This body camera footage highlights the importance of the use of body armor and how it saved one officers life. Officers exhchanged gun fire and a suspect after a foot chase september 23. Officer Lippe was shot by Nathaniel Sassafras 3 times. Twice in the torso and once in the arm. Sassafras was killed in the gunfire.
According to the DailyMail Body camera footage has been released by police showing the moment an officer arrives at a Baltimore street to find a man dead and his colleague injured after a shootout.
The video from the camera worn by officer Steven Foster captures the end of an exchange of gunfire in which his fellow officer Phillip Lippe was wounded and a man, identified as 29-year-old Nathaniel Sassafras, was killed.
It is not clear how the confrontation between Officer Lippe and Sassafras started, or who fired the first shots.
Interim Police Commissioner Gary Tuggle said only that the police officers were in Poppleton as a routine part of a new push to suppress violent crime, having stepped up their presence in the city.
‘We have taken extra steps with extra personnel to address the violence.
‘This was part of the initiative,’ Tuggle said, adding that Sassafras was not someone they were specifically targeting.
The gunfire erupted at around 6.30pm on Sunday September 23 and lasted until just before 7pm in the area of 800 block of Vine Street and Fremont Avenuel, in the west Baltimore neighborhood of Poppleton.
In the bodycam video, Foster speeds towards the scene and when he arrives the suspect is down and Lippe has been hit three times; in his arm and in the bullet proof vest he wore…