Man shot dead by police said ‘I want to kill a cop,’ review finds

Three Metropolitan Police Department officers fired 11 shots, fatally injuring a man who said, “I want to kill a cop” while holding what turned out to be a nonlethal starter pistol, according to testimony at an official review hearing Tuesday.

Michael Allensworth had relapsed into drug abuse and may have sought a “suicide by cop” situation to avoid returning to prison, his wife said in an interview with the Review-Journal.

He served from 2006 to 2009 in a Nevada prison for attempted assault with a deadly weapon and was released in 2020 after eight months behind bars on a DUI conviction, prison records show.

The department’s Fatality Public Fact-Finding Review into Allensworth’s death, held Tuesday in the Clark County Commission Chambers, was required under county law for officer-involved killings that the district attorney’s office rules do not warrant criminal prosecution.

On March 28, police officers James Villarreal, 27, Johnathan Cole, 25, and Beau Cooley, 31, opened fire on the 41-year-old man, following a standoff that lasted 30-45 minutes at the Riviera Mobile Home Park, 2038 Palm St. near East Fremont Street and Sahara Avenue.

Police were called to the mobile home park that evening by one of Allensworth’s neighbors, who reported a man threatening to shoot him with a pistol, Detective Marc Colon, a member the department’s Force Investigation Team, which investigates officer shootings, told Chief Deputy District Attorney Michelle Fleck at the hearing.

Earlier in the day, the neighbor claimed, Allensworth tried to open the door to his trailer, pointed the gun and then attempted to force his way through a window.

After officers arrived, he pointed the gun in the air, put the gun to his head and then told them,“I don’t like cops” and “I want to kill a cop today,” they reported.

In a body camera video shown at the hearing, one police officer yelled: “Drop the gun, right now. Drop the gun before you get shot. If you move that gun toward me, I’m going to shoot you.”

“Mike, drop it, drop it. We’re here to help you,” an officer said in another video.

At 53 feet away from police, Allensworth could been seen standing in the distance and, as if in a daze, slowly raising the gun toward the officers, who opened fire.

Villarreal got off four rounds from a rifle, Cole fired three pistol shots and Cooley fired four times from his handgun, Colon said. The officers reacted while in fear for their lives, he said.

The autopsy, by medical examiner Dr. Ben Murie, revealed Allensworth was hit six times. He also had a very high level of methamphetamine in his blood.

Following the shooting, police discovered that he had been holding a blank-shooting starter pistol, used in racing and other sporting events. Two live .22 caliber rounds had been chambered in it, but they could not have been fired through its blocked barrel.

Carl Arnold, an ombudsman who represents the public and the victim’s family at the hearing, got Colon to admit that Allensworth had not fired a shot. He questioned him about whether the starter pistol was even operational.

“It looks like a real gun,” Colon responded.

Arnold asked whether the officers considered using a nonlethal device to subdue the man.

Colon said that faced with that deadly situation, it “made no sense to approach someone with a lethal weapon with a nonlethal weapon.”

Arnold also inquired if officers could tell that Allensworth might be trying to commit suicide via a police shooting.

“They thought he was going to shoot them,” Colon said.

In an interview with the Review-Journal, Allensworth’s wife, Katti Allensworth, said that after being sober for some time from a drug addiction, he started using again three days prior to the shooting.

“He basically told me that he would never go back to prison again,” she said. “It’s my firm belief this was suicide by cop. He knew that having a gun on him, it was possible that he would go back to prison.”

Colon investigated the shooting by taking the three officers separately to the scene for a “walkthrough” and having each brief him on what happened. In each case, the officers were accompanied by a lawyer for the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, the police union, he said.

Contact Jeff Burbank at jburbank@reviewjournal.com. Follow @JeffBurbank2 on Twitter.