By Lisa Rein and Philip Rucker
The Washington Post
Police gave an account yesterday of how the drug investigation turned violent: The undercover officer arranged to meet 17-year-old David Lee Cao on Friday afternoon in a park-and-ride lot in Burtonsville. Cao and a 16-year-old friend, Marquies Dajour Timberlake, got into Oaks’s car to close the deal. Then Oaks questioned whether the white crystalline powder Cao offered to sell him was real.
Cao got angry and told Oaks his friend was armed, police said, then he and the detective began to argue. Timberlake pulled a gun and shot Oaks twice, police said.
The teenagers fled across the parking lot, but within seconds, another undercover officer had shot Timberlake in the torso. The teenager was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
Oaks, 32, who has been on the force for 6 1/2 years, was treated for wounds to his head, an arm, a shoulder and an ear at a local hospital and was released yesterday, said Lucille Baur, a Montgomery police spokeswoman. “We are extremely, extremely fortunate that he survived this so well,” she said.
Police have charged Cao as an adult with first-degree assault, attempted murder, use of a handgun while committing a crime and distribution of a non-controlled, dangerous substance alleged to be PCP. He is being held at Montgomery Detention Center.
Baur would not release the name of the officer who shot Timberlake, citing a state law that gives an officer involved in a shooting 10 days to provide an account of the incident.
Timberlake withdrew from Springbrook High School in Silver Spring in 2005, and Cao dropped out of a county school for troubled students last fall, said Brian Edwards, a school system spokesman. Edwards did not have further information about the teenagers.
Timberlake lived in a townhouse in the Greencastle Lakes development near the site of the shooting. Yesterday, a woman in the townhouse screamed: “Find out who shot my son in the back! Find out the truth!”
Baur would not say whether Timberlake was shot in the back.
Timberlake grew up in the Burtonsville area, in eastern Montgomery County. His great-uncle, Ernest Weedon Jr., said Timberlake was quiet and well-mannered.
“I think he was shot because they were quick to pull the trigger on the first man they saw,” Weedon, 62, said yesterday.
Weedon said Timberlake’s mother is angry. “They won’t let her see the body,” he said of police. “She’s angry because her son was shot. He was only 16 years old. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t let her see the young man.”
“It’s just something that went bad,” Weedon said. " I think we all think that. All we want is just the truth. That’s all.”
Cao’s relatives were not at their Burtonsville home and could not be reached yesterday for comment.
Police said Oaks had met Cao a week before the shooting when he made a purchase of what the teenager told him was PCP -- the hallucinogenic drug also known as “angel dust.” The drug turned out to be fake, police said. The detective set up Friday’s 2 p.m. meeting, and he brought a team of undercover officers who were stationed nearby.
Oaks received a citation in 2004 for helping apprehend three violent felons who had kidnapped and beaten a Prince George’s County man whom they also held for ransom.
A woman who answered the phone at the officer’s house in Riva yesterday declined to comment.
The shooting was the first involving a police officer in Montgomery this year. In August 2004, police fatally shot a man who allegedly had lunged at an officer with a utility knife in White Oak. That was the first fatal shooting by county police since 2000.
Staff researcher Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.