Two Livingston police officers are on paid administrative leave following a Saturday evening shooting that killed a 37-year-old local resident.
Park County coroner Al Jenkins says the victim is 37-year-old Sean O’Brien.
Police chief Dale Johnson says officers responded to Shopko Saturday evening after a caller said a man was behaving erratically and making threats. When officers responded, Johnson says O’Brien refused all orders to comply and the situation quickly escalated.
"One of the officers did deploy a Taser, but it was ineffective; didn’t work against him for whatever reason.”
Johnson says O’Brien was eventually shot and killed when he lunged at one of the officers with a knife. It’s too soon to know if the shooting was justified.
"The Bozeman PD and Gallatin County Sheriff's Department are handling this investigation, so any information like that most likely would come from them, whatever they would find out,” Johnson says.
The U.S. Justice Department and Centers for Disease Control says westerners are almost twice as likely to die as other Americans in “arrest-related” deaths.