Crawford, 22, of Fairfield, was shot in the torso after police said he did not drop a realistic rifle when instructed to do so by Beavercreek police officers Sean Williams and Sgt. David Darkow.
As the chaotic scene unfolded, customer Angela Williams, 37, of Fairborn, also died in the incident while running from inside the store with her 9-year-old daughter. An autopsy will determine the cause of death for the woman who worked as a nurse in Springfield.
Crawford is the most recent person to be killed by police officers while brandishing an imitation firearm.
At least 18 other people nationwide have been killed by police and another 13 injured during the past 15 years in situations where police confronted suspects armed with realistic-looking weapons found later to be toys, BB or pellet guns — and even cigarette lighters — according to cases compiled by the International Health & Epidemiology Research Center and research by the newspaper. Thirteen of the cases involved juveniles; nine were fatal. In nearly every case, the police officers who killed the individuals were not criminally charged.
The numbers of police shootings involving replica firearms could be higher, but federal law enforcement agencies and local police departments do not maintain this specific information. U.S. Department of Justice spokeswoman Kara McCarthy said her office does not track incidents of police misidentification of replica guns.
But the number of incidents are still plentiful. Since 2009, there have been more than two dozen high-profiled tragic cases of police shootings involving replica guns.
Police officers, gun dealers and criminologists say not being able to determine whether a person is holding a real gun forces split-second decisions like the ones made Tuesday evening by the two Beavercreek police officers inside Walmart.
Virtually identical
Shawn Bertke, manager of Rich’s Pawn Shop in Dayton, has two guns in the store that look virtually indistinguishable — one costing $45 and another about $1,200. The inexpensive one is a Crosman BB gun; the other a more lethal and very real AR-15 rifle.
“They’ve always had a realistic look, but nowadays they want it to look like an assault weapon,” Bertke said. “They want it to look cool so they’ll sell more guns.”
Dr. Farideh Kioumehr, an epidemiologist and founder of the Sherman Oaks, Calif.-based International Health & Epidemiology Research Center, has studied the tragic outcomes of gun misidentification and violence for 20 years. She puts some of the blame on manufacturers.
“The manufacturers are making them look like the real ones and that’s big trouble,” she said. “Even when you see both of them together it’s very hard to realize which one is real, especially for police officers. In a split second they have to decide whether to be killed or kill.”
Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said the gun Crawford carried was an $84 Crosman MK-177 .177 caliber variable pump air rifle that shoots both BBs and pellets.
“When they put them side by side, they cannot tell you what is real or what is not,” Kioumehr said.
On Oct. 22, 2013, a 13-year-old boy Andy Lopez was walking down a Santa Rosa, Calif., street with a toy gun that looked like an AK-47 assault rifle.
Sonoma County sheriff’s deputies in a cruiser chirped their sirens and ordered Lopez to stop, demanding that he drop what they thought was a real rifle, according to media accounts and court records. When the boy turned toward them, Deputy Eric Gelhaus shot the boy seven times, believing their lives were in danger, records show. The boy died at the scene.
Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravitch said the shooting was a tragedy but not a crime, and that she would not press charges against Gelhaus.
Acted appropriately
Beavercreek police Chief Dennis Evers said Williams and Darkow likely acted appropriately when one of them shot Crawford. He has not disclosed which officer shot Crawford.
“The officers gave verbal commands to the subject to drop the weapon,” Evers said. “The subject … was shot after failing to comply with the officers’ commands. The quick response of officers was instrumental in containing this situation and minimizing the risk to customers.”
The Montgomery County Coroner’s Office on Friday said it listed Crawford manner of death as homicide, or death as caused by another person. They said it will take several weeks to complete a full autopsy.
Evers has asked Dewine’s office and the Bureau of Criminal Investigation to investigate if the officers properly used deadly force. Officers responded to Walmart because 911 caller Ronald Ritchie said he saw Crawford wave the weapon around people, including children, and it looked “like he was trying to load it.”
Part of state’s investigation will include reviewing Walmart’s in-store video footage from around the immediate area of the shooting. Investigators also have requested that Walmart provide footage from all of its roughly 120 cameras in the store.
In a case reminiscent of Crawford’s death, a loss prevention officer at a Walmart in Phoenix was monitoring store surveillance cameras when he saw a man steal a BB gun pistol on Jan. 5, 2013. When police arrived, they watch the store’s security tape with the Walmart employee, then police confronted the man, Chuckie Stowers, 39, as he attempted to leave the store.
The officers ordered Stowers to put his hands on his head, but he instead ran away while pulling what appeared to be a black pistol from his waistband, according to reports. Stowers pointed the gun at police who opened fire. Stowers died later in a hospital.
‘The behavior of the individual’
A 24-year-old research paper funded by Congress emphasizes the point with data. A 1990 white paper, “Toy Guns: Involvement in Crime and Encounters with Police,” published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, says police departments reported more than 8,100 assaults with toy or imitation guns between Jan. 1, 1985, and Sept. 1, 1989.
The paper said 186 police departments in that period “reported 1,128 incidents where an officer warned or threatened to use force and 252 cases where actual force had been used based on the belief that an imitation gun was real.”
One of the paper’s authors, David Carter, a criminal justice professor at Michigan State University, said there are no national data collection protocols for toy gun police-related shooting incidents.
But Carter does not think the problem is getting worse.
