During a three-week stretch starting a few days after Thanksgiving, Aurora police were involved in four shootings.
It started Nov. 30 when a man attacked an Aurora officer with a meat cleaver before police shot him to death, and ended Dec. 21 when Aurora police shot and killed a man they say tried to ram them with a Jeep in front of a 7-Eleven just across the border in Denver.
During the same stretch Denver police — who, under a new state law, investigate officer-involved shootings alongside Aurora police — dealt with several officer-involved shootings of their own.
The spike left some, including members of Aurora City Council, wondering what was going on.
Still, despite that short but deadly spike in shootings, police say year-end statistics show the number of officer-involved shootings in 2015 was actually in line with recent history.
Deputy Chief Paul O’Keefe told council’s Public Safety Committee last week that there were eight officer involved shootings last year, the same figure as in 2011.
“We are exactly where we were,” he said.
Between 2011 and 2015, O’Keefe said there were a total of 28 officer-involved shootings, 19 of which were fatal.
O’Keefe said in most of the cases — 61 percent — the suspect was armed with a gun, 29 percent had other weapons, and 10 percent were unarmed.
Aurora’s first police shooting of 2015 happened just a few weeks into the year when three officers shot and killed Kavonda Payton. Prosecutors say Payton robbed a Fast and Friendly convenience store near East Sixth Avenue and Peoria Street before he and another man led police on a high-speed chase and crashed near Sixth and Tower Road.
Arapahoe County prosecutors, who cleared the officers of wrongdoing in September, say Payton pointed a gun at officers before they opened fire.
The city’s second officer-involved shooting of the year proved to be the most controversial.
On March 6, Officer Paul Jerothe — a decorated medic on the SWAT Team hailed for saving lives during the 2012 Aurora theater shooting — shot and killed Naeschylus Vinzant near East 12th Avenue and Laredo Street.
Vinzant was on parole and wanted on multiple charges when officers spotted him and he tried to run, according to a report from prosecutors. Jerothe told investigators he shot Vinzant once in the chest, killing him, because he believed Vinzant was reaching for a gun, the report said.
Vinzant was unarmed.
Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler, citing a conflict of interest in the case, asked the Jefferson County district attorney’s office to investigate.
In late December, a grand jury said Jerothe acted reasonably and should not be charged. Aurora police have since launched their own internal investigation into the case.
A Colorado Department of Corrections parole officer also shot and wounded a man in Aurora in June, but Aurora police spokesman Sgt. Chris Amsler said that case wasn’t included in O’Keefe’s count because it didn’t involve an Aurora officer.
The Nov. 30 incident, where police say Tuan Hoang, 25, attacked an officer with a meat cleaver after a traffic stop, is counted as two incidents, Amsler said. That’s because the incident involved two shooting scenes, Amsler said: One at Interstate 225 and East Alameda Avenue where, after the attack, the wounded officer fired at Hoang, and another near East Kentucky Avenue and Alameda where officers pursued Hoang after a chase and fatally shot him.
Nationally, there were close to 1,000 officer-involved shootings last year, according to a Washington Post investigation that tracked the cases closely. According to the paper, of the 965 officer-involved shootings through Dec. 24, 564 of the people shot were armed with a gun, 281 were armed with another weapon, and 90 were unarmed.
In Aurora, City Councilwoman Barb Cleland, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, said in early December — in the middle of Aurora’s three-week stretch that saw several shootings — that she was concerned about the apparent spike. She asked police to research the city’s numbers on officer-involved shootings.
During his presentation, O’Keefe said Aurora historically trails Denver in police shootings.
Last year, there were at least 13 police shootings in Denver, according to the Denver District Attorney’s Office website, though two of those involved Aurora police officers in December.
Councilman Bob Roth said the fact that Aurora is often home to fewer police shootings than Denver too often goes unnoticed.
“You certainly wouldn’t know that listening to the media,” Roth said.