A 15-year-old boy called 911 to ask San Diego police to check on his well being early Saturday morning. When officers arrived on the scene to find him holding a BB gun, they shot the teen dead.
The boy, whose name has not been released, was shot and killed by police outside San Diego’s Torrey Pines High School around 3:30 a.m. on Saturday, police say. Officers said he aimed a gun at them. But the weapon was later discovered to be a BB gun, and the 911 call had been placed by the boy, himself.
At 3:27 Saturday morning, police received a call about a boy loitering outside Torrey Pines High School in northern San Diego. The caller, who spoke in the third person, asked police to check on the boy, Mike Holden, the San Diego Police Department’s acting homicide captain said in a Saturday statement to press. The caller described the boy as unarmed, Holden said.
Two officers, one of whom was a Juvenile Services officer, responded to the call and found the boy standing in the high school parking lot. But when they approached him, he reportedly drew a BB gun.
“As the officers exited the patrol car, the subject pulled a handgun from his waistband and pointed it directly at one of the officers,” Holden said. Believing the gun to be a lethal weapon, both officers opened fire on the boy, striking him multiple times.
According to police scanner transcripts reviewed by the San Diego Union-Tribune, a police dispatcher put out a “shots fired” radio call six or seven minutes after the officers arrived on scene. No police had been injured, but the two responding officers requested paramedics “now,” adding that they were performing CPR on the victim. He died shortly after being transported to a nearby hospital.
Both officers were wearing body cameras, and activated them at some point before the shooting, Holden said Saturday. The shooting evidently had no witnesses besides the officers, making their body camera footage crucial for review. Just last week, body camera footage from an officer in a Dallas, Texas suburb contradicted his report on the shooting death of Jordan Edwards, another 15-year-old boy. The Texas officer originally claimed to have opened fire on a car when it reversed aggressively toward him last Saturday. But his body camera footage revealed that the car — full of unarmed teenagers — had been driving away from him. The officer, Roy Oliver II was charged with murder on Friday.
Like Edwards, the unnamed boy killed outside Torrey Pines High School was also a high school freshman. His school district superintendent issued a statement confirming that the boy had been a Torrey Pines student.
“You may have heard that there was an officer-involved shooting in a parking lot at Torrey Pines High School in the early hours of this morning. I am saddened to report that the 15-year-old boy
who was killed was a student at our school. Law enforcement has not released the name of the young man, but our hearts go out to the student, his family, and his friends,” superintendent Eric Dill wrote, adding that counseling would be made available to students when classes resumed Monday.
“As a community, we have a shared responsibility to care for one another,” Dill wrote. “Please rest assured that we will do everything possible to maintain our daily routine while supporting each other as we deal with this sad event.”