The Allegheny County Police Department, which is investigating the encounter, said that two firearms were found on the floor of the car. When asked if the teenager was found with a weapon on his person, Coleman McDonough, the department’s superintendent, said he was not. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Wednesday quoted Mayor Louis Payne of East Pittsburgh as saying that the officer who shot Antwon was hired in mid-May and had been formally sworn in hours before the shooting. In a statement on Wednesday night, S. Lee Merritt, a lawyer representing Antwon’s family, said: “We know very little about the circumstances surrounding his death at this early stage. We must emphasize that rumors of him being involved in a separate shooting are unsubstantiated. We know that he was not armed at the time he was shot down, that he posed no immediate threat to anyone, and that, significantly, the driver of the vehicle he occupied was released from police custody.” On Wednesday evening, dozens of people gathered outside the East Pittsburgh Police Department to protest the black teenager’s death. “No justice, no peace!” they chanted. Some carried signs that said, “Justice4Antwon” and “#BlackLivesMatter.” Those who knew Antwon described him as bright, lively and funny. He was a senior at Woodland Hills High School who was expected to graduate at the end of the year, the superintendent, Al Johnson, said in an interview on Wednesday.<doc-sep>The shooting of an unarmed teenager by a Pennsylvania police officer is the latest in an ongoing, high-emotion spate of police-involved shootings that have plagued U.S. cities and created rifts between cops and the communities they serve. Antwon Rose, 17, was shot three times Tuesday night and killed after he and another passenger fled from a car stopped by police in East Pittsburgh. Police say the car was possibly used in a non-fatal shooting 15 minutes earlier. Officers found two semi-automatic handguns on the floor of the car. Allegheny County Police Superintendent Coleman McDonough said he was confident the car pulled over by East Pittsburgh police was involved in the incident, noting that a back window had been shot out. But a cellphone video capturing the incident has contributed to local outrage because it shows an officer firing at Rose as he tried to sprint away from officers. The video, watched by USA TODAY, shows a person fleeing from a vehicle stopped by a group of police. Three shots ring out as another figure also runs away from cops. Both figures were hidden from view behind a home at the conclusion of the video. "Why are they shooting at him? ... All they did was run," a voice off camera says. Debra Jones told the Associated Press her voice is the one caught on the video. When the two passengers took off, “That officer didn’t try to chase them or taze them. He just shot that boy for running,” she said. “I looked out my kitchen window and they were putting him in handcuffs. He wasn’t moving. I think that boy died right there on the side of my house.” While authorities asked for time to complete an investigation, about 60 people gathered Wednesday in East Pittsburgh to protest, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. The officer involved in the shooting has not been named by authorities, but had been hired in mid-May and sworn in just hours before the shooting, East Pittsburgh Mayor Louis Payne said, the newspaper reported. Officers "seem to have disregarded the basic humanity of this boy when they chose to use lethal force," Reggie Shuford, the executive director of the American Civli Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, told the Post-Gazette. "While we await more details of what happened, it appears through the cell phone video that the victim was running away from the police. Our heart breaks for the family of the victim, and we express our deepest condolences to them," Shuford said. The driver of the vehicle, a 20-year-old man, was taken into custody and released after McDonough said officers did not feel they had cause to charge him in the earlier shooting. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Rose had been volunteering at the Free Store 15104 in Braddock each summer since 2015, according to founder Gisele Fetterman, the wife of Braddock Mayor John Fetterman. "He was just a really lovely, gentle kid," Gisele Fetterman told the newspaper at a World Refugee Day event in Market Square on Wednesday. "His mom is amazing. All the kids loved him. Just a fine person. Bubbly. Funny. Goofy. Just really special." Deadly police shootings across the U.S. of unarmed citizens have sparked some of the most volatile national protests in recent years, with many departments adopting stricter use-of-force policies and increased use of body cameras on officers. Many of the cases involve African-American suspects being chased by police. A recent USA TODAY investigation showed that in hundreds of fatal shootings since 1999, black suspects were killed at a disproportionate rate in pursuits every year. Deadly pursuits of black drivers were twice as likely to start over minor offenses or non-violent crimes, USA TODAY found. Black people were more likely than whites to be chased in more crowded urban areas, during peak traffic hours