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Police officer opens fire on young woman during traffic stop

Passenger arrested after bailing from car

By Eric James

(8/14/07 - KTRK/HOUSTON) - A Houston police officer shot a driver overnight. The 18-year-old reportedly had something shiny in her hand and that made the officer suspicious.

It happened around 1am outside an apartment complex on N. Wayside and Lebate. A female officer and her co-officer were patrolling the area. They got behind a red car and that's when a male passenger inside allegedly threw something out of the window. Officers didn't know what it was so they tried to get the female driver to stop.

Instead of stopping, they say she turned into an apartment complex. The male passenger jumped out of the car and started running. The other officer jumped out and started chasing him. He was arrested.

Meanwhile, the officer in the squad car tried to get the female driver to get out of the vehicle. They say she was not obeying the commands when all of the sudden, the door swung open. The driver reached out and the officer reported seeing something something shiny in her hand. That's when the officer shot 18-year-old Britney King in the hand.

"Anytime you have a situation like this, where you are not sure of what happened before or prior to you trying to stop them, all you know is that for some reason, once you tried to initiate the traffic stop, this person is refusing to stop," said Sgt. Michelle Sandoval with the Houston Police Department. "They'd already drop something out of the vehicle in front of the officer, which he was unsure what that was. So you don't really know what or who is in that vehicle."

"When the lady called me, she said they had her on the ground and wasn't giving her any assistance," said the suspect's aunt, Denise Gardner. "The police officer was just telling her to 'Shut up, shut up, shut up and be quiet'."

King just turned 18 at midnight. Witnesses are saying that King was punching in the gate code in order to get into the apartment complex when she was shot.

Officers don't know what that shiny object was in her hand nor do they know what was thrown from the vehicle.

King was taken to Ben Taub Hospital for her gunshot wound to her hand.