Shell casings recovered near the scene of the fatal shooting of Jazmir Tucker match the gun found in his jacket pocket, the Akron Police Department announced Tuesday morning.
The casings were found Thanksgiving night in the northeast section of the Miller South School for Visual and Performing Arts campus.
According to the police department’s news release, the casings were positively matched through the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, which is part of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and helps identify ballistic evidence related to crimes involving firearms.
The officer who shot Tucker, along with his partner, were sitting in their marked police cruiser filing a report from a previous incident when they heard gunfire. They left their vehicle to investigate near Vernon Odom Boulevard and East Avenue in Akron’s Sherbondy Hill neighborhood.
The officers encountered Tucker, a freshman at North High School. It’s unclear whether Tucker brandished the weapon during his interaction with the police officers or whether they saw the gun in his hand.
After Tucker was killed, the gun was found zipped in his jacket pocket.
Body camera footage released the following week by the City of Akron provides few clues about what occurred that night and has raised questions about how officers responded.
The footage, released as required by city law, doesn’t show what Tucker was doing in his last moments alive or what officers said to him before one of the officers opened fire from some distance away.
The footage does show that officers waited at least seven minutes after the shooting to approach Tucker, who appeared motionless in the grass in front of the school. Seven officers walking side by side eventually reached him, but none attempted to provide first aid. Instead they handcuffed him and searched for weapons.
Officers rolled the handcuffed teen’s body to its side and unzipped his jacket and sweatshirt, revealing a wound near his chest that was obscured by a blur added to the video before its release.
Akron Mayor Shammas Malik has called for the community to reserve judgment following the Nov. 28 shooting, but he publicly asked his own questions about the police response.“Due to the angle of the body cameras and the bright light shining on Jazmir after he was initially shot, it’s hard to make out from the videos what exactly happened leading up to the shooting and immediately following it,” Malik wrote in a statement coinciding with the Dec. 5 release of the footage.
“A gun was recovered from Jazmir’s zipped-up jacket pocket. Given that, why did the officer decide to use his weapon?”
The mayor also questioned why the officers did not activate their body cameras. The cameras were activated automatically when another cruiser turned on its lights, he wrote, and details leading up to the shooting were not documented.
“So my initial questions were why the cameras were not activated by the officers and whether this violated the body worn camera policy,” he wrote. “This will be reviewed in our internal investigation.”
Malik also said people may wonder why the officers used rifles instead of handguns when they responded to the incident and that the subject would be discussed more going forward, including in the internal investigation and “as part of the city’s comprehensive review of use of force, including when and how different weapons are used.”
Since then, protesters have gathered downtown at least five times to protest Tucker’s death and called for the name of the officer who shot him to be released, along with his personnel file. Several members of Akron City Council have publicly called for the officer to be fired.
The Fraternal Order of Police Akron Lodge #7, the police union, has called for “understanding and patience” as the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation reviews the shooting.
