COLUMBUS, Ohio — Late Monday night, several Columbus police officers responded to calls of a man walking around the Georgesville Road area, in west Columbus, with what people thought was a knife.

What You Need To Know

  • Five Columbus police officers fired their weapons, shooting and killing Noel Hernandez

  • Police ordered Hernandez to show his hands and drop the weapon in both English and Spanish

  • The five officers involved are currently not working and the case is under investigation by the Bureau of Criminal Investigation 

Three 911 calls were placed Monday night, claiming that a man, later identified as Noel Hernandez, was approaching and pounding on vehicles with a knife in his hand. According to Columbus police, all of the officers that responded were trained to deescalate the crisis.

Body camera footage was recently released by CPD, and it shows police arriving on the scene commanding, in both English and Spanish, that Hernandez show his hands and drop his weapon. Instead, Hernandez ignored police, and got in and out of his vehicle on three separate occasions before officers tried to use a stun gun on him, which was unsuccessful.

Police said that is when he began to charge them with his weapon. Five officers proceeded to open fire. Despite police rendering medical aid, Hernandez was taken to the hospital where he was later pronounced dead. 

In a press conference, Columbus Police Chief Elaine Bryant said officers followed proper protocol. 

“When an officer responds to a scene, an officer is locked in on the imminent threat that they're dealing with, the threat to themselves or to or a threat to anyone else,” said Bryant. “What I can tell you is that they responded based on what they saw at that time from their view.”

Hernandez’s death is the sixth one this year that Columbus police have been involved in. The city’s mobile response unit was unavailable the night of the shooting. The unit is the city’s initiative that pairs Columbus Public Health officials with police officers to deescalate and stabilize crisis situations.

However, Bryant said the clinicians wouldn’t have been deployed until the scene was secured which unfortunately did not become the case. Members of the Columbus community have had mixed reviews on the situation, with one social justice organization saying that it’s protocol that continues to be the problem.

“I find that to be just more than just bad policing, bad training, I find that to be a deep rooted issue,” said Ramon Obey, who serves as the executive director of Justice, Unity and Social Transformation (JUST Ohio). “In order to attack some of these deep-rooted issues, we have to move past them and uproot the system itself.”

All five of the officers involved are being evaluated by the Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations and have not returned to work.