[Source via Boston Globe By Lea Skene and Tonya Alanez]
A carjacking outside a pizza restaurant led to the fatal police shooting of the stolen vehicle’s driver, a tragic series of events that unfolded and escalated quickly Wednesday night in Roxbury, according to officials and witnesses.
The driver accelerated and struck a Boston police cruiser while trying to flee a traffic stop in the moments before police shot him, officials said.
His identity has not yet been released, and officials have provided few details about the shooting. They said no officers were injured.
The driver was pronounced dead at a local hospital, Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox said at the scene Wednesday night.
“Our intent is never to take a life,” he said, offering condolences to the person’s family.
The driver ignored “multiple verbal commands” as officers approached the car on foot, Cox said.
The carjacking occurred on Tremont Street in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood around 9:45 p.m.
Yali Lopez, a manager at Tremont House of Pizza, said she got an alarming text from the restaurant’s cashier Wednesday night. The cashier said she couldn’t close out the register because her car had just been stolen while her mother was waiting outside to pick her up from work. The mother was assaulted during the carjacking and ran into the restaurant crying, Lopez said, recalling details from her earlier conversation with the cashier.
“It’s a very scary situation,” Lopez said. “I just told her to take a couple days off.”
Even though she knows the area well and stays aware of her surroundings, Lopez said it makes her nervous to work nights.
About 15 minutes after the carjacking, officers stopped the stolen car less than a mile away at Linwood Square in Roxbury, according to police.
John-David Garcia, who lives in the area, said he and his partner were returning home after running some errands when they noticed a police cruiser blocking their street.
He stopped his truck and saw officers approaching a silver sedan, which was parked at an angle facing the curb. The cruiser was parked behind the car, Garcia said. Suddenly, his partner realized the officers had their guns drawn. Garcia decided it was time to “get the hell out of there” and threw his truck in reverse.
“You could feel it,” he said. “I just knew we had to get out of there immediately.”
Almost at the same moment, he said, the silver car backed into the cruiser. Gunshots rang out. The car then sped forward down a hill, and the officers took off running after it.
Garcia parked some distance away and watched as a swarm of police officers descended on the neighborhood.
Later, he and his partner gave statements to police describing what they’d seen. He said officers drove them separately to Boston police headquarters. During the drive, he thought about the split-second decisions police are confronted with, often when the stakes couldn’t be higher.
“I was feeling a bit more compassion for what they do, putting their lives on the line,” he said. “I can only imagine. … They go to work not knowing what’s going to happen on a shift.”
Everything escalated so fast leading up to the shooting, he said. “You just don’t have much time to make an informed decision.”
Garcia said he never even saw the driver.
He said the experience left him rattled, especially after a sleepless night. He said that sort of commotion and violence is unusual for the otherwise quiet, close-knit community where he’s lived since 2012.
By Thursday afternoon, the only obvious sign of gunfire was a small pile of broken glass in the street, presumably from the fleeing car’s windows. Neighbors walked their dogs and checked the mail while TV crews set up their cameras for evening live shots.
Speaking to reporters Thursday, Cox said the investigation is ongoing.
“There’s many more witnesses,” Cox said. “There’s a lot of people that haven’t been talked to.”
When you’re in his position, getting informed about a police shooting is “one of the worst calls you can get,” Cox said.
“We enforce laws. We’re here to keep the peace. We’re here to protect the innocent. We’re here to do a lot of things … but we’re not here to take lives,” he said. “So it’s never good when that happens.”
At the scene Wednesday night, Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden called the circumstances “tragic and unfortunate.” He said his office will conduct a thorough investigation.
“There’s a lot more that we don’t know than we do know at this point, and it’s going to take us some time to really get a complete understanding,” Hayden said.
Globe staff reporter Emily Sweeney contributed to this report.