Police shoot man to death

Staff and Wire Reports

A police officer fatally shot a man believed to be part of an armed robbery on Tuesday. 

Police said the officer saw the man around 3 p.m. Tuesday and called investigators to join him at the Days Inn hotel off Interstate 35 in northeast Oklahoma City.

Police spokesman Captain Steve McCool said the man matched the description of a suspect wanted in the robberies of two Bank of Oklahoma branches inside area Homeland grocery stories.

The veteran officer saw the man but did not confront him. When the sergeant saw him again, about 40 minutes later, the man was wearing a different set of clothes. McCool says he asked the man to stop, but the man pulled out a gun and turned it towards the officer, who fired several rounds.

Emergency medical crews responded to the scene, but the man was pronounced dead on arrival at Presbyterian Hospital.

"The bottom line is we're out here to protect the citizens in this community," McCool said. "We had good information that this could possibly be the suspect and his vehicle."

Neither the man nor the officer were identified.

The officer was placed on routine administrative leave.