Texas officer on burglary call shoots unarmed black teen

Marjorie Owens | WFAA-TV, Dallas-Fort Worth

Show Caption Hide Caption Officer on burglary call fatally shoots unarmed teen Christian Taylor, a 19-year-old college football player, was shot and killed by a white officer-in-training, according to the Arlington Police Department. The officer was responding to a burglary call. Taylor was unarmed at the time of the shooting.

ARLINGTON, Texas — A white officer-in-training shot and killed an unarmed college football player who drove an SUV through the glass doors of a car dealership, police said.

The Arlington Police Department has no video of the incident because the department has not yet put in place a pilot program in which officers will wear body cameras, said a police spokesman, Sgt. Paul Rodriguez. It also was unclear whether the dealership's security cameras captured what happened.

Police responded at about 1 a.m. CT Friday to the Classic Buick GMC dealership on an Interstate 20 service road after reports of a sport-utility vehicle being driven through the front of the building, Rodriguez said. Authorities initially called the driver a burglary suspect.

"Officers established a perimeter and approached the suspect inside," he said. "As officers confronted the suspect, there was an altercation during which at least one officer discharged his weapon."

Christian Taylor, 19, of Arlington, Texas, died at the scene, according to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office. It was not immediately known whether Taylor was intoxicated.

Officer Brad Miller, 49, under supervised field training at the time of the shooting, fired his weapon, police said. He joined the department in September and graduated from its police academy in March.

"The preservation of life and safety is our highest priority," Rodriguez said. "The Arlington Police Department is saddened by this loss of life and will provide the community a clear and transparent investigation."

Taylor had graduated from high school in Arlington and was a sophomore at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, where he played on the football team as a defensive back. He was planning to return to school Sunday to continue football practice.

In a Twitter post, the university's football coach, Will Wagner, said, "Heart is hurting."

Within hours of Taylor's death, his name began trending on Twitter. In the past 24 hours, the hashtag #ChristianTaylor has been used more than 55,000 times, according to the social analytics site Topsy.

Taylor's great uncle, Clyde Fuller of Grand Prairie, Texas, described Taylor as a good kid and said he didn't believe that Taylor was trying to commit a crime.

"They say he's burglarizing the place by running up in there? Nuh-uh. Something doesn't sound right," Fuller told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Taylor had no convictions but was sentenced to six months of probation in December on a charge of possession of a controlled substance, according to the Star-Telegram. If he were not arrested again during his probationary period, he would not face jail time.

The charges stemmed from a September 2013 traffic stop where Taylor had 11 hydrocodone tablets that were not prescribed to him, the paper said. He successfully completed probation in June, and his case was dismissed July 14.

Late last month, about two weeks after his record was wiped clean, he tweeted: "I don't wanna die too younggggg."

Miller had no prior police experience before joining the Arlington department, Rodriguez said. He is on administrative leave during separate criminal and administrative investigations.

The FBI will participate in the investigation into the death of Taylor, a suburban Dallas police chief said Saturday.

During a news conference Saturday night, Arlington Police Chief Will Johnson said a special FBI agent in charge of the Dallas field office would take part in the probe. He stressed it "in no way diminishes my confidence" in local officers to conduct the investigation.

So far this month, 21 people have been killed by police officers across the USA, two others on Friday in California and Nevada, according to a database kept by The Guardian in London, which is tracking deaths caused by law-enforcement officers this year. Taylor is at least the 696th person killed so far in 2015, and the 171st black male.

Sunday marks the first anniversary of the death of another unarmed black teen, Michael Brown, who was 18 when he was killed Aug. 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo., by then-officer Darren Wilson. Hundreds of protesters descended on the St. Louis suburb after Brown's death, and that town faced weeks of unrest.

Contributing: The Associated Press