SAN JOSE — Officers shot and killed a man Monday night believed to be connected to a gruesome homicide last week on Lundy Avenue — less than 24 hours after police shot and killed another man while conducting a follow-up investigation to that same crime, a department spokesman confirmed.
The shooting was reported just before 7 p.m. on Kirkhaven Court at Stoneyhaven Way, San Jose police Sgt. Enrique Garcia said. The man, who has not been named, was being tailed by officers earlier Monday afternoon after he had not only been identified as one of the suspects in the death of 38-year-old Christopher Maxwell Wrenn, but officers also learned that the suspect planned to kill again Monday. His victim was believed to be a woman who was in the car with the suspect when officers began tailing him, police said.
Garcia said that at some point the suspect — who had a felony homicide warrant — realized he was being followed by officers with the department’s MERGE (SWAT) team, and led them on a chase that ended when he crashed his car on Kirkhaven Court and ran out from the vehicle.
One officer following the man jumped out of a car and ran after him. As the suspect headed toward a home on Kirkhaven Court, Garcia said he reached for his waistband. The officer opened fire, hitting the suspect, and the man was declared dead at the scene a short time later.
Garcia said the man was one of the suspects seen in footage obtained by police of last Thursday night’s homicide. Garcia said the video shows three men — each armed with a weapon — “terrorizing” Wrenn before he was killed.
“I can’t imagine what that victim was going through,” Garcia said. “They terrorized him before they killed him.”
The sister of the suspect who was killed Monday night declined to state her name when she approached media outside the crime scene. Wiping her face with a white towel, she told reporters, “This ain’t right … Read between the lines here.”
Monday night’s shooting mirrored similar circumstances from an officer-involved shooting less than a day before, when San Jose police opened fire just after 10 p.m. Sunday in front of a laundromat on Senter Road near Capitol Expressway. In that instance, officers with SJPD’s Covert Response Unit were tracking a suspect connected to the same homicide that left Wrenn mortally wounded in an office complex last week.
A third suspect in that homicide is still at-large, Garcia said, but he would not release details on that individual late Monday.
Monday night’s officer-involved shooting was the second in less than 24 hours, and the fourth for the department in nine days.
“This is a very complicated case,” Garcia said.
Contact Katie Nelson at 408-920-5006 and follow her at Twitter.com/katienelson210.
