A suspect armed with a knife and a broken bottle of booze on the Civic Center station BART platform was shot and killed during a confrontation Sunday night. Two BART police officers responded to reports of a "wobbly drunk" white man in tye-die and military fatigues arrived at Civic Center around 9:45 p.m, but the confrontation was over in less than a minute when one of the officers shot the suspect in the torso. The shots were reported at 9:46 p.m and the suspect was rushed to San Francisco General after paramedics attempted CPR on the scene. He was pronounced dead around 10:45 p.m. Even though one of the officers was carrying a Taser, BART Police Chief Kenton Rainey defended his officer's use of deadly force in a press conference yesterday.

Although BART PD recently approved Tasers for all of it's patrollers, Rainey told the press that he did not know the circumstances that led his officers to discharge his weapon, "but the Taser is a tool. And when you’re confronted with deadly force … it’s a tool that the officer can choose to use, or cannot choose to use.”

For their part, Rainey said the officers involved have been cooperating with investigations in to the incident — a very different reaction than Johannes Mehserle's immediate resignation following the 2009 shooting of Oscar GRan in Fruitvale. One of the officers got a couple minor cuts during the scuffle, but was otherwise unharmed and both are on administrative leave while the investigations are going on. SFPD is handling the criminal investigation while BART PD is looking in to the administrative side. Security cameras apparently caught some part of the confrontation and several witnesses were on the platform at the time.

[SFAppeal]
[SFExaminer]