St. Joseph County Prosecutor's office releases footage from officer-involved shooting

An officer-involved shooting investigation has come to a close.

And tonight, we're learning more. The St. Joseph County Prosecutor's office say that on July 29th the shooting and killing of Dante Kittrell from South Bend Police is a justifiable homicide.

The Prosecutor's office has also released a timeline of events, along with South Bend Police releasing their body cam footage from this incident.

The briefing with Police and the mayor revealed a detailed timeline.

South Bend Police Chief and media liaison explained the timeline of events, and why some tactics weren't used in this incident.

For nearly 45 minutes, South Bend Police attempted to negotiate with 51-year-old Dante Kittrell.

Court documents indicate police arrived at Coquillard School at 11:40 a.m. on July 29th, and in total 18 officers responded to this call throughout the duration of the incident.

“Of those officers two were crisis negotiators and four of the officers discharged their weapons during the incident,” said Ashley O’Chap, South Bend Police Department Media Liaison.

Officers attempted to negotiate with Kittrell, but he asked officers to shoot their guns at him.

“Fire, Fire, Fire, right here, Fire, I dare you,” said Kittrell. “You want to help me? tell one of your (BLANK) to shoot.”

According to the St. Joseph County Prosecutor's office at 12:29 p.m. Kittrell pulled out what appeared to be a handgun.

“In the release from the County Prosecutor's office it called Mr. Kittrell's weapon a replica weapon,” said O’Chap.

Images provided by investigators showed that Kittrell's weapon was an airsoft pistol pictured on the left, but the image on the right shows a gun that appears to look exactly like Kittrell's.

Police tell WSBT: it's hard to tell the difference in a crisis scenario.

“This was an impossible situation that our officers found themselves in. You’re going to see, every time there was a tactic trying to bring Dante home safely, he knew how to counter it. He knew what to say and he knew what to do and he was unfortunately determined to end his life that day,” said Mayor James Mueller (D), South Bend.

More was discussed in this briefing, such as why bean bag guns and tasers were not used, and those reasons were because officers could not safely deploy the tasers and Kittrell told officers he would still shoot even if hit by a bean bag.