and with passengers in their cars, all factors that can increase the danger to innocent bystanders. Chases of black motorists were about 70 percent more likely to wind up killing a bystander. The Pittsburgh case comes amid remarkable national tumult over police tactics that increasingly are seen as targeting minorities. Deadly encounters over the past four years between officers and black men sparked unrest from Ferguson, Mo., to Baltimore and Charlotte, and raised difficult questions about why black people are stopped, searched, arrested and shot by the police at higher rates than others. One of the cases of a fleeing suspect shot by police that sparked the most national outrage happened in South Carolina in 2015, when Walter Scott, 50, bolted from his car after being pulled over during a routine traffic stop. North Charleston police officer Michael Slager was captured on a cell phone video, fatally shooting Scott in the back as he ran away. The shooting erupted after Slager pulled Scott's car over for a broken brake light. Scott initially ran from the officer, who tried to use a Taser on him before the pair struggled on the ground. As Scott fled a second time, Slager fired at him eight times. The case sparked national attention amid a series of shooting incidents across the country involving white police officers and unarmed black men. Slager eventually pleaded guilty to a federal civil rights charge and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. At the protest Wednesday in East Pittsburgh, the crowd chanted their anger and frustration. A leader with a bullhorn led the group in a call and response: "What do we want? Justice. When do we want it? Now. If we don't get it, shut it down. If we don't get it, shut it down." Contributing: Associated Press<doc-sep>East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, police officer Michael Rosfeld was charged on Wednesday with criminal homicide for the shooting of Antwon Rose, an unarmed, fleeing 17-year-old. According to the Allegheny County Police Department, police initially responded to reports of a shooting around 8:20 pm on June 19, finding a 22-year-old man who had been shot but was taken to the hospital and survived. Police put out a call for a vehicle that was seen fleeing the scene, and officers stopped a car that they said matched the description. While they were detaining the driver of the car, two people jumped out. Rosfeld fired, killing Rose, a student at Woodland Hills School District. Rose was unarmed, although he had an empty handgun clip in his pants pocket when he was shot, and officers found two guns in the vehicle he fled from, according to the New York Times. But Rosfeld admitted to investigators that he never saw a gun before he opened fire — which is, legally, significant to whether the shooting was justified. The 20-year-old driver of the vehicle was released after he was questioned by police. The other teen who fled from the vehicle was arrested this week. A bystander captured a video of the police shooting and posted it on Facebook. It shows two people running away from police cars, with their backs to the officers, as police open fire. “Why are they shooting?” the person who recorded the video said. “All they did was run, and they’re shooting at them.” Rosfeld was put on leave shortly after the shooting. He was hired in May but reportedly sworn in the police department the same day of the shooting, although he had eight years of experience in other police departments. According to the Post-Gazette, “Pennsylvania law allows police officers to use deadly force to prevent someone from escaping arrest if that person has committed a forcible felony, possesses a deadly weapon or if the person has indicated he or she will endanger human life or inflict bodily injury if not arrested.” The shooting led to large local protests. And it’s received national attention as police use of force, particularly against black Americans, continues drawing heightened scrutiny — due to vast racial disparities in police use of force. Black people are much more likely to be killed by police than their white peers Based on nationwide data collected by the Guardian, black Americans are more than twice as likely as their white counterparts to be killed by police when accounting for population. In 2016, police killed black Americans at a rate of 6.66 per 1 million people, compared to 2.9 per 1 million for white Americans. There have also been several high-profile police killings since 2014 involving black suspects. In Baltimore, Freddie Gray died while in police custody — leading to protests and riots. In North Charleston, South Carolina, Michael Slager shot Walter Scott, who was fleeing and unarmed at the time. In Ferguson, Darren Wilson killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown. In New York City, NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner by putting the unarmed 43-year-old black man in a chokehold. One possible explanation for the racial disparities: Police tend to patrol high-crime neighborhoods, which are disproportionately black. That means they’re going to be generally more likely to initiate a policing action, from traffic stops to more serious arrests, against a black person who lives in these areas. And all of