How to make a cop shoot you...

A police officer friend of mine killed a 20-year-old kid yesterday morning.
Maybe.
T was one of two Special Response Team (i.e. SWAT) guys who fired when the kid pointed his weapon at other officers. Only one bullet hit the kid and I’m betting it was T’s. He’s thoroughly professional, has a firing range behind his house and trains almost constantly.
It all started about 4:30 yesterday morning when an officer noticed this kid speeding in a nearby county seat town. Over the next hour, he led police from several departments on a three-county chase, running over several stop-sticks that punctured three of his tires. He was running on three rims by the time he abandoned his car along an interstate about 14 miles west of where we live and struck out on foot.
Officers said he was waving a pistol and a knife as he ran through corn stubble and harvested soybean fields in the darkness.
They followed him about a mile and a half, crossing a state highway and moving north on a county road. As he walked along the county road, a sheriff’s deputy followed at a discrete distance, illuminating him with the patrol car’s headlights while a police negotiator tried to persuade him to drop his weapons.
The kid was jabbering incoherently and cutting his arm with his knife.
All the while, T and another SRT member were following along with their M-16s – T flanking him in an open field and the other officer walking up the road.
In an apparent moment of clarity, the kid told the officer, “Tell my mother I love her.”
Then he raised the pistol and brought it to bear on the negotiator.
True to their training, T and the other SRT officer, raised their assault rifles and fired to protect their brother officer.
One shot went wide, but the other caught the kid in the chest. He was pronounced dead minutes later at a nearby hospital.
The autopsy and toxicology reports are still pending, but the kid had needle tracks on his arms and his behavior was consistent with that of a meth head.
The kicker is that his pistol turned out to be a pellet gun.
My wife and I took a plate of cookies over to T’s house last night and it was clear that he was taking it kind of hard.
“I arrested that kid a week ago, but I didn’t even recognize him this morning,” he said.
Turns out the kid had been admiring a friend’s stereo just hours before it was stolen and it turned up in the kid’s garage, so he had a burglary charge pending when he committed “suicide by police” yesterday morning.
It wasn’t until two hours after the shooting that T learned the kid was waving a pellet gun.
“It looked like a long-barreled .357 to me,” he said.
We won’t know who fired the fatal bullet until ballistics tests are done.
Either way, T is going to be unhappy. He doesn’t especially want to have the distinction of being the first officer on his department to kill a perp in more than a quarter century. But, on the other hand, he doesn’t want to be known as the guy who missed.