Published January 13, 2015
Police responding to a domestic dispute shot and killed a 15-year-old who went after a police officer with a clothes iron.
Public affairs spokesman Lt. Frank Vanore described the teen as being armed with "an object in his hand that he was using as a weapon" when he went at police officers Monday afternoon outside his home. The item was an iron, according to news reports citing unidentified police sources.
The teen's mother had called police around 1:30 p.m. after scuffling with her son, Ronald Timbers, according to police and Lamika Jenkins, a family spokeswoman. Jenkins did not say what sparked the dispute.
The teen kept coming at two officers before he was shot by one of them, police said. The bullet struck Timbers in the chest, police said.
"As you can see, it escalated totally out of control," said Jenkins, the teen's sister-in-law.
City police have fatally shot 14 people this year. Last year, 20 people were killed in police shootings, the city's highest annual total in more than a quarter-century.
It was not clear whether police first tried to subdue Timbers with pepper spray or a stun gun.
Homicide detectives and the department's internal affairs unit are investigating, said Sgt. Ray Evers, a police spokesman.
"A lot of questions don't have answers," Evers said.
Timbers was a ninth-grader at the CEP Miller Alternative School, a school for students with discipline problems, according to the Philadelphia School District.
https://www.foxnews.com/story/philadelphia-police-kill-teen-wielding-clothes-iron