A 17-year-old Fresno high school student who was shot and killed
after he attacked a campus police officer with a baseball bat
wanted to die that day, authorities said Thursday.
A 17-year-old Fresno high school student who was shot and killed after he attacked a campus police officer with a baseball bat wanted to die that day, authorities said Thursday.
Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer said investigators strongly believe Jesus “Jesse” Carrizales sought out the violent confrontation that led to his death Thursday morning, and called the incident “a case of suicide by cop.”
Dyer said there were no prior run-ins between the Roosevelt High School sophomore and officer Junus Perry, who had been assigned to the school for the last three years.
“It is unfortunate that the officer was put in a position where he had to take a student’s life,” Dyer told reporters Thursday. Perry shot Carrizales after the student surprised the officer from behind and struck him in the head with the crude wooden bat, Dyer said. Police described Carrizales as 6 feet tall and 250 pounds – larger than the officer.
The officer fell down dazed, and reached for the gun in his hip holster, but the clip fell out.
As the student came at him, yelling obscenities and raising the bat above his head, the officer grabbed a secondary weapon – a semiautomatic handgun he carried as backup – from his ankle holster. He fired one round and hit Carrizales in the chest, Dyer said.
Carrizales reportedly died within a few minutes. His family said the officer didn’t have to shoot the teen.
“He’s the baby of our family, and they took him away,” his sister Elisa Ortega, 27, said Thursday outside her mother’s modest Fresno home. “They didn’t have to kill him. The Taser guns, the batons they have, that should have been enough to calm the situation down.”
At least five students and a probation officer on campus witnessed the incident directly, police said. No one else was injured.
