By Aaron Besecker
The Buffalo News, N.Y.
CHEEKTOWAGA, N.Y. — Three Cheektowaga police officers stood outside a North Buffalo apartment looking for a man they were trying to arrest. They yelled that they had property of his they wanted to return.
They knocked on the apartment door for several minutes and eventually noticed a center piece of the door was coming loose.
A still frame from Cheektowaga police body-worn camera footage of last week’s fatal police shooting of a man in North Buffalo shows Hugh Davis Jr. lunging at officers.
A few more knocks and that section of the door fell off. Behind it, there was a man with a knife who lunged at them.
As officers yell at the man to drop the knife, the man swings at them. That’s when one of the police officers fired three shots at the shirtless man on the ground near the top of the stairs.
That scene, captured on a police body-worn camera, was revealed Monday as Cheektowaga police publicly released footage from the cameras of three police officers involved in Wednesday’s fatal shooting on Sanders Road .
The fatal shooting of Hugh Davis Jr., 60, remains under investigation by Buffalo police and the State Attorney General’s Office . All bodycam footage has been shared with those two agencies, Cheektowaga Police Chief Brian Coons said.
Police went to the apartment to arrest Davis on charges for an Aug. 11 incident at a Genesee Street hotel involving damage to a hotel room and an alleged assault of a hotel employee.
Davis’ family viewed the bodycam video on Sunday, Coons said.
Police did not release bodycam footage from the fourth officer, who was around the back of the apartment building at the time of the shooting, the chief said.
Coons said the statements by officers about having property of his was their attempt to get Davis to come to the door.
Davis was pronounced dead at the scene.
Cheektowaga police played roughly 10 minutes of body-camera footage at a news conference at police headquarters. They also posted the footage to the department’s YouTube channel.
The State Attorney General’s Office on Friday announced it had formally opened an investigation into the shooting. The office had been conducting what it called a “preliminary assessment” up to that point.
The four Cheektowaga officers who went to the apartment remain on paid administrative leave. Coons continued to withhold the officers’ names.
Cheektowaga police will be conducting an internal review of the officers’ actions.
Coons said he doesn’t believe it would be fair to make a judgment of the officers’ actions just based on looking at the video.
He said no conclusion about their actions would be made until the investigation has been completed.
His conclusion, he said, would be based on the “totality of the circumstances.”
This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.
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