Incident: May 8, 2026, Hamilton Boulevard, Peoria, Illinois. Footage released by the Illinois State Police on August 26, 2026.
A family called 911 after a woman texted them from inside her ex-boyfriend’s truck saying he was going to kill her. She had flown into Peoria for a wedding. He met her at the airport lot and left with her.
One Peoria Police Department officer pulled up on Hamilton Boulevard and got out of his car. In front of him, Cortez Lamarr White, 41, drew a handgun and shot Ashley Stenson, 42, five times. She died on the sidewalk.
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White turned the gun toward the officer and threw it at him. The officer fired. White ran. The officer chased him and kept firing. White went down, was taken into custody, and died at the hospital. The officer was not injured. Round count was never released.
Investigators recovered White’s Taurus 9mm with three rounds still in the magazine, and a stolen Glock 9mm in the pickup.
Now the footage.
The legality is not the argument on this one, and anyone telling you otherwise did not watch it. A man executes a woman at contact distance in front of a uniformed officer and then turns the gun on him. That is a lethal threat. It does not stop being a lethal threat because he starts running.
Watch it once and the first thing you see is the gun coming at the officer. White throws it. The State’s Attorney’s final report puts it in one line: he pointed the gun at the officer. Those are the same two seconds — he brought it up on the officer, then it left his hand in the officer’s direction, and the Taurus was recovered on the sidewalk. The report and the video do not conflict; the report just stops at the part that decides the case.
That throw is also where the whole “he was unarmed” argument comes from, and it dies on the officer’s own camera. From that angle you cannot tell what was thrown, or whose hand it came out of, or that it is a gun and not a phone. You cannot tell that the man now running from you has nothing left on him. He put a round through a woman’s head three feet in front of you. You are working the threat, not taking an inventory of his hands. You do not get to grade that from a chair with a pause button.
Where this one earns criticism is the shooting itself.
It took a reload to put him down at what looks like twenty-five to thirty yards. That is not a hard problem. All the optics and the gear in the world do not matter if the rounds do not land when they have to land. He is lucky that man never turned and fired back, because there was time for it.
Then there is the backdrop. As the chase comes around the corner there is a car door standing open with a person in play behind the line of fire. Nobody in that car got hit. That is luck. Whether the officer was accounting for it in the moment is not something anybody can answer from the video, and it is a fair question either way. What is not in question is that there was a cleaner shot earlier, and taking it would have ended the whole thing before that geometry ever existed.
Most of this is a suspect-driven problem, not an officer-driven one. Rolling up on a domestic and having the man shoot the victim in the head in front of you is not something you can be ready for. None of what happened to that woman lands on the officer. He put himself between a killer and everybody else on that street and he finished it.
The handcuffing at the end is worth pointing out, because it comes up every time. He is down, he is shot, and they cuff him anyway. That is not cruelty. That is because the last thing anybody needs is a man coming back out of it, getting up, and having to be shot a second time when a set of cuffs would have already settled it.
White is dead, so there is no prosecution. The Peoria County State’s Attorney issued a written final report on August 26, 2026 and called the shooting justified, reasonable and necessary. Cleared.
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