EAST LANSING, Mich. — The woman who called 911 from outside the Lake Lansing Road Meijer store in East Lansing sounded calm enough.
"Some guy just went got out of his car, started in towards the store came back and pulled a gun out of his car and ran into the store," she told an Ingham County 911 operator on the evening of April 25. East Lansing police released an audio recording of the call to FOX 47 News on Friday.
The police who responded to that call would shoot a young Black man that night as he ran away from them through the store's parking lot. Two officers involved, Jose Viera and Jim Menser, were placed on administrative leave while the Michigan State Police conducted an investigation.
The man who was shot, identified by Black Lives Matter Lansing activists as DeAnthony VanAtten, was taken to the hospital and later held in the Ingham County Jail on a probation violation warrant.
The caller that night answered the 911 operator's questions. The man she saw was Black, in his 20s, wearing a black and yellow jacket.
"And he has a mask that covers every bit of his face except for his eyes," a second speaker says over the phone.
The called described the gun, the car, told the operator where the man had entered store and that a woman was still sitting in the man's car.
She said she was leaving the parking lot "because I don't want to be involved in that."
And then she called back to give police the car's license plate number.
East Lansing's Independent Police Oversight Commission has called for the release of additional video from the scene and asked city officials to investigate what kind of training officers and dispatchers get in dealing with bias-driven calls for service.
Michigan State Police have concluded their investigation of the incident and turned it over to the state Attorney General's Office today.
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