A man who was shot by a Baltimore County Police officer moonlighting as a security guard in Parkville has died, Baltimore County Police and Fire confirmed Tuesday.
A report of a black SUV driving erratically across the parking lot of the Parkway Crossing shopping center set the stage for a confrontation that would cost 28-year-old Derrick Sellman his life.
His family is still trying to absorb its loss, but a neighbor, Stepheny Stottlemire, is mourning as well.
"He was a very good kid. He was very well spoken, very bubbly, very pleasant to be around. This world lost a great person," said Stottlemire.
Which makes the events leading up to his death at the wrong end of a Baltimore County police officer's service revolver that much more difficult to make sense of.
Police say the off-duty officer working a second job as a security guard at the shopping center confronted Sellman.
"The officer starts to interact with the driver. Within seconds, that driver accelerates the SUV,” said Cpl. Shawn Vinson of the Baltimore County Police Department, “At this point, the officer is being dragged in between the doorway of the SUV and the interior of the vehicle and then the car strikes a white vehicle, a white Toyota that was traveling in the opposite direction, and the officer actually makes impact with that white vehicle also."
The officer then got off at least one shot from his handgun at point-blank range that would prove to be fatal.
"Sometimes you can be in a situation and "Bam!" It's gone and who knows what the officer had in mind or how he approached that,” said James Tucker, who also lives near the suspect’s family, “There are not too many people who can get hit by a moving vehicle and the anxiety not go up."
Sellman, we're told by a family friend, had just gotten off work and had stopped at the center driving his aunt's vehicle to pick up a pizza just six blocks from his family's home.
"It makes no sense,” said Stottlemire, “I can't even wrap my brain around how it goes from something so small to something so big."
At last word, the unidentified police officer had been treated and released from the Shock Trauma Center, but investigators had not yet questioned him.
The Chief Medical Examiner will perform an autopsy on Derrick Sellman as part of the investigation.
