Dallas police have released footage from an officer-involved fatal shooting during a robbery in East Oak Cliff last week.
In the early hours of July 4, the Dallas Police Department received reports of an armed robbery in progress at an illegal game room in the 2900 block of South Lancaster Road.
Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia reported during a press conference on Monday that at least one person was pistol-whipped while three armed suspects allegedly rounded up individuals in the parking lot and forced them inside the building, per WFAA. A fourth suspect, 34-year-old Timothy Jefferson, stayed in the parking lot and kept watch.
Senior Corporal Ruben Martinez, a plainclothes officer who had been working nearby, was the first at the scene and ended up face-to-face with Jefferson in the parking lot.
Video footage from both responding officers’ bodycams and a nearby surveillance camera shows Martinez and Jefferson pointing their guns at each other. After Martinez identifies himself as a police officer, Jefferson drops his weapon, yet the two begin to scuffle as Martinez approaches to place him under arrest.
DPD claims that Jefferson reached for his weapon on the ground, and Martinez fired several shots at him as a result. Officers attempted to provide Jefferson with medical attention at the scene, but he eventually died at the hospital.
The officer-involved shooting is under investigation by the Office of Community Police Oversight, which responded to the scene, as well as the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office and the DPD Special Investigations Unit.
“We’re once again lucky that our officers were not injured or killed, and no one was injured in this incident,” Garcia said, per Fox 4 KDFW.
“This type of event is never our intended outcome. But ultimately, here we are again because of the dangerous actions and choices of suspects wanted in our city,” he added, per WFAA.
“We never want this to be the result or the outcome of any of our calls. This is a tragedy for the officer, it’s a tragedy for the suspect’s family and friends who may not have remembered the individual this way.”
Jefferson was a convicted felon with priors for organized crime, burglary of a habitation, and a string of aggravated robberies for which he was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2009.
Two of the other three suspects allegedly involved in the armed robbery were arrested at the scene, 21-year-old Kyvarian Banks and 20-year-old Dominique Lee-Bolin. Both have been booked into Dallas County jail on armed robbery charges, with Banks issued a bond of $650,000 and Lee-Bolin given a bond of $45,000.
The last suspect has yet to be identified and is currently still at large.
The incident occurred in Council Member Carolyn Arnold King’s District 4, which has seen 114 robberies as of July 8 this year, according to data from the City’s crime analytics dashboard.
King noted how illegal game rooms are an ongoing problem in the area.
“We are really cracking down on those businesses that don’t add value to our community,” King said, per CBS News Texas. “And oftentimes these are storefronts, and they appear to be legitimate on the outside of the front.”
The person who allegedly runs the game room, 38-year-old Mohammad Ghali, has also been arrested for keeping a gambling place.
DPD has been making headway against certain types of violent crime despite a critical staffing shortage. However, with just 3,000 officers fielded — roughly 1,000 short of the staffing level recommended by a City analysis — response times have lagged, and property crime and robberies have remained high or even grown.
At the same time, achieving adequate staffing levels is difficult due to DPD’s budget of only $654 million this fiscal year. The Dallas City Council opted to spend less taxpayer money on law enforcement than its counterparts in other high-crime jurisdictions, such as New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles.