik Aziz said. At the scene, officers found one person stabbed, and they confronted a second person, a suspect, holding a two-by-four in the doorway, Aziz said.
“Those officers gave loud, repeated verbal commands for that person to discard that two-by-four,” Aziz told reporters after a preliminary investigation. “And one officer discharged his weapon by striking that person in the upper body, in the lower body.”
The suspect was listed in critical condition but stable, the chief said. The victim was in critical condition with life-threatening injuries, Aziz said. The officer, a 30-year veteran assigned to the patrol bureau, was placed on administrative leave.
No one else inside the home was physically injured, nor were any officers, Aziz said. Investigators were still combing through information.
“We don’t know the relationship between anyone who was inside the residence or the suspect or the victim at this point in time,” the chief cautioned. “There were a couple of witnesses … and we’re going to get to speak with them so they can give us all the information that we need so we can put together the circumstances surrounding this home invasion, a stabbing and an officer-involved shooting.”
Later Sunday morning in Virginia, police shot a man after responding to a 911 call by a woman who reported that her husband had stabbed her, Herndon police spokesperson Lisa Herndon said.
Police responded to a five-bedroom house in the 900 block of 1st Place just after 11:50 a.m., Herndon said.
“Once contact was established with the suspect, the suspect approached the responding officer with a knife, at which time the officer fired from his service weapon, striking the suspect in the upper body,” Herndon said.
Both the husband and wife were transported to Reston Hospital with critical injuries, police said. The husband was in intensive care following surgery, and the wife was in stable condition, Herndon said. The family dog also suffered one or more stab wounds and was taken to an emergency veterinarian clinic, police said.
The officer was uninjured, Herndon said.
Following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020, a presidential commission recommended that every state require its police departments to have an independent agency investigate all fatal shootings and other serious use-of-force incidents by officers as a way to improve trust between police and the communities they serve.
In Northern Virginia, 11 police departments — including the Herndon Police Department — announced in 2021 that they had launched a Critical Incident Response Team to handle the investigations of police shootings, in-custody deaths and officer suicides in one another’s departments, allowing a group of detectives unrelated to the involved department to take an independent look at each case. Herndon police said Sunday that Police Chief Maggie DeBoard activated the CIRT, which is investigating the incident.
In Maryland, fatal police shootings are investigated by the state attorney general’s office. Because the District Heights suspect was expected to survive, Prince George’s detectives are investigating the shooting, Aziz said.
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