A photograph of a candle in memory of fallen police officers and other images of racial solidarity appeared on the Facebook page of a Missouri man on Saturday afternoon.
Hours later, the man was dead, after a Facebook exchange between the man and a police officer over the Black Lives Matter movement turned into a fatal face-to-face encounter, a relative said.
The St. Louis County Police Department said that on Saturday, just before 6 p.m., the man, Tyler Gebhard, 20, broke into the house of a relative of one of its officers, who shot him. Mr. Gebhard had “made a series of threats” before going to the house, the police said. “These threats were from the suspect to the family as well as uninvolved members of the community.”
The police did not give details about the threats. But Mr. Gebhard’s uncle, Patrick Brogan, said that the two were friends on Facebook and that they had clashed recently online over Mr. Gebhard’s support of Black Lives Matter, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
“He walked over there and into a gunfight,” Mr. Brogan was quoted as saying, drawing on accounts offered by friends of his nephew.
The police said in a statement over the weekend that the two men knew each other from a church group. When Mr. Gebhard showed up at the house of the officer’s relative in Lakeshire, St. Louis County, he repeatedly rang the doorbell, banged on windows and doors and demanded to enter.
He then went to the backyard, picked up a large, concrete planter and threw it through a rear door, shattering it, the statement said. He went inside, where the officer’s wife, mother-in-law and two children had barricaded themselves in a room.
The off-duty officer was also inside, and gave a series of verbal commands to Mr. Gebhard, which he ignored, the police said.
“Fearing for his life and the lives of the others in the home, the off-duty officer shot the suspect,” the police said. The newspaper quoted the police as saying that the officer said “get down, get down, get down” before firing.
It's also important to note though that the attacker had bi-polar disorder, according to his uncle.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/u...-is-shot-dead-by-officer-during-break-in.html
Not like this, people.