SALISBURY, Md. — Three Salisbury Police officers have been cleared of criminal wrongdoing related to the shooting death of an armed man last November.
The incident happened in the driveway of a home on Jefferson Street.
That's where police spotted 40-year-old David Evans, who was wanted for alleged homicide earlier in the day.
Body-worn camera footage shows officers repeatedly screaming at Evans to surrender, but he refuses to come forward to be handcuffed.
Police learned that Evans had a gun on the hood of a car he was standing next to.
Evans falsely claimed the gun was unloaded, but eventually picked-up the weapon prompting officers to kill him.
An autopsy revealed Evans sustained ten gunshot wounds. A loaded gun was recovered next to his body.
According to a newly released investigative report from the Maryland Attorney General's Office, Evans shot two people including a woman he'd previously been linked to romantically. The woman later died.
The Attorney General's report concludes the officers actions were justified, labeling Evans as "the aggressor."
Here is how the report sums it all up:
"Mr. Evans possessed a handgun within close reaching distance and started lifting that handgun up towards the subject officers. Further, during the subject officers’ encounter with Mr. Evans, he refused to comply with their repeated commands to move away from the handgun and to not touch the handgun. Mr. Evans ignored the subject officers’ repeated attempts to de-escalate the situation. Given these circumstances, and the fact that the subject officers knew Mr. Evans was the suspect in a shooting death that had occurred just hours earlier, we cannot prove that it was unreasonable for the subject officers to believe that their own lives, and the lives of their fellow officers, were in immediate danger when Mr. Evans grabbed his handgun."
To read the full report, click here.
