Akron Police Officer Davon Fields told investigators he believed the person he was chasing on Thanksgiving night had just killed or wounded someone in a school parking lot and that the suspect was about to shoot officers pursuing him in a cruiser.
“Immediately, based on my training and experience, I know this guy is willing to do any and everything to not get arrested for what he had just done,” Fields told state investigators in an interview. To protect the lives of his colleagues, Fields said, he had no choice but to aim his high-powered rifle at the suspect and fire.
The suspect, 15-year-old Jazmir Tucker, it turns out, hadn’t shot anyone. And the gun Fields said Tucker pulled from his waistband was zipped away in his jacket pocket, likely throughout his encounter with police.
Tucker, who was a student at North High School, was dropped face down in the grass in front of Miller South School for the Visual and Performing Arts after being struck by two gunshots to his back and one to his arm.
As Tucker lay motionless and unresponsive to Fields’ commands to put his hands to his side for more than seven minutes, the officer told investigators, he was afraid to apply first aid. Fields said he was worried about a surprise attack — since Tucker fell with his right arm under his body. Both shots to his back were fatal and killed him quickly, according to a Summit County medical examiner.
Records released by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office provide the first detailed look at the mindset of the six-year veteran as he and his partner investigated the source of gunshots in Akron’s Sherbondy Hill neighborhood and encountered Tucker. The records were made available after a Summit County grand jury on Thursday declined to indict Fields for murder.
Ballistics testing later showed that two shell casings found in one of the school’s parking lots were fired from the gun in Tucker’s pocket, though there are no records of the shots hitting anything. The gun found on Tucker was a Taurus G2C 9mm semi-automatic pistol with an extended magazine wrapped in blue painter’s tape.
Records made public by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office detail that Fields believed that Tucker had just committed a serious crime, was actively fleeing and was an immediate threat to officers — the elements necessary to justify force under the U.S. Supreme Court standard established in Graham v. Connor.
Among the state records is a 46-minute interview of Fields by two Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation agents at a downtown Akron defense attorney’s office, as the police union president, police union lawyer and a City of Akron lawyer sat in.
What happened the night of the shooting?
Fields was training a rookie officer on the Thanksgiving night shift. The pair were sitting in their cruiser in the parking lot of Antioch Baptist Church in the Sherbondy Hill neighborhood on Vernon Odom Boulevard. Fields said he was helping the rookie write police reports when they heard a shot coming from behind them.
“It has to be within a hundred feet behind us” coming from the direction of Lane Field Park, Fields said. “… Immediately after hearing it, I looked at my trainee to make sure that he was processing [what] he’s hearing, what I’m hearing, and he looked directly at me so I was made aware he heard what I heard.”
Two seconds later, he told the investigators, they heard another shot. Fields grabbed his rifle — an Aero Precision X-15 — from the rack between his driver’s seat and the passenger seat. The trainee grabbed his rifle from the floor next to his legs and they exited the vehicle.
Fields called out on his radio that he was chasing a suspicious subject. He grabbed his rifle because it’s “far superior to a pistol” when attempting to shoot with precision from a distance.
“If I can,” Fields told investigators, “and the situation allows for it, I’ll go rifle.”
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The officer’s mindset
“There was a couple things I was processing at this time,” Fields told the agents. While he said random, celebratory gunshots around holidays are common, they aren’t common on Thanksgiving. And he said people typically fire random shots in large gatherings and at bars, but there weren’t any in the area.
That indicated to Fields that the gunshots were fired toward someone.
“So, processing,” he said, “knowing that it’s not normal for somebody to just fire off rounds, I thought that somebody had just been shot and [was] possibly dying in that back lot.”
But spotting a lone figure walking away meant he shouldn’t try to help a potential victim. “I couldn’t go address that because the suspect of this possible felonious [assault] or murder was walking away,” he said.
The pursuit of Jazmir Tucker
Fields walked through the church parking lot and a field toward a Miller South parking lot, just around the corner on East Avenue and near where he thought the shots were coming from.
“I seen an individual coming, walking west from that exact area. Couldn’t have been more than 20, 25 seconds after the shots,” Fields said. “So we are probably 60 feet from him — 60, 70 feet, maybe a little more.”
