Why Wichita police officer won’t be charged in fatal shooting involving knife, meth

A Wichita police officer will not be charged for fatally shooting a 29-year-old man who held a knife to his girlfriend last year, District Attorney Marc Bennett said Tuesday.

Considering that Jose Ortiz posed an imminent threat to his hostage and that Ortiz wasn’t complying or responding, the officer was reasonable in firing one shot that struck Ortiz in the head, Bennett told reporters at a news conference at his office in the Sedgwick County Courthouse.

Bennett’s review was focused on the question of whether the officer was criminally liable, according to a report he released immediately after the news conference.

The shooting occurred on Aug. 7, 2017, in the dining room of a home in the 1300 block of North Wellington Place.

A root cause of the tragedy is methamphetamine, Bennett said, noting that an autopsy showed that Ortiz had been using the highly addictive and illegal drug.

In his meth state, Ortiz thought his girlfriend was hiding men in her bathroom, Bennett said.

Bennett said he wasn’t divulging the officer’s name because the officer wasn’t being charged.

The district attorney’s 23-page report on the shooting gave this account: At about 7:15 a.m. Aug. 7, 2017, the 911 system received a call from 1320 N. Wellington Place. The caller told a dispatcher that her brother, Jose “Pepe” Ortiz, was trying to kill his girlfriend. The caller told the dispatcher that Ortiz had been using the drug “ice” — a nickname for meth — and had choked his girlfriend with a cord.

The caller called 911 again and said her brother was armed with a pocket knife — a photo with the report showed a knife at the scene with a 4-inch double-edged blade.

The caller could hear the woman screaming.

Wichita police officers arrived at about 7:31 a.m. and found Ortiz had tied up his girlfriend and was holding a knife to her back and neck and smoking “ice.”

Officers tried to speak with Ortiz through the front door. The tried to call him. He didn’t respond.

At about 7:48 a.m., officers asked for a SWAT team and a negotiator. Ortiz still wasn’t responding to officers already there.

At about 8:14 a.m., officers heard a woman scream inside. About a minute later, a sergeant and four officers entered through the front door. The found Ortiz standing in the dining room.

Ortiz held a woman in front of him, as if he was using her as a shield, Bennett said. According to the report, Ortiz was grasping her “by her hair and holding a knife to her right side and back.” Her arms appeared to be bound behind her back.

When the officers tried to persuade Ortiz to release the woman, he backed into a corner, holding his hostage in front of him.

He kept holding her by her hair while keeping a knife to her side and back, the report said.

She “screamed and winced in pain several times.”

“Finally, (she) screamed and bent at the waist, moving her waist and hips to her left, in what appeared to be an effort to move away from the knife Ortiz had held to her right side.”

Once the woman screamed and tried to move away, an officer fired one shot from a rifle. Ortiz fell to the floor at about 8:16 a.m.

That was about 45 minutes after officers arrived.

Officers had to sever an electrical cord wrapped around the victim’s wrists behind her back.

An EMS crew took Ortiz to Via Christi St. Francis Hospital, and he was pronounced dead at about 9:36 a.m.

This story was originally published October 23, 2018 at 4:29 PM.