© OK Dept. of CorrectionsDominic Rollice, 49, of Tahlequah was shot and killed by Tahlequah police officers last night after he allegedly lunged at them with a hammer.
The victim was 49-year-old Dominic Rollice of Park Hill who was drunk and in the house where he used to live. He was in the garage when his ex-wife called the police to have him removed.
"He's drunk, and it's gonna get ugly real quick," the woman could be heard telling a 911 dispatcher.
The dispatcher warned the woman that if officers come out, they will have to take him in for public intoxication.
"In fact, he's a registered sex offender," the woman said. "He lives in Park Hill. He's got tools in the garage, but he doesn't live here."
As police responded, they quickly backed Rollice into a corner at which time he grabbed a hammer in a seemingly reactionary move. Seconds later he'd be dead — in spite of not advancing toward the officers.
"I'm in my house; I'm doing nothing wrong," Rollice said. It is unclear as to whether Rollice had a legal right to be in the house. However, this did not matter to police.
The three officers who responded were Lt. Brandon Vick, Officer Josh Girdner, and Officer Chase Reed.
"I'm going less lethal," says Reed.
As Reed fired his taser, causing Rollice to go down, Vick and Girdner both opened fire.
"Hold your hands up! Get on the ground!" the officers yell at a man who was just shot six times. Rollice responds by grunting and then collapsing backward.
"Dominic, you gotta stay with me. Stay with me," Reed, the only cop in the room who was interested in preserving life, says to Rollice while the other officers secure the scene. "EMS is on the way, OK? Stay with me."
Moments later he's dead.
Police Chief Nate King said during a Friday news conference that although an outside investigation is pending, he believes the officers' actions were "necessary, not just justified" because the Rollice escalated the situation and made the officers fear for their lives.
"A reasonable officer would have sensed a clear and present danger to them and to their other officers," he said.
This excuse by King would probably hold more water had an officer in the same room not immediately resorted to deadly force.
The fact that Reed was in the same room with the other officers and chose to use a taser first shows that the use of deadly force was entirely unwarranted.
According to Tulsa World, King said it's "alarming" for officers that fatal incidents appear to be on the rise in the U.S. And he's right, police killings are on the rise.
However, he misses the point that police shootings are on the rise because police are more apt to resort to deadly force.
"I worry about our officers. I worry about our society," King said of the deadly force incidents occurring nationwide. "It's not just in Tahlequah. It's in Tulsa. It's in Wagoner. It's in Cherokee County itself."
Below is a video of a man suspected of a misdemeanor charge of public intoxication who paid the ultimate price when police arrived.
Reader Comments
See, it's not just that this shooting could have been avoided. It's that the laws which make the cops do these things are the result of the do-gooders out there. Those people who keep thinking laws are good things are the ones who are ultimately responsible for this shooting. The police have their hands tied by them, they are forced to make arrests because it's a domestic, and the law now says someone is going to jail because..and don't ya know...that by making one party a criminal, then the odds of them being called back for a worse situation is reduced. That's the story anyways, or the phoney excuse behind that law. Naturally I'd think it probably has more to do with the courts receiving money from fines and then there's the court ordered educational costs like anger management and so forth.
This is a nightmare. I don't know why anyone is doing the job of a policeman any more. It's not even a job so much as it is the robotic administration of a compulsory campaign to extract money and property from the population, to steal their cars, homes, lives. Guess that explains the 4k to 8K+ a month wages. They have to pay that much just to retain enough people to do this horrible function.