Police Officer Natalie Corona, the rookie cop who was killed in the line of duty Thursday night in Davis, Calif., was the victim of an “ambush”-style attack, authorities said.
Corona, 22, was fatally shot by a gunman who approached on a bicycle and then continued firing shots at a variety of targets before eventually killing himself as police followed him to his home.
“At this point,” Davis police Chief Darren Pytel said at a Friday news conference, “we’re speculating that [Officer Corona] never saw him.”
The suspect — described only as a white male in his 20s — had no prior criminal record or history of violence, according to police officials who spoke at the news conference.
Pytel declined to release the name of the gunman, noting that the attacker’s only previous contact with the department came last year when he was the victim of a crime that the chief said was “nothing that was extraordinary at all,” the Sacramento Bee reported.
The attack occurred around 7 p.m. as Officer Corona responded to a three-car collision. While she was at the scene, the gunman rode up on a bicycle, walked up to Corona and began firing, Pytel said.
The gunman then began firing indiscriminately, striking a nearby firetruck, a house, a passing bus and the backpack of a woman whose life was spared when the bullet became lodged in a textbook, the chief said.
“This clearly, to us, looks like an ambush,” Pytel told reporters.
After the shooting, the gunman ran toward a rental home he shared with a roommate where he gave no hint about the rampage he had just conducted outside, Pytel said.. – READ MORE