A LaGrange police officer has been cleared by the district attorney after shooting a teenager during a deadly confrontation in January. The injured teen also will not be prosecuted because he fatally shot a man who “was a deadly threat” to him, authorities said.
The incident occurred at the Tall Pines Apartments on Turner Street on Jan. 20 around 1:15 a.m., police said.
Jazmen Glanton, 29, had been visiting his child’s mother, Patrial Sims, and her brother, 19-year-old Patrick Reeves. Reeves said he was with a friend upstairs when he heard his sister screaming for him to call police. He said once he called authorities, he came downstairs to find the door partially open and his sister with a bloody face, authorities said.
Reeves told investigators during his dispute with Glanton, the 29-year-old reached for his gun, but Reeves managed to grab the weapon and backed out of the apartment with his sister. Since Glanton kept walking toward them, Reeves racked the handgun and shot him, Coweta Judicial Circuit District Attorney Herb Cranford wrote in a news release Thursday.
The officer, who had responded to the scene, witnessed the shooting and fired her weapon once at Reeves, Cranford said. Reeves subsequently dropped his gun and raised his hands in the air. He told police he “did what (he) had to” because Glanton was “beating (his) sister.”
Glanton was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m. The GBI Medical Examiner’s Office determined his death was caused by multiple gunshot wounds.
Police said they gathered a Taurus .380 handgun, three cartridges, three cartridge cases, a deformed bullet and one 9mm cartridge case, as well as other evidence, from the scene.
Cranford said an examination of the unnamed officer’s weapon revealed that only one shot was fired. The officer told the GBI she shot to prevent Reeves from shooting someone else.
According to the Official Code of Georgia, an officer can use deadly force against a suspect if “the officer reasonably believes that the suspect poses an immediate threat of physical violence to the officer or others.”
Cranford said the evidence proves that the officer was justified in using deadly force against Reeves because she "fired her weapon immediately after observing Reeves shoot Glanton. In other words, it was objectively reasonable for the officer to regard Reeves as an immediate threat of violence to herself and others in the moment she decided to fire her weapon at Reeves.”
As for Reeves, Cranford wrote, “There is insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Patrick Reeves was not justified in using deadly force against Jazmen Glanton. The weight of the evidence shows that Glanton was a deadly threat to Reeves and Reeves' sister, Patrial Sims.”
In interviews, Sims told the GBI that Glanton hit her before trying to smother her with his hand during the argument. Both siblings told investigators that Glanton had a history of domestic violence against Sims.
An incident report from the Hogansville Police Department showed that on April 2, 2017, Sims, who was pregnant with Glanton’s child at the time, called police because she said Glanton pulled her hair and struck her in the face.
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