Denver officer fatally shot man thought to be holding knife – but it was a marker pen

A Denver police officer fatally shot a man who was holding a marker pen, which the officer mistakenly believed was a knife, officials said on Monday.

Newly released body-camera footage of the killing of Brandon Cole, 36, on 5 August shows an officer firing two shots at the man who was on the sidewalk. A young child and a woman were standing close behind the man as the officer fired at him and he fell to the ground.

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Officials said a neighbor had called 911 to report potential domestic violence involving Cole, his wife and his teenage son, the Denver Post reported. Matt Clark, a police commander, said the neighbor reported that the woman may have been pushed out of her wheelchair and that Cole was “going after” his son.

The brief footage released on Monday shows that when officers arrived, the wife was sitting by a wheelchair and told the officer: “Don’t, don’t pull your gun out on my husband, please.” The female officer responded: “Okay” and asked if the woman needed EMS. At that point, Cole got out of a vehicle and both officers pointed weapons at him. He appeared to be acting erratically and said: “Let’s go” and “fuck that”.

As someone shouted: “Do not shoot him!” one male officer Tased him. Cole ran away from that officer toward the female officer, at which point she shot him with her firearm, about 40 seconds after she had arrived to the scene. The woman and young child directly behind him in the video were not injured and were not involved in the initial call to police, officials said.

The Denver police chief, Ron Thomas, called the shooting a “tremendous tragedy” at a press conference, but defended the officer’s decision to fire two fatal shots in close range near two bystanders: “You can see in the video that when she finally deploys her duty weapon, the person is so close to her that the view of the young child and other person are not even clear to her. Certainly that was a consideration, but there was not much time to act before she was overrun by that individual.”

The district attorney will review the legality of the shooting, Thomas said.

Investigators said it appeared only one probe from the stun gun hit Cole, and that it did not stop him from heading toward the female officer. The video shows the black marker pen falling on the ground as he collapsed. Cole was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Clark claimed that Cole had taken an “aggressive stance” in front of the officers, and that the female officer reported that he was holding the marker pen, which she believed at the time was a knife, in a “threatening manner”.

“She feared she would be stabbed and potentially overtaken by the subject,” he said, adding that the “de-escalation” tactics included “calling him by name”.

Police declined to release the name of the officer who killed Cole, but said she had been with the department since 2019 and had not previously been involved in any other shootings.

Denver police have faced scrutiny over its use of lethal force in recent years. In July 2022, three officers shot at an armed man in downtown, injuring six bystanders in the process. One officer was indicted over the incident in January, the indictment alleging that his decision to shoot was “reckless, unreasonable and unnecessary for the purpose of protecting himself or other officers”.

Officers across the US have fatally shot civilians after claiming they thought objects in their hands were guns, including cases where the individuals were holding a sandwich, a wallet, a hairbrush and a phone.

The Associated Press contributed reporting