He said deputies spent several minutes attempting to talk Wright into dropping a .40-caliber Ruger outside the Speedway at 5000 N. Main St. in Harrison Twp. After ignoring multiple commands to drop the weapon, a Huber Heights officer shot the suspect with three rounds of beanbags, and Wright reacted in a way causing a deadly threat to officers, Plummer said.
“After they hit him with the beanbag rounds he then raised his handgun up at the officers. At that time, one of the deputies shot him with a shotgun,” the sheriff said.
Plummer identified Deputy Joshua Haas as the officer who fired the shotgun that struck Wright in the stomach/pelvis region, rather than higher on his torso. “It was a little lower, that’s why he’s still alive,” he said.
Plummer said Haas is a 10-year veteran, a K-9 handler and a “respected, top deputy.”
Haas is now on paid administrative leave, which is departmental procedure following an officer-involved shooting.
Investigators are still trying to determine why Wright, who has no criminal record, confronted law enforcement outside the busy convenience store at North Main and Shoup Mill Road. Plummer said Wright’s only police contact was with Moraine police, in which he could have been a witness, a person of interest, or a suspect in an unknown incident.
The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office is handling both the internal and criminal investigations, Plummer said.
Witness captures encounter
While outside the Speedway, Wright had moved from the trash can near the entrance to the southwest corner of building but didn’t threaten officers at first, keeping the gun pointed down at a “low ready” position allowing the initial dialogue, Plummer said.
The newspaper was provided cell phone video taken by George Furman, a Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority bus driver. His video shows at least two and half minutes of police ordering Wright to drop a weapon held in his right hand along side his thigh.
Multiple officers can be heard repeatedly yelling, “Put the gun down! Down! Drop the gun!”
“They tell him a million times to put it down and he won’t cooperate,” said Furman who had planned to stop his bus at the Speedway to get coffee. “They gave him a lot of leniency. They keep telling him to put it down but he won’t listen to nobody.”
Police eventually ordered Furman to move the bus, and he said he did not witness the shooting.
Plummer said Wright did not become a direct threat to police, until he raised the gun after getting struck with the non-lethal beanbags.
“The individual was given ample opportunity to drop the weapon,” he said. “There was at least a 4-minute dialog between the officers and the suspect to drop the weapon. They tried an alternative, less lethal bean bag round to get him to drop the weapon. The guy escalated the situation where we had to use lethal force.”
Wright remained hospitalized Saturday night, but his family declined to release his condition, according to a Miami Valley Hospital spokeswoman.
Sought confrontation
Prior to the confrontation, deputies responded to a 911 call of shots fired at the Meadows of Catalpa Apartments, less than a mile east of the convenience store off Turner Road. There they found shell casings and broken bottles which appeared shot, according to Plummer, but no other signs of property damage or a victim.
Upon pulling into the Speedway to refuel around 6:30 a.m., deputies encountered Wright sitting on a trash can with a handgun. The deputies called in a “Code 99” distress call summoning other units from Dayton, Huber Heights and Vandalia.
Plummer said Wright reportedly told a clerk to go inside the store, because something was about to happen.
“In his mind he was prepared for a confrontation with the police,” Plummer said. “You never know what’s going through a person’s mind.”
At midafternoon Saturday, a half dozen sheriff’s investigators were searching Wright’s apartment they had connected with the morning incident. Deputies removed a computer and other electronics equipment from the lower-level apartment in the 4100 block of Idle Hour Circle, where Wright lived.
The sheriff’s department has not experienced an deputy-involved shooting involved fatality or proven incident of injury by gunfire to a suspect since June 2005 when Rennie “Robby” Moore was killed after allegedly trying to run over a deputy with a minivan at the Economy Inn and Lounge in Harrison Twp.
A Dayton Daily News database of area police-involved shootings shows at least seven people have been shot by area officers this year, including John Crawford III, who died on Aug. 5 after being shot in the Beavercreek Walmart store. The two most recent shootings — both fatal — took place in a span of four days in November.
On Nov. 16, John R. Smelko was killed by a Dayton officer after responding to a disconnected 911 call. The officer arrived and saw a gun pointing out through a crack in the door and fired.
Andrew Brady Davidson of Arcanum was fatally shot Nov. 13 by Butler Twp. police Sgt. Todd Stanley after Davidson allegedly ran toward the sergeant with a knife.
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