Police fatally shoot 26-year-old man after pursuit in North Baltimore

Dan Belson

The Baltimore Sun

May 12, 2025

Baltimore Police fatally shot a 26-year-old on Monday after officials say he drew a gun during a pursuit and fired multiple shots at officers.

Officers from the department’s District Action Team had approached the man at about 1:30 p.m. on the 4600 block of York Road in the Kernewood and Wilson Park area, Police Commissioner Richard Worley said.

The man ran and drew a handgun as officers pursued him, Worley said. He fired several shots at officers, with multiple hitting a police cruiser, the commissioner said. Officers returned fire and struck the man, who died at a hospital.

No officers were injured, according to police.

Worley said the man had a firearm with an extended magazine, both of which were recovered at the scene.

“We had an unfortunate incident where someone lost their life, and we fear for their families,” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said at the scene Monday afternoon. “But again, this is another example that we cannot and will not have people indiscriminately walking around with illegal guns and firearms willing to use them and shoot them indiscriminately at police officers out here in the middle of the day on the block that is always full of people.”

“We are lucky that not just any of our officers who respond today, but that regular citizens were not hit because someone decided that they were not going to comply and that they were going to start to indiscriminately shoot a weapon,” Scott said.

The Maryland Attorney General’s Office’s Independent Investigations Division is probing the encounter.

An officer is heard in recorded dispatch audio yelling “shots fired” repeatedly at around 1:30 p.m., before other police are dispatched to York Road. A few minutes later, police are heard saying that a “suspect” is down and that the “officer’s OK.”

An officer then describes a “male in his 20s” with a gunshot wound to his head and multiple to his body.