Following a frame-by-frame review of body camera footage from four different Chico Police officers, Butte County District attorney Mike Ramsey determined police acted within reason during a fatal encounter with a 34-year-old Ventura man.
Ramsey said that the evidence showed that officers and a security guard all feared for their lives during an hour-plus confrontation with Tyler Rushing July 23. Rushing had allegedly burglarized a title company office.
Rushing was shot three times, repeatedly bitten by a police dog, shocked with a taser, tackled and handcuffed before dying at the scene.
The security guard received two puncture wounds from broken glass, one officer was struck in the head with a jagged piece of a broken toilet tank lid and a second officer was stabbed in the neck with a pen.
At a press conference Thursday, Ramsey narrated as he played footage of what he said was Rushing striking an officer with a jagged ceramic object.
Ramsey: “What you see here, is this coming down.”
While pinned behind the door of a bathroom where he had sought refuge, Rushing injured two officers before Police Sergeant Scott Ruppel used deadly force.
“Sergeant Ruppel has decided at this point that he needs to stop the threat that is out of control,” Ramsey said.
Ramsey said that Rushing, described by friends and family as a peaceful, loving man, may have been under the influence of an undetermined synthetic drug that wasn’t detected in an autopsy.
Investigators determined that Rushing had hitchhiked to Chico after he was allegedly robbed of his truck’s keys, wallet, phone and other belongings while working at a music festival near Ukiah.