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Baltimore Police Give Conflicting Accounts After Killing Donnell Rochester

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On Feb. 19, Baltimore police offi­cers shot and killed 18-year-old Donnell Rochester. The teenag­er was flee­ing a traf­fic stop relat­ed to a search war­rant for his fail­ure to appear in court for a car­jack­ing charge. Officers pumped bul­lets into the car as Rochester drove away and then hand­cuffed him after he was mor­tal­ly wounded.

Maryland’s attor­ney general’s office iden­ti­fied two offi­cers involved in the shoot­ing as Connor Murray and Robert Mauri. Both are on admin­is­tra­tive leave pend­ing fur­ther investigation.

Body cam­era footage shows offi­cers run­ning at Rochester with their guns drawn while the teen is still in the vehi­cle. When the car slow­ly moves for­ward, offi­cers fire mul­ti­ple shots at it.

Rochester was unarmed. The police depart­ment released body cam­era footage in March that doesn’t show the car strik­ing any offi­cers as Rochester dri­ves away, though Murray, who was near the car, does fall down as he’s run­ning and fir­ing his weapon.

Murray him­self lat­er says in the footage that Rochester did not strike him with the car. “You OK?” an offi­cer asks him at the scene. Murray replies, “Yeah.”

The oth­er offi­cer asks Murray if he got hit.

“No, I don’t think it hit me,” Murray answers.

But that’s not what offi­cers wrote in a Feb. 22 request for a search and seizure war­rant for Rochester’s car, in which they cit­ed first-degree attempt­ed mur­der — claim­ing the teen struck a police offi­cer with his car — as a rea­son to search the vehicle.

Police on the scene of the shooting at Chilton and Hillen in Baltimore on Feb. 19, 2022.
Police on the scene of the shoot­ing at Chilton and Hillen in Baltimore on Feb. 19, 2022.

HuffPost obtained the war­rant this week. It states that Rochester “struck” Murray with his vehi­cle and that Murray fired “mul­ti­ple rounds” because Rochester failed to stop.

Officers’ shift­ing descrip­tions of what hap­pened dur­ing Rochester’s killing are like­ly to fuel com­mu­ni­ty anger and dis­trust. The teen’s fam­i­ly has been orga­niz­ing protests for months. Raquel Coombs, a spokesper­son for the attor­ney general’s office, which is inves­ti­gat­ing the shoot­ing, did not respond to HuffPost’s ques­tions, cit­ing the pend­ing investigation.

Baltimore police also did not com­ment to HuffPost on the search and seizure warrant.

Rochester’s fam­i­ly mem­bers have called for the offi­cers involved in the shoot­ing to be crim­i­nal­ly charged and have ques­tioned their tac­tics when they shot the teenag­er and pulled him out of the vehicle.

Attorneys rep­re­sent­ing Rochester’s fam­i­ly told HuffPost the dis­crep­an­cy between the body cam­era footage and sub­se­quent police accounts shows police are grasp­ing for an expla­na­tion for why they shot an unarmed teenager.

No weapon was ever recov­ered from the vehi­cle Rochester was dri­ving. Baltimore police only found bul­let frag­ments from the shoot­ing, pro­jec­tiles, and plas­tic tubes of “sus­pect­ed” mar­i­jua­na, the seizure war­rant says.

“It looks like the police were look­ing for any means to cov­er or mit­i­gate what had hap­pened,” Malcolm Ruff, one of the family’s attor­neys, told HuffPost. “He was a scared 18 year old kid who was try­ing to get away and get out of a bad sit­u­a­tion. He got scared, he tried to get away, he did not try to run that police offi­cer over.”