Eight officer-involved shootings came across the desk this week. Two out of Texas, three out of Ohio, one out of California, one out of Nevada, and one more out of Texas that I almost want to leave off the list out of embarrassment.
People want to hear that every one of these clears. That is not how this works. Most of them do, and the reasons why are worth understanding. One of them does not, and the reasons why matter more.
Here is the whole week.
San Antonio, Texas — He Pulled a Gun on a Bicycle Stop
July 16, 2:18 a.m., 800 block of Hammond Avenue.
Officers tried to stop 52-year-old Andrew Davila Jr. on a bicycle. The department has said only that he was considered suspicious. He briefly stopped, ignored commands, and took off. A patrol unit caught up and made contact with him, and he went down in a front yard.
When officers closed on him, he drew a handgun. They gave him repeated commands to drop it. He did not. He pointed it at them. Four of the five officers on scene fired.
Davila was struck and pronounced dead at the scene. A handgun was recovered and photographed. An unknown item struck by gunfire ignited a small fire, which officers put out. No officers or bystanders were hurt.
This one does not need a long analysis. He ran from a lawful stop, went down, and produced a firearm and pointed it at officers. What is interesting is how long they waited. Drop the gun, drop the gun, drop the gun — three times, on a man who already has a pistol in his hand and is bringing it up. That is more restraint than most people would extend, and more than the law requires. You do not have to absorb the first round to be allowed to defend yourself.
Dallas, Texas — Four Rounds at His Own Undercover
August 6, 9:10 a.m., 3500 block of Sunnyvale Street.
39-year-old Renard McFadden rolled up in a stolen Ford F-150, walked to a white Porsche Cayenne parked outside a business, and threatened the 9-year-old girl sitting inside while indicating he was armed. He ordered her out. The child ran in to get her mother. When the mother came out he indicated he was armed again, took the Porsche, and left.
Her tracking app did the rest. At 10:10 a.m. officers found the Porsche on the 5800 block of Williamstown Road. Uniformed units set up a felony stop. A covert officer put his unmarked car in front of the Porsche to block it in, then got out with his handgun drawn and moved toward a yard for cover.
A uniformed officer fired four rounds toward the covert officer and the suspect. Another officer yelled “blue, blue” from a distance. The firing stopped. McFadden got out and surrendered. Nobody was hit — not the officers, not the suspect, not the public. A loaded handgun came out of the Porsche.
Now the part people do not want to hear.
The block-in was coordinated on the radio. The covert officer called it out before he moved — he was going in front of the suspect vehicle to block it from leaving. The covert car is directly in front of the suspect vehicle, in the shooting officer’s line of sight, through his own windshield. The other unmarked unit peeled off exactly the way it is supposed to so the marked car could take point. Every piece of that stop was called out loud.
The covert officer did nothing wrong. Getting out and moving to cover is the correct move. Sitting inside a car directly behind a felony-stop suspect vehicle is sitting in a kill zone, and glass stops nothing. He was doing his job.
The officer who fired never identified what he was shooting at. He could not tell which door opened on which vehicle, with better visibility than the dashcam that captured it, on a stop where the position of every unit had been broadcast.
Target identification is not an advanced skill. It is the floor. You do not press a trigger until you know what is in front of it. Four rounds went downrange at a police officer because somebody skipped that step, and the only reason this is not a funeral is luck.
Hiring and training standards have slipped in a lot of places over the last five years, and this is what it looks like on video. Nobody is served by pretending otherwise — least of all the officers who do the job right.
Dallas’s ninth officer-involved shooting of 2026. Charges against McFadden at the time: unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, robbery, and unlawful possession of a firearm, with more pursued.
Dallas, Texas — A Stabbing in Progress and a Shot He Could Not Take
August 7, 6:50 a.m., 8500 block of Park Lane.
A 911 caller reported 37-year-old Isidoro Melo-Munoz armed with a knife and assaulting a woman he had dated. A sergeant got there first and a witness flagged him down and pointed him at it.
He arrived to a stabbing already in progress. He gave repeated commands. Melo-Munoz kept going and stabbed her multiple times, then ran, still armed. The sergeant fired one round at him as he fled and missed. A knife was recovered along the path he took. Three knives came off the scene total.
The victim went to surgery and was later listed in stable condition. Melo-Munoz was taken into custody the next day at a convenience store on the 6700 block of Abrams Road, booked on warrants for aggravated assault – family violence with a deadly weapon and for burglary with intent to commit assault from an August 5 incident involving the same victim.
The social media take on this one was that he should have shot during the assault. Watch it again. He is on the wrong side of a slatted wood fence line with the victim and the suspect stacked together and no clean angle. Firing through that means a real chance of putting a round into the woman he is trying to save. That is not a shot, that is a gamble with somebody else’s life.
