By Ryan Boetel
Albuquerque Journal, N.M.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The shooting unfolds rapidly. Seconds after police officers found him hiding in a closet, Daniel Saavedra-Arreola is fatally wounded.
Albuquerque police on Tuesday showed reporters video of the Jan. 7 incident and on Wednesday the department released it through Evidence.com, a cloud-based video sharing platform. The Journal has made one of the videos, recorded from a police officer’s lapel camera, available on its website.
The video is graphic.
Officers Amy O’Dell, Elisa Valdez, Emmett Fritz and Bryce Willsey all fired their weapons during the encounter.
The Journal has posted a clip that’s about 10 minutes long at abqjournal.com. In it, officers can be heard yelling into a vacant apartment on East Central, asking for a suspect to exit. Police had been called there on a report that a suspect had broken into one of the units. In reality, police said police officers called on the suspect to exit the apartment for over an hour before they forced their way through a locked door and started searching.
The video shows officers checking closets, a kitchen, the bathroom and one of the bedrooms before they go into the final room of the house, where Saavedra-Arreola is waiting.
As soon as one of the officers opens the closet door, Saavedra-Arreola lunges and starts wildly swinging a metal pipe and a folding knife. One of the officers narrowly avoids being struck, according to the video.
Police first shot him with a Taser, which doesn’t have any apparent effect.
The four officers then fire their weapons a total of 17 times. Saavedra-Arreola dies as a result of his injuries.
Albuquerque interim Police Chief Michael Geier said this week that he plans to follow a similar protocol after future police shootings. Once police have finished their preliminary investigation by interviewing all officers and eyewitnesses, he’ll brief the media on the shooting and provide them with access to the shooting videos.
Shaun Willoughby, the president of the Albuquerque police union, said that while the union thinks videos shouldn’t be released until after the district attorney decides whether or not to press charges, he said it’s a step in the right direction that Geier has created a policy for when the videos should be released. The prior administration didn’t have a clear policy on when it would release videos.
This was the first shooting that happened since Geier took over the department on Dec. 1.
©2018 the Albuquerque Journal (Albuquerque, N.M.)