A teenage girl grabbed a gun from a Los Angeles sheriff’s officer and fatally injured herself during a melee with officers trying to recover the weapon, law enforcement said Monday .
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The tragedy took place Sunday evening in City of Industry, a large suburb of Los Angeles, in a sheriff’s station after the young Latin American girl knocked on the door, according to a press release from the sheriff.
When the officers opened the door, “the teenage girl ran into the lobby, grabbed the officer’s firearm and took it,” the document explains.
“A struggle ensued between the deputies and the young girl who was armed with the officer’s firearm,” the statement added. “During the struggle, the teenager suffered a gunshot wound.”
Dispatched to the scene, firefighters pronounced him dead.
An investigation has been opened. According to initial information, the incident is linked to a call made a little earlier to sheriff’s agents, about a “family disturbance”.
The sheriff’s department insisted that the tragedy “was not an officer-involved shooting.”
Interventions by law enforcement that take a fatal turn are quite common in the United States. According to an independent tally by the Washington Post, more than 1,100 people have been shot and killed by police in 2023.
These numbers are unofficial and police departments are not required to report incidents to the federal government.
The event adds to the long list of tragedies involving firearms in the United States, which pay a very heavy price for their spread across the country and the ease with which Americans have access to them.
The country has more individual weapons than inhabitants: one adult in three owns at least one weapon and nearly one adult in two lives in a home where there is a weapon.
Around 49,000 people died from gunshots in 2021, more than half of them suicides, compared to 45,000 in 2020, figures without comparison with those of other developed countries.
