Reviews of shooting completed
Police investigators have completed two reviews into a shooting last month in which a Kootenai County Sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a man who was charging at officers with a knife.
A criminal investigation by the Idaho State Police has been turned over to county Prosecutor Bill Douglas, who will decide if any charges will be filed against the officers involved in the death of Frank Joseph Saucedo Jr. Douglas could not be reached for comment Thursday or Friday.
An internal Sheriff’s Department review conducted by Detective Brad Maskell will be presented to a review panel on Thursday, Capt. Ben Wolfinger, the Sheriff’s Department information officer, said Friday. The panel will determine if the officers followed department procedures during the encounter.
Two deputies, identified by the Sheriff’s Department as Art Dollard and Justin Bangs, are on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigations.
Preliminary findings seem to mirror police and witness accounts following the June 18 incident that Saucedo rushed officers with what appeared to be a kitchen knife and that officers tried to stop him with beanbag rounds fired from a shotgun.
The ISP report says Dollard fired three of the nonlethal rounds, striking Saucedo. The beanbags failed to even slow down the charging man. Bangs, providing cover for Dollard, fired twice with a rifle, striking Saucedo in the chest, the report says. He was pronounced dead at Kootenai Medical Center in Coeur d’Alene.
The deputies arrived in Rathdrum at about 1 a.m. June 18 as backup for two Rathdrum police officers trying to calm Saucedo, who had been reported as an unwelcome visitor at the house of a woman who had broken off a relationship with him the previous afternoon.
Witness and police accounts after the incident said Saucedo did not talk with officers, instead shouting bizarre statements making reference to Satan and graveyards. The Rathdrum officers backed away in an attempt to calm Saucedo down and called for help from the county, requesting nonlethal force, police said at the time.
Kara Jones, who had met Saucedo in February and dated him briefly, said the 33-year-old man stabbed himself in the stomach before taking off “at a dead-bolt run” at the officers.
She said Saucedo returned from a commercial fishing job in Alaska in early June and moved into her Rathdrum duplex. Jones became alarmed, she said, that Saucedo’s behavior was erratic, abusive and controlling, and she broke off the relationship on June 17.
She said Saucedo showed up at her house with the knife at about 1 the next morning, pounding on the door.
Saucedo had told her two stories about returning to Rathdrum: He left the Pribilof, a factory ship, because his father died; he left because he was fired. Jones said Saucedo almost never talked about his family, saying once his mother was homeless.
State police investigators said they had difficulty finding Saucedo’s family, but they recently located both his parents. The father is alive, and the mother is not homeless, they said.