An officer pulls up on a disturbance call. Before he’s even out of the car, he hears a gunshot from inside. Then a man comes out the door holding a gun. Ten seconds later, that man is dead in the parking lot.
That’s the whole shooting. Here’s how it happened, and why it’s about as clean a use-of-force case as they come.
LVMPD Communications received a call at 6:03 a.m. on July 21 reporting a physical altercation at a business in the 5100 block of Boulder Highway near Nellis Boulevard. As the responding officer parked and began to exit his vehicle, he heard a gunshot from inside the store and saw people running out.
Travis Dewayne Ward, 35, exited the business armed with a handgun. The officer gave verbal commands for Ward to drop the weapon. Ward refused. The officer fired, striking him. Despite lifesaving efforts, Ward was pronounced dead at the scene.
Additional officers entered the business and located a man suffering from a gunshot wound — later identified as 28-year-old Kwame Swain. He was taken to the hospital in critical condition. As of Friday, his status had been updated to stable.
The full picture came out during the investigation. Swain had been in a fight with two women outside the business. One of them struck him in the face with a rock. The other called her boyfriend, later identified as Ward, and asked him to bring a gun. Ward drove to the scene, went inside, found Swain, and shot him. Surveillance video shows Ward attempting to fire a second round, but his weapon malfunctioned. He then ran back out the door — straight into the arriving officer.
This is the analysis under Graham v. Connor: the officer heard a gunshot from inside an active business, then watched the man responsible for it walk out armed and non-compliant. There’s no ambiguity in that sequence. The officer didn’t know a shooting victim was still inside. He knew a man had just fired a gun and was now standing in front of him, refusing to drop it. That’s the entire justification, and it’s enough.
The only training point worth raising has nothing to do with the shoot itself. It’s the parking position. The officer pulled in close to the front of the business — the kind of habit that gets drilled out of you at the academy and then creeps back in over years of routine calls. You don’t park directly in front of a residence or a business you’re responding to; you give yourself standoff distance, because you don’t know what’s about to come through that door. In this case, it worked out. The suspect came out in front of the officer instead of catching him off guard from the side or behind. But that’s luck, not tactics. Thirty yards back, at an angle, and the officer has cover and reaction time he didn’t have here. This time it broke the right way. It won’t always.
