BEAUMONT, Texas — Two officers are on administrative leave after shots were fired when Beaumont Police responded to a burglary call at a restaurant along I-10 Thursday.
Beaumont Police gave a press conference about the incident Friday, Nov. 14 around noon.
Chief Jimmy Singletary released the suspect's name as Kennith Waynon Hooker, 52, a transient man born in Port Arthur. Hooker has lived in Hardin, Jefferson and Orange County and had a "significant criminal history," police said.
Beaumont Police's Criminal Investigation Division believes he committed two burglaries before this one that night, based on the evidence detectives have been gathering, Singletary said.
The names of the two officers involved have not been released, but one is a man and the other is a woman, Beaumont Police Officer Carol Riley said.
Neither officer was injured during the incident.
"That's a major concern for our department," Singletary said. "That's why we have a traumatic incident support team in place to make sure our officers are OK."
"This is a tough thing," he said. "There's a lot of these police officers that have never seen a person die. We're going to make sure they're feeling OK when they come back to work."
Beaumont Police is working alongside the Jefferson County District Attorney's Office to investigate the incident, Singletary said.
Beaumont Police has a procedure in place to handle incidents like this, he said.
"They're immediately assigned an officer's traumatic incident support team counselor," he said. "We do not immediately ask them to give a statement and give an account of everything that's going on."
When asked if incidents like this are becoming more common since this is the second officer-involved shooting in Beaumont in just over a month, Riley said officers are able to get to the scene more often while an alleged burglar is still there and this leads to more confrontations.
"A citizen saw this happening and called and gave a good description so police could get there before the burglar left," she said. "The quicker our response times are, the quicker we are getting involved in those in progress calls, it's going to be more violent."
Singletary said the officers found the suspect with a 14 inch screwdriver trying to pry open a lockbox when they arrived at the scene.
"I want the citizens to know how dangerous this job is," he said. "It's becoming more and more violent. Our officers did a good job. They had to protect themselves."
Beaumont Police officers are trained to shoot for the center of their target in these situations, Singletary said.
"We do not want to hurt anyone, but if we are justified in using deadly force, I want our officers to shoot for center of mass," he said. "We are not causing the situation, they are.
"It's a tough situation, I know it sounds harsh, but we don't shoot to wound, we just shoot to stop the bad guy. And hopefully he'll live, but the main thing is stopping him and we have a better chance of stopping him if we shoot for center of mass."