By Cindy Von Quednow
Ventura County Star
CAMARILLO, Calif. — A 23-year-old man was fatally shot Wednesday by a sheriff’s deputy on a busy Camarillo street after charging at the officer with a knife, authorities said.
The Camarillo man got into an altercation with the Ventura County sheriff’s deputy and was shot about 11:50 a.m. near the intersection of Carmen and Daily drives, authorities said.
He was taken to Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks and later pronounced dead.
At a news conference Wednesday at the scene, Sheriff Geoff Dean said the man took a cordless phone from the 7-Eleven store at the intersection, then called 911 to say a crime was going to happen and he wanted police to kill him.
The man crossed Carmen Drive, and then a single deputy pulled up in his patrol car, Dean said. The yelling man, with the phone in one hand and the knife in the other, told the deputy he wanted to be killed and asked to be shot, Dean said.
The deputy kept his distance and asked the man to put down the knife, but the man kept coming at him, Dean said. As the knife-wielding man got 2 or 3 feet away, the deputy feared for life and shot him multiple times, Dean said.
Authorities were still trying to notify the man’s family and had not released his name.
The deputy, who also was not named, suffered minor scrapes.
“The incident unfolded very quickly once the deputy arrived on scene,” said sheriff’s Sgt. Denise Sliva.
The Sheriff’s Office released a video of the incident taken by a bystander that supports its account of what happened. The Star is not publishing the video because of its graphic nature.
— Megan Diskin (@megandiskin)
A witness who declined to give her name said she was driving north on Carmen and stopped at Daily late Wednesday morning when she saw a patrol car facing her, also stopped at the red light. She saw a man standing directly in front of the patrol car holding something that looked like a skateboard above his head.
She described it as “a challenging stance.”
The light turned green, and she made a left turn into a nearby shopping plaza and stopped. By the time, she could see the street again, the deputy had made a U-turn and was out of his vehicle, she said. She saw him standing with his gun out and heard what she thought were three shots, she said.
The shooting occurred along . Carmen was closed from Daily to Paseo Camarillo for an extended period as deputies investigated the scene.
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