BATON ROUGE, La. — A crowd of angry neighbors gathered overnight after the fatal shooting of a man by a police officer at an apartment complex in Baton Rouge, a city that was wracked by unrest after another police shooting last year.
The officer suffered minor injuries Monday night, Louisiana State Police spokesman Trooper Bryan Lee said. The man who was fatally shot was identified by the state police as 24-year-old Calvin Toney.
Toney died of a single gunshot wound to the chest, according to the East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner’s Office, which released preliminary results of an autopsy performed Tuesday.
Dozens of people, many shouting angrily at officers, gathered at the scene late Monday.
East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore III said a stun gun was deployed at least once during the struggle before the shooting, but he couldn’t specify how many times it was used or who fired it. He emphasized that the man was not handcuffed at the time.
State police were called in to investigate the shooting and talked to witnesses, Lee said. He said investigators were reviewing footage from the officer’s body camera. He didn’t know whether the slain man was involved in the Department of Children and Family Service worker’s case.
Baton Rouge Mayor Sharon Weston Broome expressed confidence that body camera video will “add value to the truth and transparency in this process.”
“My message is ‘Let’s wait for the facts to come out,'” she said.
Police tape covered the entrance to the complex in northern Baton Rouge, and about 100 people gathered on other side, some yelling “Black lives matter,” and “No justice, no peace.”
The protesters had dispersed by Tuesday morning, and a maintenance worker at the apartment complex asked an Associated Press reporter to leave the site, saying tensions were high after the shooting.
Officials have not yet identified or released any details about the officer.
Calvin Coleman, who identified himself as the father of the man who was shot, said his son was black. Coleman said he had been standing behind the police tape for some time waiting for answers.
“It hurts,” Coleman said. “It tears you apart knowing that he’s right there and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
In July 2016, a white Baton Rouge police officer shot and killed a 37-year-old black man, Alton Sterling, outside a convenience store where he was selling homemade CDs. Two cellphone videos of the shooting quickly spread on social media, sparking nightly protests in Louisiana’s capital city. Nearly 200 protesters were arrested in the days after that shooting.
Democratic state Rep. C. Denise Marcelle was among those officials who spoke out after Sterling’s shooting. She said Monday night she was trying to calm people down at the scene of the latest shooting.
“The emotions are extremely high,” Marcelle said. “A lot of people are kind of blowing it up.”
“I just wish that he did not have to kill him. I just wish there was some way it could have been avoided,” she said.
