[Sacramento Bee] DAVIS - Davis police officer Natalie Corona died as the result of a chilling, resolute ambush by a city resident on a bicycle who rode up to an accident scene she was investigating Thursday night, then opened fire with a hail of bullets from a semiautomatic handgun, police said.Chief Darren Pytel described an inexplicable attack that began just before 7 p.m. near 5th and D streets as Corona responded to a minor three-car collision.
As she stood talking to one of the motorists, the gunman glided up on a bicycle, stopping in the shadows on a sidewalk, then walked toward the 22-year-old rookie police officer and began firing.
"The suspect basically just opened up firing, shot her once and she went down to the ground, and he ended up shooting her multiple times," Pytel said at a news conference Friday night at police headquarters. "At that point, he unloaded a magazine, reloaded and started shooting in another direction."
The shooting 24 hours before was indiscriminate, Pytel said: Corona, who was wearing a protective vest, was shot in the neck and went down, then shot numerous more times.
“This clearly, to us, looks like an ambush,” the chief said, adding, “At this point, we’re speculating that she never saw him.”
After shooting Corona, the gunman opened up on the surrounding scene, striking a nearby fire engine, a house, a passing bus, shooting through a backpack worn by a young woman who was saved when the round lodged in a textbook, and firing at a firefighter running away who was struck in his boot but uninjured.
Somehow, Corona was the only casualty of the shooting spree, which ended when the gunman ran toward a rental home he shared with a roommate at 501 E St., Pytel said.
“It appeared that he basically circled the block,” Pytel said, leaving behind a backpack and going inside his home. Once there, Pytel said, the gunman met up with his roommate but gave no hint of the rampage he had just conducted outside.
Police from throughout the region rushed to the normally quiet college town, eventually surrounding the home.
But even that show of force seemed to have little impact as the gunman emerged from the house.
“At one point he did come out,” Pytel said. “It appeared to officers that he was wearing a ballistic vest, a bulletproof vest. He shouted some stuff, went back in and came back out with a firearm, then went back inside, pushed a couch in front of the door and officers heard a gunshot.”
The gunman had shot himself in the head inside the home, Pytel said, leaving a complete mystery for now about what might have set him off.
Authorities still have not released the gunman’s name, saying they may not do so before next week, but Pytel said he had no known history of violence or threats. His only prior contact with Davis police came last year when he reported being a victim of a crime, “nothing that was extraordinary at all,” the chief said.
Despite the rampage, police responding to the scene never fired a single shot, Pytel said, and much of the initial shooting apparently was captured by the in-car camera in Corona’s SUV.
“It sounds like sounds like the video kept running, and it hadn’t even downloaded into the system because the video was so long from the in-car camera,” he said.
Corona also was wearing a body camera, but Pytel said he was not certain whether that had been activated; given that she was investigating a minor traffic mishap, she may not have turned it on, he said.
Corona, who graduated from the Sacramento Police Department’s training academy in July and completed her field training just before Christmas, responded to the accident scene alone.