On Wednesday in Buffalo, New York, a police officer shot and killed a man after a suspect dragged him in a speeding vehicle while he was stopped for a traffic violation.
Prior to this horrific incident, Officer Ronald Ammerman had stopped 25-year-old Davon Roberts around midnight for speeding and having tinted windows in the vehicle he was driving, police said. New York Post report on friday.
image show Suspect during traffic stop:
WATCH: Video shows Buffalo man killed by police, officer clinging to car as officer flees https://t.co/vO8wpnl6D7
— The Buffalo News (@TheBuffaloNews) July 11, 2024
As Ammerman sat in the car and approached the driver, he noticed that the 6-year-old boy sitting next to him was not wearing his seat belt.
When the officer asked for his ID, Roberts complied, saying he was from Georgia and was driving his sister’s car, but the officer determined that the photo of his ID stored on his phone was invalid — Roberts did not have a driver’s license in either Georgia or New York.
The officer told Roberts that he and a fellow officer would look into his name in another way and opened the car door, at which point Roberts stepped on the accelerator and sped away from the scene with Ammerman still clinging to the open car door.
Video footage from PoliceActivity show A tense moment sees an officer grab the car and tell Roberts “You’re going to kill me! You’re going to kill me! You’re going to kill me!” as the car appears to speed away.
As the car sped down the road, a child could be heard screaming in the passenger seat, and moments later Ammerman grabbed a gun and fired several times at Roberts, who jumped out of the car toward the officers.
The suspect then fell to the ground and the officer yelled “Shots! Shots!”, adding: “He tried to kill me!”
A routine traffic stop turns tragic when a driver with a 6-year-old boy in the front seat sped off with an officer clinging to the door. Shocking body camera footage captures the moment a Buffalo police officer grabbed hold of speeding suspect Davon… https://t.co/ixEFGsvShJ pic.twitter.com/1E1jPKrkgo
— Janie Johnson – America is Exceptional (@jjauthor) July 12, 2024
A short time later, Ammerman ran to his car and retrieved the child, asking, “Are you OK?”, to which the child replied, “Yes.”
Police rushed the suspect to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
“Roberts was accused of trying to shoot someone at a vigil for his brother, Jaylen Griffin, on April 22, 2024. He was charged with attempted assault and unlawful possession of a weapon,” Spectrum News 1 reports. report On Thursday, he noted that Griffin’s body was discovered in 2024 after she went missing more than three years ago.
Body camera footage from other officers show The moment the suspect fled with Ammerman clinging to the car:
Buffalo Police Chief Joseph Gramaria said in a statement about the incident: Said WKBW reported that he told reporters on Wednesday that the video of the incident was “extremely traumatic.”
When police searched the vehicle, they found a handgun under the driver’s seat, the media reported.
The police chief called the incident a “justifiable use of force” because the officers were at high risk of serious injury or death. Per department policy, both officers are currently on administrative leave.
“This is reality, and we don’t have much control over how these situations happen,” Gramaria said. “We can train for different situations, but when it happens in real life, in real life situations, it’s always going to be different than what happens in the training facility.”