The round he did fire came as a man who had just stabbed a woman multiple times ran off into an apartment complex full of people, still holding the knife. Some people do not like fleeing-felon shootings. This is the exact fact pattern the doctrine exists for — a demonstrated, armed, immediate danger to anyone he reaches next.
He was alone, watching a woman get stabbed, unable to reach her. That is about as bad a set of options as this job hands out.
Dallas’s tenth officer-involved shooting of 2026 — the second in two days.
Oakland, California — Two Homemade Spears
July 13, 2:12 p.m., 40th Avenue and International Boulevard, Fruitvale.
CHP officers found 43-year-old Jose Castillo at a homeless encampment near 42nd Avenue carrying two homemade spears — large knives lashed to long metal poles. He refused commands to drop them, raised them at the officers, and walked off.
Oakland officers picked him up near East 12th Street and 41st Avenue. He refused every command, kept moving, and kept the weapons up. Three bystanders including at least one child had to be cleared out of his path as he came down the sidewalk. Officers followed him down 41st Avenue.
He walked into a strip mall parking lot and turned on them. At least two Tasers were deployed and were only briefly effective. He shed his backpack and started swinging the spears. Two officers fired at close range. Castillo was pronounced dead at the scene. No officers or bystanders were injured.
Understand what a knife lashed to a pole actually is. In the last two weeks alone we have watched a deputy get stabbed inside 15 feet and another officer nearly get it inside 20. A blade on a shaft does not shorten that reactionary gap — it erases it. It can be thrust, and it can be thrown.
What these officers did right was give him room while it was only cops and him. They walked with him. They tried less-lethal first. The officer closest to him and most exposed was carrying a Taser, which is almost certainly the only reason this did not end on the sidewalk.
But that space is a luxury, and it disappears the second civilians enter the picture. Once he is walking toward a business full of people with two spears in his hands, the calculus is done. You cannot let that man through a door.
They did not shoot him for walking away. They did not shoot him for entering the parking lot. They shot him when he turned and swung. That is the line, and it held.
Las Vegas, Nevada — Gasoline, a Blowtorch, and a Round Through the Door
August 10, 12:29 a.m., 4500 block of Pigeon Point Court.
A woman called 911 and said her boyfriend, 48-year-old Jason Simmons, was trying to set her on fire with a blowtorch. On the recording: “he is about to burn me up.” Then she updated dispatch that she had been shot and was hiding in a bathroom. Her teenage daughter was in another bedroom.
Officers arrived to gasoline fires burning through the house and smoke filling it. They formed up and went in. They found the girl in a front bedroom with a gunshot wound.
Working through the house, they hit a locked master bedroom door. An officer was forcing it when Simmons fired seven rounds through that door. One hit her in the center of the chest. It went through 24 layers of Kevlar and stopped inside her vest, leaving a bleeding abrasion. She fired 11 rounds back, the team pulled off the door, and the call was declared a barricade.
SWAT and negotiators came in. The girlfriend, still on the phone, reported that Simmons had shot himself. She came out and was transported with burn injuries and a gunshot wound, in critical condition as of the last reporting. SWAT entered and found 14-year-old Aven Drummond in the front bedroom. She was pronounced dead at the scene despite life-saving measures. She would have turned 15 two days later. Simmons was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. A rifle, three handguns and a blowtorch were recovered.
Every cop knows doors, hallways and stairwells will kill you. And every cop takes them anyway, because there is nobody else to take them. That is the whole job in one sentence.
Watch how they worked it. The first thirty seconds are chaos — fire, smoke, alarms, a shot victim, an unknown armed suspect. Then they slow down. They call rooms. They announce. “I am going into this room, I need someone with me.” One officer coordinates movement and keeps the team stacked. That is training taking over in a scene that had every reason to fall apart, and it is the reason this did not get worse.
She never got that door open. He fired through it while she was standing in front of it. The vest did what it was built to do, and it was close — the strike was high on the carrier, near the center of her chest.
This was LVMPD’s tenth officer-involved shooting of 2026, six days after Officer Austin Abdelnabi was shot and killed in the line of duty. Two officers shot in under a week in one city. End of Watch, Officer Abdelnabi.
North Olmsted, Ohio — The Best Piece of Police Work I Have Seen This Year
January 21, 3:02 p.m.
37-year-old John Johnson of Lorain robbed a Brink’s armored truck outside the Elyria AT&T store on West River Road North, forcing the driver into the truck at gunpoint and taking an undisclosed amount of cash before fleeing in a second vehicle.
