Man dead after exchanging gunfire with Baltimore officers

“They drove into the parking lot and saw man armed with AR15 rifle, firing that weapon”, the spokesman told reporters at a briefing.

Four plainclothes officers heard gunfire and drove towards it where they got into a shootout, WBALTV reports. Davis said the man turned toward the officers in the vehicle and opened fire from about 50 yards away.

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The officers and the wounded Harper were trapped on the second-floor landing for about 90 minutes while tactical officers secured the building. The suspect, however, who fired from an apartment building with what police said was an “AR-15-type” weapon, was then shot at by two of the officers. The department has not identified the two officers who shot Harper.

Now investigators are wondering if the four police officers were the targets, and if the shooter was acting on some anti-cop motive, as in Dallas.

“We don’t have a victim”.

Davis said authorities are working to trace the gun’s origin and determine how the shooter obtained it.

Kevin Davis said at a news conference Friday afternoon that Dayten Ernest Harper shot at four police officers who ran in his direction after hearing gunfire Thursday night in West Baltimore. Officers say that the unidentified gunman was shooting before they arrived on scene at around 9:30 p.m.

He said investigators were now looking at that “theory” and would hopefully have answers to reveal on Friday, at a planned press conference.

This photo provided by the Baltimore Police shows a gun recovered from a shooting scene in Baltimore, Thursday, July 14, 2016. This is the gun recovered from the scene.

The shooting comes a week after police shootings of two black men, one in Louisiana and the other in Minnesota, stoked outrage among many in the African-American community and protests around the country.

The suspect hasn’t been identified.

In response, Republican lawmakers drafted the Back the Blue Act, which debuted on Thursday, to help protect police officers in the line of duty by imposing strict minimum sentences for individuals who kill or injure police officers, as Gretel Kauffman reported for The Christian Science Monitor.