“The driver weaponized his vehicle and drove toward the officer.”
I’ve heard that language before.
In less than one week this summer, ICE agents fatally shot two men in moving vehicles—25-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, and 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. In both cases, Homeland Security said the drivers had “weaponized” their vehicles against officers.
Less than a month earlier, on June 14, 2026, police responded to a reported shoplifting outside a Walmart in Senatobia, Mississippi. Vellesiya Wiley waited in the passenger seat of her friend’s car with her one-year-old son, Kohen, on her lap.
Wiley’s friend returned with a bag of diapers and began backing out of the parking spot. An officer fired into the car multiple times, according to news reports. One bullet fatally struck Kohen.
Police said “officers encountered two subjects and a juvenile child fleeing from the store into a vehicle. [They] attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one.”
Different agencies, different states, the same assertion: the vehicle was coming at the officer.
For the last five years, I’ve analyzed police interviews, autopsies, forensic reports, press statements, and video evidence from shootings into moving vehicles. I’ve also interviewed dozens of mothers who lost children in police shootings. In city after city, I began to recognize the same language—not necessarily in the shootings themselves, but in the official accounts that followed them.
Cars can, of course, be deadly weapons, and officers sometimes face drivers who are genuinely trying to hit them. The issue is not that police describe those threats. It is that, in the chaotic hours after a shooting, a department can present an officer’s account of the most disputed moment as an established fact.
Every police shooting is chaotic, and officials often must speak before they know everything. The problem is that a preliminary account does not always remain preliminary. Since the official version usually arrives first—and carries the authority of the state—later evidence often has to dislodge a story already lodged in the public mind.
In Mississippi, Wiley remembers her son’s shooting differently. “I raised my baby up trying to show them that he was in the car,” she said.
Wiley recalled the officers stood on the right side of the car as her friend steered left. An independent review concluded a bullet entered the right side of Kohen’s chest and exited the left.
On January 20, 2018, in Overland Park, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, the call went out to police: “J-21 attempt,” code for attempted suicide.
“I’m familiar with that kid,” one police officer radioed back.
John Albers, 17, struggled with ADHD and depression. He had begun to make some impulsive decisions.
That night, two officers arrived at the Albers home for a welfare check. Across the street, a neighbor’s Ring doorbell camera captured what happened next.
A thin line of light appeared beneath the garage door. Officer Clayton Jenison raised his weapon and moved toward the driveway. The garage door continued to rise.
A silver minivan’s reverse lights came on, and the van rolled backward onto the driveway. On a police dashcam positioned to the left of the van, Jenison appeared to stand directly behind the vehicle. The Ring camera showed a different angle: Jenison remained to the right of the minivan at all times.
“Stop!” Jenison shouted.
The tires rolled. No sudden acceleration. No lurch. Just movement.
Jenison fired. Two shots flashed in the darkness. Glass shattered.
The minivan paused, then continued backward into a reverse J-turn around the officer. Its back end swung into the street until the van rolled back onto the Albers front lawn, headlights facing the street.
Jenison pivoted, tracking the vehicle, and fired eleven more shots as it circled him.
In his videotaped interview with police detectives, Jenison said, “I thought he was going to run me over.” Forensic analysis showed him standing six feet to the right of the van when he fired his first shot and nineteen feet away when he fired his thirteenth.
An hour after the shooting, before John’s father, Steve Albers, knew what had happened, an officer asked him, “Why did John park the van backward in the garage?”
Steve didn’t understand.
The officer rephrased: “Any reason he might want to park it so he could drive forward into the street? Why he might need to get out fast?”
Steve shifted his gaze from the officer to the open garage, not knowing his son had, in fact, reversed rather than driven forward.
“Any idea why he’d try to run over an officer?”
“Wait,” Steve replied, puzzled at the implication. “What’s going on here?”
That evening, Overland Park police released a statement:
“As the responding officers approached the residence to make contact, the garage door opened, and a vehicle exited the garage, moving rapidly toward one of the responding officers.”
The disputed perception in Jenison’s interview—“I thought he was going to run me over”—had become, in the department’s public account, a statement of fact: the vehicle was “moving rapidly toward” him.
Psychologists call part of what happens next the primacy effect: information encountered first can shape how later information is interpreted. Once the public hears that a driver accelerated toward an officer, contradictory evidence may have to fight uphill simply because it arrived second.
At a press conference one month after the shooting, District Attorney Steve Howe played only the left-side police dashcam video. “Suddenly, the garage door opened,” he said. “The minivan backed up toward the officer who was standing directly behind it. John Albers rapidly drove the car toward the officer.”
Howe made no mention of the Ring doorcam video.
The minivan “performed a wild J-turn,” he continued, “and in a split second, the officer went from a position of safety to once again being directly in the path of a van that was accelerating toward him.”
The official explanation again turned on the same disputed fact: where the officer stood in relation to the vehicle.
John’s autopsy, completed one week after Howe’s press conference, showed that the bullets traveled from right to left through his head and neck. Forensic analysis determined the bullets shattered the passenger-side windows of the minivan; the rear window and front windshield remained intact.
The first account matters beyond any single case. A 2022 National Bureau of Economic Research study found that television news outlets more often used language that obscured responsibility after police killings than after civilian killings, especially in cases involving unarmed victims who did not flee. Researchers traced that language most often to police departments’ initial accounts. Participants exposed to such language were less likely to hold officers morally responsible or to demand accountability.
The pattern predates Albers. In 2010, after Officer Aaron Hess fatally shot 20-year-old Daniel “D.J.” Henry Jr. outside a college bar in Pleasantville, New York, police said Henry had sped toward Hess and struck him with his car.
Witnesses, passengers, and video later challenged that account, saying Henry had followed an officer’s order to move the car forward slowly and had not accelerated toward Hess.
A 2021 New York Times investigation found that over five years, police killed more than 400 drivers or passengers who were not wielding a gun or knife and were not being pursued for a violent crime—more than one death every week.
When an official narrative takes hold, a victim’s family can spend months or years trying to catch up to it. By the time contradictory evidence emerges, the first account may already have framed the questions journalists, prosecutors, and the public are asking.
On January 7, 2026, an ICE officer in Minneapolis killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three. Federal officials said she had “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.” An independent autopsy later concluded that one bullet entered Good’s left temple and exited the right side of her head.
Unlike many local police departments, Homeland Security did not frame Good’s shooting as the beginning of an ongoing investigation. Officials instead used sweeping language about her intent. But in this case, the government’s account did not go uncontested for long: citizens uploaded cellphone videos in real time, allowing the public to compare official claims with other evidence almost immediately.
But Good’s shooting remains the anomaly. The surge of ICE agents in Minneapolis, the violence, and the round-ups of law-abiding immigrants had already brought out dozens of protesters and cell phone coverage to that residential street. At least three videos emerged within minutes of the shooting. So ordinary citizens, in real time, were able to break the government’s monopoly on the first narrative. Officials no longer controlled the story or the evidence.
What happens in cases where no Ring camera, dashcam, or cellphone video exists to compete with the first account? One could argue that when independent videos aren’t immediately available, the official account deserves even more caution—not less.
The first story still matters. Officers deserve the opportunity to explain what happened, and the public deserves timely, accurate information. But departments can distinguish what they know from what an involved officer says.
“The driver weaponized his vehicle” is a finding. “The officer believed the vehicle was driving toward him” is an account awaiting verification. Initial statements should mark the opening of an investigation, not its close.
I can no longer read an initial press release the way I once did. I still read the first story. I just don’t mistake it for the last.