these policing actions carry a chance, however small, to escalate into a violent confrontation. That’s not to say that higher crime rates in black communities explain the entire racial disparity in police shootings. A 2015 study by researcher Cody Ross found, “There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.” That suggests something else — such as, potentially, racial bias — is going on. One reason to believe racial bias is a factor: Studies show that officers are quicker to shoot black suspects in video game simulations. Josh Correll, a University of Colorado Boulder psychology professor who conducted the research, said it’s possible the bias could lead to even more skewed outcomes in the field. “In the very situation in which [officers] most need their training,” he previously told me, “we have some reason to believe that their training will be most likely to fail them.” Part of the solution to potential bias is better training that helps cops acknowledge and deal with their potential prejudices. But critics also argue that more accountability could help deter future brutality or excessive use of force, since it would make it clear that there are consequences to the misuse and abuse of police powers. Yet right now, lax legal standards make it difficult to legally punish individual police officers for use of force, even when it might be excessive. Police only have to reasonably perceive a threat to justify shooting Legally, what most matters in police shootings is whether police officers reasonably believed that their lives were in immediate danger, not whether the shooting victim actually posed a threat. In the 1980s, a pair of Supreme Court decisions — Tennessee v. Garner and Graham v. Connor — set up a framework for determining when deadly force by cops is reasonable. Constitutionally, “police officers are allowed to shoot under two circumstances,” David Klinger, a University of Missouri St. Louis professor who studies use of force, previously told Dara Lind for Vox. The first circumstance is “to protect their life or the life of another innocent party” — what departments call the “defense-of-life” standard. The second circumstance is to prevent a suspect from escaping, but only if the officer has probable cause to think the suspect poses a dangerous threat to others. The logic behind the second circumstance, Klinger said, comes from a Supreme Court decision called Tennessee v. Garner. That case involved a pair of police officers who shot a 15-year-old boy as he fled from a burglary.<doc-sep>Follow KDKA-TV: Facebook | Twitter EAST PITTSBURGH (KDKA) – An investigation is underway after 17-year-old Antwon Rose was shot in the back by an East Pittsburgh police officer while Rose was running from a traffic stop. KDKA-TV has now learned that the officer who is accused of shooting Rose, was only sworn into duty a few hours before the fatal shooting. When a police officer shoots someone, even if they’ve been involved in a crime in a neighboring community as has been alleged here, Allegheny County homicide detectives step in. “In accordance with police best practices in the aftermath of officer-involved shootings, Allegheny County Police Department homicide detectives were requested to assume the role of independent investigatory agency,” said Superintendent Coleman McDonough on Wednesday. But it’s up to Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala to determine whether Rose’s shooting was justified or not. “That officer has the same rights as any other citizen,” said McDonough. RAW VIDEO: Police Offer New Details During Press Conference: RELATED STORIES: Sources tell KDKA political editor Jon Delano that the East Pittsburgh officer, in his 20s, has been on duty in East Pittsburgh for just three weeks and was sworn in about 90 minutes before the actual shooting. Although, he’s been an officer in the region since 2011. He has worked in Harmarville, Oakmont, and for the University of Pittsburgh Police Department. “What the community is reacting to right now is a horrible video showing a young man who absconded from a traffic stop and was shot in the back by a police officer,” noted Beth Pittinger. Pittinger, who is with the Pittsburgh Police Review Board, which has no jurisdiction in this case, says there are lots of unanswered questions. “We have to have the patience to allow the Allegheny County homicide detectives to do their job,” she says. Pennsylvania law allows deadly force in an arrest only when the officer believes that such force is necessary to prevent death or serious bodily injury to himself or others. That’s the general rule, but there is another. Deadly force can be used when force is necessary to prevent an escape and (1) the person to be arrested has committed a forcible felony, or (2) he’s attempting to escape and possesses a deadly weapon, or (3) he will endanger others if not arrested right away. “As our investigation progresses, we will provide the District Attorney with our findings for his review,” noted McDonough. There is no word on how long that will take. Rose’s shooting was caught on video by nearby residents. He was taken to McKeesport Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. According to police, officers initially responded to a shots fired called on