The person didn’t notice him, he said. The officer hadn’t activated the cruiser’s lights or siren and hadn’t yet announced himself.
“At the distance I was from him, if I had yelled commands for him to show his hands at that distance, he would just turn and run,” Fields said. “The issue with that is he would run into a highly populated area. Believing that he just shot and killed somebody, or that they were possibly, dying, [a suspect] running into a populated area would be an issue.”
So he started silently jogging toward the suspect to get close enough to chase him down on foot if the suspect fled after he yelled commands, Fields said.
Tucker notices Fields and runs
“The suspect first noticed me as we first started jogging toward him,” Fields said. The officer directed his rifle-mounted flashlight toward Tucker’s feet and yelled at him to put his hands up, which he said was his first verbal command.
“He turned and looked at me, and took off running,” Fields said. “There was no time for me to yell any other commands. … I already closed the distance on him, so catching him on foot would not be an issue, so I immediately gave chase behind him.”
With Fields’ call over the APD radio that he was chasing a shooting suspect, other APD officers began flooding the scene.
“As we’re running southbound, I hear the acceleration of a — I didn’t know it was a cruiser at the time, but I heard the acceleration of an engine as we’re running,” he said. “A couple seconds later, I see the red and blue lights pass me and immediately as they’re starting to pass the suspect, as it got parallel with him.”
Fields said he thought the cruiser was attempting to cut Tucker off.
Fields claims Tucker reaches for his waistband, indicative that he was pulling out a gun
Fields said Tucker noticed the cruiser getting closer to him and claimed Tucker reached for a gun in his waistband.
Fields said he knows the difference between someone reaching toward their waistband to pull up their pants and someone reaching toward their waistband to pull out a gun to shoot people.
Tucker’s right elbow had “a high 90-degree-angle bend” which is “indicative” of someone carrying a gun there because it’s “how a majority of the people in the city who carry illegal firearms carry them. … I know that if you’re trying to pull up your pants, you’re going to reach for your side or back. It’s typical. Everyone that I’ve seen running from us, they reach back and grab their pants or belt or whatever it is. That elbow points towards us. Grabbing your pants is not the same as drawing a fire arm.”
Fields claimed he saw at least a magazine of a gun in the bottom of Tucker’s hand. Tucker’s black cell phone was later found near his body.
“Immediately seeing that, knowing he was about to go for his firearm.” Fields said. “… If he was going to give up, he would have threw his hands up or something like that. However, immediately after seeing the cruiser cutting him off, he immediately reached for a firearm, which led me to believe he was about to shoot the officers in the car.”
The officer was succinct in what happened next: “I stopped running, fired several shots; he fell forward onto his right arm.”
Akron officers wait for ballistics shields to provide first aid
Fields and other responding officers spent more than seven minutes yelling from a distance at Tucker to put his hands out to the side instead of approaching him to provide aid. Fields said they didn’t approach Tucker until other officers brought ballistics shields in case Tucker planned a sneak attack.
“Just because someone’s been shot, it doesn’t mean they’re out of the fight,” Fields said. “… As I said, there’s been multiple incidents in the past where someone’s been shot and they either kind of bait officers in — once they close that distance, they jump up and start firing at them or once you close the distance and start moving them, they jump up and start fighting or shooting.”
Both of Fields’ gunshots to Tucker’s back — one piercing his heart and left lung before exiting his body and another piercing his pelvis, small intestine and other organs — would have killed Tucker rapidly, Summit County Medical Examiner Lisa Kohler said in January. The gunshot wound to his right arm would not have been fatal, the autopsy said. It said the shot to his arm had “irregular” entrance and exit wounds and it was unclear what direction the shot was fired from. The bullet that struck Tucker’s pelvis, small intestine and other organs was recovered from his body.
While Fields spent most of his time with BCI explaining why he felt he had to kill Tucker, he ended the interview on a different note.
“It’s terrible that someone lost their life – he was somebody’s relative, somebody’s son – and especially on a holiday,” he said. “I feel terrible about it, and that’s all.”
And then the audio recording ended.