More like “Victimization of one last person, and if a perfect finale, it will be the very one or more enforcement people upon whom society relies for security at home,” type of suicide.
While the references to suicide vs. homicide are popping up, this isn’t a “Suicide By Cop” type case.
The perp, while fleeing, shot at an officer who tried to stop his attempt at staying “free”. If it were a suicide by cop case, he would have engaged the officers simply in order to force them to kill him.His motive was to continue fleeing, as scene by his attempt to keep running after being hailed.
[#offtopic] I was going to let this drop, but since the discussion is continuing, consider the following hypothetical scenarios of what I view as essentially self-inflicted death:
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Perp shoots (and kills) himself;
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Perp throws himself under a fast-moving freight train, about 50 cars back so the crew has no idea he was there and no opportunity to stop the train;
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Perp steps in front of the locomotive of a fast-moving train about 50 feet before it gets to him, so that even though the engineer may see him at the last second, there’s just not enough time to even apply the brakes;
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Perp steps in front of a fast-moving police car about 50 feet before it gets to him, so that even though the officer may see him at the last second, there’s just not enough time to even apply the brakes; [Something similar to this actually happened in Whitehall Twp. here about 10 years ago on a dark, rainy night - the word “horrific” doesn’t start to apply to the results.]
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Perp jumps into the crocodile pit at a zoo. The crocs do what comes naturally, and have him for lunch;
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Perp does what Granite Railroader (above) calls a “suicide by cop” case - just confronting and shooting at the the officer without attempting to flee. The officer returns fire and kills the perp;
and finally,
- Perp does what apparently happened here at Homewood - tries to flee, encounters officer, shoots at the the officer. The officer returns fire and kills the perp.
I would argue that there’s not a huge difference among these scenarios. Other people are involved in all of them except 1) [only the perp] and 5) [the crocodiles]. But in those, the other people had no meaningful chance to avo
While only slightly OT, you make some very interesting points.
I thought “suicide by cop” involved pointing a weapon at officers and NOT firing. The mere act of raising the weapon forces the officers to defend themselves by firing.
In our area we’ve had a several “average Joe Homeowners” with no history of violence do this – walk out of their homes after some sort of disturbance to attract police and raise a handgun to the officers to draw their fire. Some were wounded by sharpshooters and survived, some were subdued with rubber bullets, and others were shot dead.
If you ever had a weapon directed at you in anger, you’ll never forget it. Can’t blame the cops for doing what they had to do to go home that day.
PZ