The car was spotted in Lorain. Elyria police and multiple agencies ran a pursuit east on Route 20 into North Olmsted at over 100 miles an hour, in snow and ice, with traffic on the road. North Olmsted officers deployed stop sticks that finally ended it at Columbia and Brookpark.
A hundred-plus in the snow is a different animal. One mistake at that speed and it is over — for the suspect, for a civilian, for the cop. If there is ever a call that justifies letting a pursuit run at those speeds in those conditions, it is an armed armored-truck robbery.
Johnson bailed on foot into an apartment complex on Clareshire Drive. He took a mother and her four children hostage at gunpoint and forced his way inside with the two youngest. A doorbell camera caught the whole thing.
An Elyria Police Department officer was seconds behind him. He did not stage. He did not wait for a perimeter. He did not hold for twenty more units. He went through the door and ended it.
Johnson died. A .45 caliber handgun was recovered inside. Every hostage walked out unharmed and not one officer or civilian was hurt. In August a grand jury declined to indict the Elyria officer, and the use-of-force review found his actions objectively reasonable.
Elyria Police Chief James Welsh: “He is a hero. This was a serious situation from the start.”
He is right. An armed robber with a gun in his hand just took a mother and four kids into an apartment. There is no version of waiting that gets those kids out safer. Every second on the radio is a second he is alone with them. The officer threw out everything that would have protected him professionally and did the thing the job is actually for.
If you want to know what the standard looks like, it looks like this.
Columbus, Ohio — Two Guns, Both to His Own Head
August 7, around 6:25 p.m., Hamilton Road exit on I-70.
A 911 caller reported that after a crash, 32-year-old Brandon Burtyk got out of his vehicle, produced two handguns, fired shots, and ran off on foot with them.
Officers found him outside a home on the 4500 block of Errington Road holding a handgun to each temple, yelling at officers to kill him. What follows is a long stretch of an officer doing real work with his mouth — put the guns down, let us talk about this — asking his name, staying on him. At one point an officer asks him only to keep the muzzles pointed in a safe direction, because a round fired into the air over a neighborhood is its own problem.
Then he brought the guns off his head and extended both arms toward officers. Multiple officers fired. Burtyk was not struck. He tossed a gun, officers moved in and took him into custody, and he was transported for injuries from the crash. An officer was struck in the leg during the exchange, treated and released.
One of the handguns was reported stolen. Burtyk was charged with one count of felonious assault and held on a $3 million bond.
The distinction people miss: it does not matter that he wanted to die. The moment a firearm comes off his own head and points outward, he is a lethal threat to everyone in front of him, and nobody is required to wait and find out whether suicidal is where it stops. Plenty of these end with somebody else dead first.
Watch his hands at the end. Guns at the temples, then both arms out. That is the whole thing.
Brooklyn, Ohio — A Welfare Check That Was Always Going to End This Way
February 24, around 1 p.m.
Parma police got a welfare check at 12:48 p.m. at the Knollwood Apartments on a suicidal man, after a friend received a goodbye text and called it in.
Officers could not find 29-year-old Ricardo Davis. What they found instead was notes with suicidal writing taped to the door, packed boxes labeled with people’s names, and a receipt for a firearm. That is a man who has already decided.
His phone was triangulated. His car was spotted westbound on Brookpark Road near Hauserman. Officers tried to stop him and he kept driving until Commerce Parkway in Brooklyn. Officers called out that he was reaching into the back seat.
He got out with a gun in his hand and walked straight at them, ignoring commands to drop it. He was shot, taken to MetroHealth, and pronounced dead. No officers were injured. His friend later told BCI investigators he believed Davis was going for suicide by cop.
There is nothing here anybody could have done differently once he got out of that car. You cannot bet the lives of everyone on that scene on the hope that a man who came looking to be shot will accept not being shot. People who set this up have already accepted killing as part of the plan.
And there is a piece of this worth saying to civilians. Watch the traffic in that video. Cars are stopped and sitting directly downrange of an active felony stop, because the drivers think yielding is the polite thing to do. If you find yourself looking at a felony stop from the wrong side, do not yield — leave. Turn, drive, get out of the line. No officer is going to write you a ticket for it. They want you gone more than you do.
Suicide-by-cop calls are the ones that stay with officers longest. There are no high fives after those. There is a man who used them as an instrument, and a bunch of cops who have to carry it.
The Week in Total
Eight shootings. Two men killed by police who left officers no choice. One killed while he was actively taking hostages. Two no-hit shootings. One officer shot in the chest and saved by her vest, one officer shot in the leg, and a 14-year-old girl who did not survive the night in Las Vegas.
And one officer who fired four rounds at a fellow cop because he never confirmed his target.
They are not all the same, and the only way anybody learns anything from them is if we stop pretending they are.
