Nation/World

Pennsylvania officer who killed Antwon Rose charged with criminal homicide

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Michael Rosfeld, the East Pittsburgh police officer who shot and killed unarmed teenager Antwon Rose Jr. last week, has been charged with criminal homicide, court records show.

Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. said he plans to release more information at a news conference Wednesday morning.

Rose's death - the latest instance of police killing an unarmed black male - sparked several days of protests around Pittsburgh and sustained calls for the officer to be fired and charged.

The fatal encounter occurred June 19 while police investigated a drive-by shooting in the nearby borough of North Braddock; a silver Chevrolet Cruze that Rose and two suspects were in matched a witness description of the vehicle involved in that shooting, authorities said.

An officer stopped their car at 8:40 p.m., and Rose and another male fled. An East Pittsburgh Police Department officer fired three rounds as the two males were running away, striking Rose "several" times, authorities said initially. Two days later, the Allegheny County Police Department identified Rosfeld as the officer who had killed Rose, and said he was being placed on leave while the department investigated the shooting.

A graphic video of the incident showed Rose tumbling to the ground feet away from the car. He was pronounced dead at a hospital soon after being shot.

In the video, apparently recorded by a neighbor from a second-story vantage point, a woman could be heard gasping as gunshots ring out below.

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"Why are they shooting at him?!" she exclaimed. "Why are they shooting? All they did was run and they're shooting at them!"

Two firearms were recovered from the vehicle, police said, but Rose was unarmed when he was shot.

Nationwide, police have shot and killed at least 491 people so far in 2018, according to a Washington Post database tracking such shootings. Of them, at least 90 of the people fatally shot - 18 percent - have been black.

Black people have been the victims in 23 percent of fatal police shootings since January 2015, when The Post began tracking these shootings, and account for 36 percent of the unarmed people who have been shot and killed during that time.

Rose is the only person who has been shot and killed by an East Pittsburgh Police Department officer since 2015, when The Post began collecting data on officer-involved shootings.

As The Washington Post has previously reported, "officers are rarely charged for on-duty shootings, and convictions in such cases are even rarer." Since 2005, fewer than 100 state and local police officers have been charged with a crime in connection with a fatal on-duty shooting, according to a tally kept by Bowling Green State University professor Phil Stinson.

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