By Estelle Atkinson
Las Vegas Review-Journal
LAS VEGAS — A man told officers “you’re not the real police” and then charged at them with a bat before a police officer shot and killed him outside a southeast Las Vegas Valley apartment complex on Friday, Metropolitan Police Department body camera footage released Tuesday showed.
Kyle Norris, 42, died of gunshot wounds to his chest, the Clark County coroner’s office said Tuesday.
Metro officers responded to The Allister apartment complex on the 5100 block of Rawhide Street around 9 a.m. Friday after receiving a report that a man was trying vehicle doors in the parking lot and threatening residents, police said.
According to Metro, police later learned that Norris did not live in the apartment complex and had been visiting an acquaintance.
Officers confronted the person, who Metro Capt. Kurt McKenzie said in a briefing Friday was “almost immediately” uncooperative, at the back of the complex.
Body camera footage shown by Metro in a press briefing Tuesday showed that Norris, wearing an Arizona State University T-shirt, told officers, “you’re not the real police.”
“We are the real police,” officers responded.
Officers told Norris he would have to either approach them or they would approach him, adding, “we are going to take you into custody regardless.” At the time, Norris was not holding the bat.
Norris would have faced charges, police said
In a briefing at Metro headquarters Tuesday, Assistant Sheriff Dori Koren said that Norris would have been charged with assault with a deadly weapon on a protected person and resisting with a dangerous weapon.
However, Koren said that while Norris had not yet grabbed the bat when he was told he was going to be taken into custody, officers had “given lawful commands at that time for him to cooperate and to surrender peacefully, so he would already be violating the law by refusing to obey those commands.”
After officers asked him several times to walk over to them from behind a beige SUV, Norris grabbed a blue, metal baseball bat from the car and began approaching officers.
As Norris approached officers holding the bat, body camera footage showed officers deploying an electric control device, a less lethal option used to shock a person, which police said was not effective.
“In some cases, it is ineffective where it doesn’t gain that full body lock,” Koren said. He added that in 2023, the device was effective about 70 percent of the time.
Sixth fatal police shooting in 2024
According to McKenzie, as the man continued to approach officers, they deployed their electronic control devices two more times and, at the same time, one officer fired two rounds at Norris.
After Norris fell to the ground, officers took him into custody and tried to render aid. He was pronounced dead on the scene, police said.
The officer who shot Norris was identified as 21-year-old Samuel Garcia, who has worked for the department since 2022.
Around 1 p.m. Friday, the man could be seen lying partially uncovered behind the apartment complex.
When asked whether it is standard to leave a person uncovered, Koren said that once he was pronounced dead, the area became a crime scene. “We have to be able to preserve as much of everything that we see,” he said.
This was the ninth shooting by a Metro officer this year, and the sixth fatal one. At the same time in 2023, Koren said there had been five shootings, two of which were fatal.
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