POLICE FATALLY SHOOT BLACK PREGNANT WOMEN

According to Katie Mettler and mark Berman at the washiontonpost.com Seattle police officers shot and killed a woman at her apartment Sunday morning in front of “several children” when the woman, who relatives said was pregnant, “confronted” them with a knife, according to a statement from authorities.

The Seattle Times reported that the 30-year-old woman had called police to report a possible burglary.

At a vigil Sunday night, family identified the woman as Charleena Lyles, according to the Times, and relatives said she had a history of mental health struggles. She was several months pregnant, her family said, and too “tiny” for officers to have felt threatened by her — even if she had a knife.

“Why couldn’t they have Tased her?” Lyles’s sister, Monika Williams, said to the Seattle Times. “They could have taken her down. I could have taken her down.”

On Sunday morning just before 10 a.m., two patrol officers were dispatched to investigate a reported burglary at Brettler Family Place, an apartment complex for people transitioning out of homelessness, according to Detective Mark Jamieson.

Usually, only one officer would respond to a standard burglary call like this one, Jamieson told reporters. But police were familiar with Lyles and her apartment, he said, and her call flagged “hazard information” affiliated with her apartment that “presented an increased risk to officers,” the detective said.

[Minn. officer acquitted in shooting of Philando Castile during traffic stop, dismissed from police force]

Officers walked to the fourth floor and “at some point, the 30-year-old female was armed with a knife,” Jamieson told reporters. Both officers, who have not been identified, fired their weapons. They performed CPR, according to authorities, but Lyles was later declared dead by fire department officials at the scene.

Children inside at the time were not injured, according to police. Officials who did not say if they were Lyles’s children. Police were trying to determine Sunday whether the children had witnessed the shooting.

The department’s Force Investigative Team is investigating the officers’ decision to use deadly force. Both officers will be placed on administrative leave during the investigation, authorities said.

Authorities offered few immediate details about what led police to fire their weapons. Early Monday, the police department released an audio recording capturing what they described as “some of the interaction with the caller prior to the rapid development of the use of force incident.”

On the recording, which officials said was captured by dashboard video cameras in the patrol cars, officers can be heard discussing a woman who had previously made “all these weird statements.” Neither officer is identified, and police say all names have been removed from the recording.

The recording captured officers speaking to a woman about an Xbox that she said was taken. Seconds after that interaction, however, the encounter suddenly escalates and the officers can be heard shouting at the woman to back away.

“Hey, get back! Get back!” an officer shouts, a call echoed by the other officer, before a volley of gunshots are heard.

In a short statement accompanying the recording, police said that both police officers involved “were equipped with less lethal force options, per departmental policy.”

[Aren’t more white people than black people killed by police? Yes, but no.]

Family members told the Seattle Times that they believe Lyles’s race — she is black — was a factor in her death. Seattle police told the newspaper that the officers who shot her are white.

Sean O’Donnell, captain of the department’s north precinct, where the shooting took place, said one of the officers is an 11-year veteran of the force and the other is “newer to the department,” reported the Times.

King County jail records show that Lyles was arrested June 5 on charges of harassment, obstruction of a public official and harassment of a law enforcement officer. She was released conditionally on June 14. Williams told the Seattle Times that one condition was that she receive mental health counseling, although the newspaper could not independently verify that information Sunday.

Williams told TV station KOMO News that her sister’s arrest earlier this month was connected to another incident at the apartment. Lyles was charged with obstruction because she refused to hand over one of the children to officers until Williams arrived at the scene. She had scissors in her hand, Williams said.

“She didn’t charge nobody or nothing,” Williams told KOMO News.

She said Lyles had “mental health issues” that were going untreated.

Around a hundred people gathered Sunday for a vigil honoring Lyles. The mourners taped a photos of the woman and her children to the back of black plastic chairs and spelled her name out on the sidewalk with small votive candles. Friends and family wondered aloud how police could shoot and kill a mother in front of her children.

Lhora Murray, 42, lives in the apartment directly below Lyles and told the Stranger she often heard yelling from the woman’s unit and called security multiple times. When she heard gunshots Sunday morning, Murray said she called people — unaware it was officers who had fired their weapons.

Murray told the Stranger that after the shooting, police handed her two of Lyles’s children, a 10-year-old and a toddler. “They shot my mom,” Murray said the 10-year-old told her as she took the kids outside.

Lhora Murray, 42, lives in the apartment directly below Lyles and told the Stranger she often heard yelling from the woman’s unit and called security multiple times. When she heard gunshots Sunday morning, Murray said she called people — unaware it was officers who had fired their weapons.

Murray told the Stranger that after the shooting, police handed her two of Lyles’s children, a 10-year-old and a toddler. “They shot my mom,” Murray said the 10-year-old told her as she took the kids outside.