By Scott Daugherty
The Maryland Gazette
The man police killed inside his Lothian home two weeks ago actually fired the first shot, county police said.
Mansfield Albert Hurley, 25, of 5113 Sands Road, didn’t hit any of the SWAT team officers as they raided his home, though.
Lt. David Waltemeyer, a county police spokesman, said Mr. Hurley fired only one shot. Police later recovered a single .22-caliber bullet from a television.
“It is highly unusual in Anne Arundel County,” said Lt. Waltemeyer. “It’s not unusual to be confronted by someone with a weapon, but a majority of the time they will comply.”
Earlier, police had said only that Mr. Hurley, who was wanted in another shooting, was armed with a rifle when he was shot and killed Nov. 2.
But after interviewing all 10 officers involved in the raid, detectives determined that Officer Timothy Schultz wasn’t the only person who fired a weapon inside the 960-square-foot house.
Lt. Waltemeyer said several detectives conducted the interviews and one detective reviewed all of them, as well as the ballistics report, before releasing any information.
“It’s not unusual for that to take time,” said Lt. Waltemeyer, explaining the one-week delay. He said the tactical officers knew at the time of the shooting that Mr. Hurley fired the first shot.
Mr. Hurley was a suspect in the Nov. 2 shooting of Ronnie Cornelius Hall, 41, of Lothian. Mr. Hall, of 1155 Mount Zion Road, initially told police he was shot about 3 a.m. as he walked outside to get his newspaper.
Officer Sara Schriver, another police spokesman, said detectives noted several inconsistencies in Mr. Hall’s story, and he eventually cooperated with police and named Mr. Hurley as the shooter.
Detectives then went to a county judge for a “no-knock” warrant - allowing them to break down his door and raid his house. Lt. Waltemeyer explained that such warrants are standard in cases like this, when the suspect is
known to have weapons in the house and is already wanted in another shooting.
Officer Schultz, an eight-year veteran of the department and full-time member of the county’s Special Operations Section, was one of the officers who broke down the door to Mr. Hurley’s house about 10:47 p.m.
Officers found a relative of Mr. Hurley in the kitchen and got him on the floor without any problems.
A moment later, though, police found Mr. Hurley in a hallway with a rifle. After a short verbal exchange and the shot from the .22-caliber rifle, Officer Schultz fired four shots from his .40-caliber service weapon, killing Mr. Hurley, police said.
Officer Schultz is now on routine administrative leave.
It was the sixth police-involved shooting - the third fatal - by local law enforcement this year, and the fifth by a county police officer.
The shooting investigation was repeatedly delayed. Police pulled out of Mr. Hurley’s house shortly after the shooting, choosing to apply for and wait for a new search warrant.
And after starting the search Friday morning, they found a suspicious package that they thought might be a bomb and pulled out again.
Three hours later, the package was deemed harmless and police resumed their crime scene investigation.
Copyright 2006 Capital Gazette Communications, Inc.