It’s also unclear where the child was in the apartment during the gunfire, but police said he had been moving around the apartment, mostly in the kitchen, during the standoff.
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Three officers arrived at an apartment in Randallstown on Monday morning to serve both Gaines and a man who lived at the residence with arrest warrants. Gaines reportedly also has a young daughter, but it is unknown whether she was at the apartment at the time.
At around 4 p.m., after hours of standoff, the woman threatened officers verbally and with the weapon, according to the police account.
Gaines was killed and the boy is being treated for non-life threatening injuries in an area hospital. They then returned fire and killed her, police said. Cops say they knocked and no one answered, but they could hear people talking inside.
“‘If you don’t leave, I’m going to kill you”.
The cardboard “tags” read: “Free Traveler” and “Any Government official who compromises this pursuit of happiness and right to travel will be held criminally responsible and fined, as this is a natural right and freedom”.
“Gaines was posting video of the operation, and followers were encouraging her not to comply with negotiators’ requests that she surrender peacefully”, a spokesperson for the Baltimore County Police Department said. A video collected by CBS Baltimore shows a very quiet scene, in which a woman, presumably Gaines, is whispering to her son (his face is blurred out) as what looks like a man in a SWAT uniform stands in her doorway, but not entirely in the house.
During the stand-off, Gaines also posted videos from the traffic stop on her Instagram account.
Courtney, the man in the apartment with Gaines, was wanted on an assault warrant filed by Gaines following a domestic violence incident in “the weeks prior” to Monday’s standoff, Johnson said.
It is not clear if the 5-year-old, who was shot in the arm, was struck by Gaines or police.
After the officers gave Gaines a citation, she defiantly threw the paperwork out of the window and placed the child on her lap as a barrier between police and herself. After five to ten minutes, one of the officers obtained a key of the apartment from the landlord and opened the door. He left the apartment with a 1-year-old child and was arrested. Her five-year-old son was with her throughout the negotiations, and the boy was wounded in the arm during an exchange of gunfire between police and Gaines, authorities said. Videos showing Gaines’ encounter with police went viral. “Pointed it at one of the three officers”, Johnson said. The police chief said county police based their de-activation request on the fact that there was a barricade involving someone with a gun, and that a child was present.
“My niece is a good person; I never knew her to be a rowdy person”, Barnett told the paper.
At least eight other black women have been shot and killed by police this year, according to a police killing tracker by The Washington Post.
“We are of course extremely upset at an event like this”, police spokeswoman Elise Armacost said at press conference. She said they “would have to “murder’ her” to get her out of her vehicle so it could be towed, the report said”.
The question is why there is no body camera footage from the cops, since police officers in Baltimore have been equipped with body cams since May.
CNN affiliate WBAL reports that it is the county’s third officer-involved shooting of 2016, and the first fatal officer-involved shooting of the year.
A child was injured in the shootout, and a male suspect apprehended.
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Without witnesses or video of the shooting, the community has only the police account of what happened.