Kirkpatrick Avenue in North Braddock. When they arrived, they found a 22-year-old man had been shot in the abdomen. The shooter fired nine .40-caliber founds at the victim from a vehicle. The victim returned fire and struck the vehicle with multiple rounds. Callers reported that a car was spotted fleeing the scene. Police spotted what they believed was the same car on Grandview Avenue in East Pittsburgh a short time later. The car had bullet holes in the rear windows. While an East Pittsburgh police officer was detaining the driver, two passengers ran from the car, including Rose. The officer opened fire and Rose was struck by multiple rounds. Police found two weapons inside the vehicle, but none on Rose’s person. The officer has been placed on paid administrative leave pending the results of the investigation. Rose was a student in the Woodland Hills School District.<doc-sep>
Hide Transcript Show Transcript WEBVTT REPORTER: I SPO WIT OFFICER MICHAEL ROSFELD FACE-TO-FACE THIS AFTERNOON. HE TELLS ME HE IS TRYING RIGHT NOW TO DEAL WITH WHAT HAPPENED, BUT HE ALSO SAYS HE HAS A LOT O SUPPORT FROM LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT AS WELL AS HIS FAMILY, AND THAT THAT IS CERTAINLY HELPING. BUT HE SAYS THIS IS QUITE A DIFFICULT TIME. HE DID NOT WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE INVESTIGATION OR ANY OF THE DETAILS LEADING UP TO THE SHOOTING OF 17-YEAR-OLD ANTWON ROSE. IN FACT, HE TOLD ME THAT HE HAD BEEN STAYING AWAY FROM ALL NEWS COVERAGE, HE DOES NOT WANT TO KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING, HE'S JUST TRYING TO DEAL WITH THIS SHOOTING AND BE WITH HIS FAMILY. THE OFFICER TELLS ME HE HAS BEEN A POLICE OFFIC SINCE 2011. HE WORKED IN OAKMONT AND HARMER BEFORE COMING TO PITTSBURGH AS A POLICE OFFICER BEFORE THREE WEEKS OF THIS SHOOTING. HE SAID HE WASN'T AWARE OF THIS VIDEO CAPTURED BY A WITNESS AS HE FIRED HIS GUN THREE TIMES AT ANTWON ROSE AND ANOTHER PERSON RUNNING AWAY FROM T VEHICLE THAT THE OFFICER HAD JUST PULLED OVER. ROASROSE WAS HIT THREE TIMES AND DIED AT THE HOSPITAL. THE CAR HE WAS RUNNING FROM ARE HAD BEEN INVOLVED IN A SHOOTING IN NORTH BRADDOCK AND MICHAEL ROSFELD HAS HIM CUSTODY. >> FIRST OF ALL MOST IMPORTANTLY MY THOUGHTS, PRAYERS AND CONDOLENCES GO OUT TO ANTWON ROSE'S FAMILY ALONG WITH ALL HIS FRIENDS. I'M SURE THEY LOST SOMEONE THAT THEY FELT DEEPLY FOR. I HOPE THEY CAN FIND PEACE IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS. I KNOW IT WON'T BE EASY. ONE THING I'M ASKING IS THAT WE DON'T DEFINE PITTSBURGH AND OUR POLICE DEPARTMENT FOR ONE TRAGIC THING THA HAPPENED. REPORTER: HE TELLS HE HAS BEEN THE MAYOR OF EAST PITTSBURGH FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS, AND IN HIS TIME HERE HE SAYS AN EAST PITTSBURGH POLICE OFFICER HAS NEVER FIRED THEIR WEAPON. AS FOR OFFICER RO* MICHAEL ROSFELD HE IS NOW ON LEAVE. HE IS A PART TIME POLICE OFFICER, THAT IS AN UNPAID LE Advertisement Lawyer: No apparent justification for fatal police-involved shooting of teen in East Pittsburgh Share Shares Copy Link Copy A 17-year-old boy fatally shot by a police officer in East Pittsburgh seconds after he fled a traffic stop did not pose a threat to anyone, a lawyer for the family of the teen said.The East Pittsburgh police officer who fatally shot 17-year-old Antwon Rose during a traffic stop spoke with Pittsburgh's Action News 4 reporter Marcie Cipriani in person Thursday. Michael Rosfeld said he and his family are trying to deal with what happened. He said this is a difficult time for them and said he wasn't ready to talk about what happened in the moments before he fired his gun or why he did it. Civil rights attorney S. Lee Merritt said late Wednesday that he doesn't see any apparent justification for the use of deadly force by an East Pittsburgh police officer that left Antwon Rose Jr. dead. Allegheny County police are conducting an independent investigation of the shooting in East Pittsburgh.Part of the encounter was captured on video and posted to Facebook by a bystander.Rosfeld said he has stayed away from news coverage and that he was unaware video of the shooting existed or that there have been protests surrounding the shooting.Video: Police open fire during traffic stop believed to be connected to earlier shootingThe shooting has sparked some social media outrage and calls for punishment of the officer, including from rapper Nas and a handful of other celebrities. A Wednesday night protest at the East Pittsburgh police headquarters lasted for several hours and drew more than 100 people, some of whom laid down in front of a police cruiser.A second protest Thursday afternoon at the Allegheny County courthouse attracted nearly 1,000 people, including speakers decrying police use of force and gun violence.Investigators said the officer stopped the car Antwon and two other people were riding in Tuesday because it matched the description of a car reported to be involved in a shooting about 15 minutes earlier in a nearby town. As the officer took the driver into custody, the short video shows Antwon and the other passenger running from the car.News conference: Teenager shot, killed by police in East PittsburghThe officer quickly fired three shots, all of which struck Antwon, who later died at a hospital from his injuries.