ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) — A police officer in suburban Dallas shot and killed a college football player during a struggle after the unarmed 19-year-old crashed a car through the front window of a car dealership, authorities said.
The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the dead man as Christian Taylor, of Arlington. Taylor was a sophomore at Angelo State University in San Angelo.
Officers were responding to a burglary call about 1 a.m. Friday in Arlington when they discovered someone had driven a vehicle through a front window of the Classic Buick GMC, according to a statement from the Arlington Police Department. The statement said police approached the suspect and a struggle ensued. At some point during the struggle, an officer shot Taylor.
Police identified the officer as Brad Miller, a 49-year-old who has been with the department since last September and who has been working under the supervision of a training officer since his graduation from the police academy in March. The police statement said Miller had no police experience before joining the Arlington police force.
He will be placed on administrative leave, which is routine in such cases. Independent criminal and administrative investigations will be completed, according to the police statement.
The shooting comes amid increased scrutiny nationwide of police use of force, particularly in cases involving black suspects. Taylor was black. The race of the officer was not immediately known.
The case resonated on social media, with posts questioning the official account that Taylor was committing a robbery and asking why there was no video of the altercation. By Friday night, #ChristianTaylor was trending on Twitter.
Taylor’s great uncle, Clyde Fuller of Grand Prairie, Texas, described Taylor as “a good kid” and said he didn’t believe that Taylor was trying to commit a crime.
“They say he’s burglarizing the place by running up in there? Nuh-uh. Something doesn’t sound right,” Fuller told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
It was unclear whether there was any video of the shooting. Police Sgt. Paul Rodriguez said Arlington officers have not been equipped with body cameras, and police said they haven’t found any dealership security video that captured it.
The Star-Telegram reported that court records it reviewed showed Taylor was sentenced to six months of deferred adjudication last December on a drug charge stemming from a September 2013 traffic stop in which police reported Taylor was found with 11 hydrocodone tablets not prescribed to him. The case was dismissed July 14 after Taylor satisfied the requirement of his probation. He graduated from Summit High School in Mansfield, Texas, in 2014.
Angelo State officials said they were saddened to hear of the death of Taylor, a 5-foot-9, 180-pound defensive back.
“We’re not familiar with any of the details because it happened away from here, but we’d just like people to know that we are sad and sorry for his family and friend,” university spokeswoman Becky Brackin told the San Angelo Standard-Times.
In a Twitter posting, football coach Will Wagner said, “Heart is hurting.”
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curious burglary method. ram car through front window. loot the joint. back vehicle out of debris. make clean getaway. hmm.
Way too few pertinent details. I hope there is some video footage that actually did capture this incident. Unless Christian Taylor has a history of past robberies, not just possession of a handful of vicoden, I’m not inclined to think he crashed into the place of business on purpose – without any weapons to protect himself should something not go as planned! Again, too few details and background.
My thoughts go out to Taylor’s family and friends.
So many of these stories involve young policemen - making me more convinced that poor training is a critical part of the problem. When you combine the tendency to over-react rather than de-escalate with instilled biases, the result is needless deaths.
Speaking of training, and assuming for the sake of argument that shots were justifiably fired – why aren’t policemen trained to shoot merely to wound and not kill, by (for example) aiming at people’s legs?
Actually it’s a very common method of burglary. Quick in, quick out, and you put the merch in the vehicle, don’t have to tote it out to the street. Dozens of incidents like this. Here are a couple, and the articles refer to others. A google search turns up lots.
http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/story/27492875/burglars-drive-car-into-northbrook-louis-vuitton-store
Not saying at all that’s what happened here, but to say it’s not common is not true.
Need far more details here. One big one is if his car was the same make as the dealer (car parts are big bucks). If the dealership is a Buick and he is driving a Buick, that could be important. He also could have been buzzed (it was 1 AM) and just wiped out into the storefront. Might have not been buzzed and just dozed off and went off the road too. We can’t tell if his path to the crash site is direct, of if he had to pull into the lot first make a turn or two, and then accelerate. There are way too many details missing.