He started walking toward the officers — slowly and quietly — as they yelled at him.
“Drop it now,” one shouted. “Drop that knife,” screamed another.
The man, Jovany Mercado-Bedolla, 26, didn’t listen. He kept coming closer with his left fist balled around something long, shiny and silver. He was at the top of a carport and crawled down the driveway toward the officers.
When he finally got to the sidewalk, still in no rush, they shot him several times.
“Shots fired,” an officer called into his radio. “Stay back, stay back.”
It was over in about 30 seconds.
The scene was captured in body camera footage released Wednesday by the Ogden Police Department. The Aug. 16 shooting killed Mercado-Bedolla, and raised questions about why the man was there in the first place.
A person at a house party near 32nd Street and Gramercy Avenue had called dispatchers just before 9 p.m. after Mercado-Bedolla had approached partygoers and threatened them with the knife. He seemed disoriented, the caller said.
When four officers arrived, people at the party pointed them to where the man was hiding, behind some vehicles in a dark carport. The video — only one was released though all four officers recorded footage of the confrontation — shows them approaching Mercado-Bedolla. They ask him to drop the knife. He doesn’t.
He holds it down at his side. Ogden police Chief Randy Watt has previously said Mercado-Bedolla was holding it in a “threatening manner.”
The officers kept yelling at him, and Mercado-Bedolla didn’t respond. He walked toward them. And by the time he reached a gap in the chainlink fence onto the sidewalk, all four fired their weapons at him.
Mercado-Bedolla fell to the ground. The knife dropped in front of him.
The Weber County Critical Incident Response Team is now investigating. The officers are on paid administrative leave — bringing the number of Ogden officers on paid leave to five, after an officer shot and killed Donald Joseph Lee, 37, on July 31.
Lee reportedly had a knife and charged police who were investigating a burglary in Roy, prompting an Ogden officer to open fire.
