Police kill man who threw rocks at officers

Taylor Viydo | KREM-TV, Spokane, Wash.

Show Caption Hide Caption Man fatally shot after throwing rocks at police A Washington man was gunned down by police after throwing rocks at them. His family questions why deadly force was necessary.



PASCO, Wash. — In the fourth fatal police shooting here in six months, a man was killed as he ran a half block from police with his arms outstretched and then turned around.

Police say orchard worker Antonio Zambrano-Montes, 35, hit two officers with rocks when they shot him Tuesday evening at a busy intersection here.

His family said he was holding a rock.

The death has sparked protests in this city of 68,000 residents in southeastern Washington, brought condemnation from Mexico's Foreign Relations Department and caused Washington Gov. Jay Inslee to say he is monitoring the situation. Another protest is planned for noon PT Saturday.

"We don't want another Ferguson here in Pasco," said Franklin County Coroner Dan Blasdel, referring to unrest that followed the Aug. 9 killing of an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Mo., and a grand jury's decision not to indict the white officer who shot him.

His office is doing an autopsy Friday on Zambrano-Montes, and he is considering convening an inquest to look into the death.

"It shows that it's open and transparent," Blasdel told the Tri-City Herald in Kennewick, Wash. "It shows that it's not the good ol' boys investigating their own."

More than half of the residents in this city about 200 miles southeast of Seattle and 125 miles southwest of Spokane are Hispanic. The racial and ethnic makeup of the city's police department wasn't immediately available.

Three officers have been placed on leave during the police department's investigation, said Capt. Ken Roske, Pasco police spokesman. Several demonstrators have shown up at City Hall in support of the department.

The family wants officers Ryan Flanagan, Adam Wright and Adrian Alaniz held criminally responsible for the shooting. Flanagan was accused in 2009 of excessive force and racial profiling in a lawsuit that the city settled with a Hispanic woman for $100,000.

In investigations of the three previous shootings in which the victims were armed, city police officers and a sheriff's deputy on a regional SWAT team were cleared and returned to work.

"We want justice. We want them to pay for what they did," said Pedro Zambrano, the victim's cousin.

Family members said Zambrano-Montes battled depression after being separated from his two teen daughters.

Zambrano-Montes was arrested early last year for assault after throwing objects at officers and trying to grab an officer's pistol, court records show. Police this week say Zambrano-Montes refused to comply with orders to drop what he was holding and withstood a shock from a stun gun.

He was raised in Michoacan, Mexico, and lived for about a decade in Pasco.

In a statement, Mexico's Foreign Relations Department called the shooting one of the "events in which unwarranted use has been made of lethal force."

The family is heartbroken, said Zambrano-Montes' aunt, Angela Zambrano, but doesn't think the shooting was racially or ethnically motivated. The family met for two hours with the city's police chief, Bob Metzger.

"She is not angry. She's just sad," her translator said. "She just asks that there's peace and justice in this town."

Contributing: The Associated Press