“Actually there seem to be fewer incidents,” Carter said in an email.
“The key factor in police encounters with people who have toy guns was the behavior of the individual,” he said. “Often times, the officer saw an object which appeared to be a gun, and the individual was acting like it was a real gun — their behavior appeared to be threatening.”
Evansville, Ind. police Sgt. Jason Cullum said the problem is not rare in his community. As recently as 10 days ago, his department responded to a 911 call reporting a 10-year-old boy pointing to a toy gun at other children, he said. A would-be robber tried to use a imitation gun to rob a gas station two weeks ago, he said.
Airsoft guns and BB guns can seem quite real, and that’s no accident, Cullum said. “They’re actually designing them to be replicas of real firearms,” he said.
Ohio is one of 27 states that do not have any air gun and BB-pellet gun laws or restrictions, according to DeWine and the website pelletgunzone.com. That website said some states including Michigan, Illinois, Rhode Island and New Jersey consider high-powered air rifles as firearms.
But in the nation’s most populous state, a bill regulating toy guns is working its way through the state’s legislature.
The California State Senate in January approved a bill that requires BB, pellet and Airsoft guns to be painted bright colors to help law enforcement distinguish them.
“Toy guns are deliberately made to look like real firearms which has led to fatal confusion for officers and tragic consequences for families,” State Sen. Kevin de Leon, the bill’s sponsor, said in a release. “Painting toy guns bright colors will make them harder to mistake for real firearms.”
‘No amount of training …’
Some toy guns and lookalike devices are required by a 1988 federal law to have a blaze orange marking on the muzzle. The law, however, exempts non-firing collector antiques, traditional BB guns, paint ball and pellet guns that expel projectiles through the force of compressed air or gas, or mechanical spring action. Historical replicas and training weapons won’t have the orange tips, either.
The imitation firearm in Tuesday’s Walmart incident, though, had no special markings.
Both Cullum and Bertke say an orange tip on a toy or imitation gun does little to solve the problem.
“We’ve had them painted over. We’ve had them removed,” Bertke said.
Cullum adds that muzzles can be broken off. They’re also not visible at night. The tips of true guns could be painted in an effort to pass them off as fake.
In the heat of the moment, officers can’t always make fine distinctions, he said.
On the Evansville department’s Facebook page, Cullum recently paired a photo of a real gun, a duty weapon Glock, with a photo of an imitation gun purchased at Walmart for $10.
The question to Facebook users was simple: Identify the real gun.
Not everyone could, Cullum said.
“People were looking at it on the computer screen and arguing about it, which one was real and which one was fake,” he said. “And they had the luxury of staring at it as long as they wanted before deciding.
“Officers don’t get that luxury,” he said.
“When they put them side by side, they cannot tell you what is real or what is not,” said Kioumehr, the epidemiologist with the International Health & Epidemiology Research Center.
“It would be nice if we would get lawmakers to find something to help,” Cullum said. “But as long as they’re being manufactured, the problem is still going to exist. And that’s why, even with the law, education and public involvement — teaching kids about the dangers —would still have to go on.”
The federal law does make it illegal to manufacture or sell any toy or lookalike firearm unless the device has affixed to it “a marking approved by the Secretary of Commerce.”
‘Police use their best judgment’
Joe Eaton, treasurer with the Buckeye Firearms Association, said orange-tipping is widespread, but so are replica and training weapons law enforcement and military personnel use. No law will “make a difference either way” when it comes to dealing with the variety of devices out there, he said.
He believes the key to preventing a fatal outcome is obeying police orders when encounters happen, no matter what kind of device one is carrying.
“The problem is the police use their best judgment in this,” Eaton said. “They tried to evidently talk this guy into putting down whatever it was that he had. For whatever reason, he chose to not to comply with the directives police were giving to him.”
“Police officers are going to err on the side of their safety and the safety of the public in any of these situations,” he added.
Part of the challenge is the difficulty some people have when dealing with police.
“The general public are ill-informed about how to respond to officers in terms of demeanor,” said Jimmy Taylor, an Ohio University-Zanesville sociology professor who studies American gun culture. “More important, they aren’t informed about how to interact with an officer if armed with imitation or real guns, in order to defuse a situation before an altercation develops.”
Trained for ‘perceived threat’
The attorney general’s office said there are no specific guidelines outlining how police should engage people with fake guns.
“We don’t have any training specifically on what’s real versus what’s not real,” said Jill Del Greco, a spokeswoman for DeWine. She noted officers can go through simulated training scenarios where they learn afterwards that a gun was fake.
“They’re trained to respond to the perceived threat,” Del Greco said.
Professor Taylor added that, “No amount of training will ensure that officers will always be able to tell the difference.” But “it is clear that some manufacturers are still making it unreasonably difficult to detect from a distance, in a split-second, in poor lighting, and-or any combination of these.”
Kioumehr sees the problem as more than a public health issue, but a “social epidemic disease.”
“Violence is just like any other thing (disease) — it’s contagious,” she said.
The “vaccine” for the disease is education and awareness, especially for children and young people, she said.
She said she doesn’t even like the term “toy gun.” Guns and toys are diametrically opposed, she argued.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 32,351 people are annually killed in the United States either by gun violence or mishaps.
“Guns are for killing and shooting and destroying,” Kioumehr said. “Toys are for playing.”
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