A 64-year-old Akron man, whose daughter says was trying to turn over a pellet gun during a traffic stop, was shot to death Thursday morning by a University of Akron police officer just south of the campus.
The shooting occurred about 11 a.m. in the 600 block of Wolf Ledges Parkway, south of East Thornton Street, UA spokeswoman Eileen Korey said.
An investigator for the Summit County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the man as James Genda of Baird Street in Akron.
Genda had a lengthy municipal court record, with 81 charges filed against him since 1990. Nearly all involved a traffic violation or using improper license plates, court records show.
His daughter, Michelle Harbaugh, 44, of Erie, Pa., said Genda kept the pellet gun only as a means of protection while working on cars in his backyard.
In a Beacon Journal phone interview a few hours after the shooting, Harbaugh said her father was on his cellphone with his younger sister, who works at the main post office building on Wolf Ledges near the scene of the shooting, and that she saw — from a post office window — and heard everything unfold.
“He said he was reaching for the gun to hand it to the police officer. He told the police officer he had the gun, reached for it and the police officer shot,” Harbaugh said after discussing the incident with her aunt, who she identified as Debbie Genda.
Later Thursday, UA spokeswoman Laura Massie said university police investigators determined the gun was “a BB pistol.”
“The officer involved in the shooting saw what he thought was a handgun in the driver’s possession,” Massie said. She said the officer, whose name was not released, “thought it was a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol.”
The gun “looks exactly like a .45-caliber handgun. Black metal. No plastic tip,” Massie said.
University police and city police are conducting a joint investigation of the shooting, Akron Police Lt. Rick Edwards said.
Edwards, the department’s chief spokesman who was at the scene of the shooting in the morning along with many Crime Scene Unit officers and other investigators from both agencies, gave a brief account of what happened.
He said the UA officer made the traffic stop and approached the car, a white four-door Pontiac Sunfire, for having improper registration. The car was parked at that moment in a side driveway entrance of the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles office at 688 Wolf Ledges.
The officer then returned to his patrol car to check further on the Sunfire and found the license plates did not match the vehicle, Edwards said.
When the officer left his cruiser and approached the Sunfire a second time, the driver produced the handgun, and the officer fired in response, Edwards said.
The UA officer, a 10-year veteran, fired his service weapon, a Glock 9 mm, “several times,” Edwards said. No information was available, he said, about whether the officer and driver exchanged any words before the shooting.
“You have to take immediate action if you feel your life is in danger for one second,” Edwards told reporters at the scene.
Korey, the university’s chief communications official, said the UA officer was placed on paid administrative leave while the investigation continues. It is protocol to not release an officer’s name during the early stages of an investigation, she said.
The officer’s university patrol car was not equipped with a dashboard video camera, Korey said.
Moments after the shooting, the officer called the university’s dispatch center to report the incident. The recorded conversation of that call was not immediately available, she said.
In an email Thursday afternoon, Massie indicated UA would provide information, including the name of the officer involved, official records and any audio or video recordings, when the investigation is complete.
Harbaugh said a medical examiner’s official told her and her aunt that the officer fired 10 shots — five through the open driver-side window and five into the driver-side door.
She said the university officer had told Genda to get off his phone after the stop, so he placed the phone on the car’s dashboard but did not end the call to his sister. That’s how she heard everything, Harbaugh said.
Her father did not threaten the officer with the gun, she said, but rather was “pulling it out to give it to him.”
She said her father continued his conversation with his sister.
“He told her he wasn’t going down; he didn’t want to go to jail. He said going to jail was worse than anything he’s ever been through, and that he didn’t want to go back to jail,” Harbaugh said.
“Debbie said, ‘No, you’re going to go to jail, just deal with it, put your big-boy panties on. And he said, ‘No, I’m not going to jail, I’m not going to jail,’ ” she said.
Debbie Genda could not be reached for comment.
UA Police Chief Paul Callahan, a former Akron Police Department major who at one time led the city’s Detective Bureau, will lead the investigation into the shooting.
Beacon Journal staff writers Doug Livingston and Phil Trexler contributed to this report. Ed Meyer can be reached at 330-996-3784 or at emeyer@thebeaconjournal.com.