Submitted photo This screenshot highlights what the body camera showed of an officer preparing to shoot and then shooting at a man Oct. 12, 2023, in a Helena Avenue house in Youngstown. The body camera does not show the suspect because the officer was peering around a wall.

YOUNGSTOWN — When a Mahoning County grand jury in July refused to indict a Youngstown police officer who shot and killed Ricco Acevedo, 45, on Oct. 12, 2023, inside a home on Helena Avenue on the South Side, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation released the body camera videos on its website.

BCI, part of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, investigated Acevedo’s death at the request of Youngstown police Chief Carl Davis. At the end of its investigation, BCI turned over its evidence to the Ohio Attorney General’s Special Prosecutions Section to present the case to a Mahoning County grand jury, which refused to indict.

It was the first time the Youngstown Police Department had an officer-involved shooting that was captured on body camera, said Lt. Brian Butler, head of the internal affairs division of the Youngstown Police Department. The recordings provided “great evidence” to show how this unusual case unfolded, he said.

When the shooting took place, few details were provided — a 9:13 a.m. call for a burglary, a 9:41 a.m. police radio call for “shots fired” and a man being killed by police.

But the body camera video from the officer who fired the shots explains what turned out to be a 21-minute effort to figure out who the alleged burglar was and more importantly what he was doing in the home of a man locked up in the Mahoning County jail. The homeowner’s mother, who made the initial 911 call, said the home was supposed to be empty.

When the officer arrived on Helena at 9:21 a.m., he spoke with the homeowner’s mother, Elizabeth Cuevas, who said she saw a man coming down the steps of her son’s house she did not know.

The officer met Acevedo about a minute later. Acevedo was calmly holding a garbage bag in the driveway of the home and said he was there making plumbing and drywall repairs for the owner, who was in jail.

The interaction between the officer and Acevedo was cordial, polite and conversational. Acevedo offered to show the officer the work he was doing in the house, and they walked inside. The officer told Acevedo the homeowner’s mother “basically called you in as a burglar.”

“Really,” Acevedo said as he climbed the steps.

“You don’t look like a burglar to me,” the officer said. Acevedo chatted about the amount of money the owner was going to pay him, several hundred dollars. Even though the officer was being conversational, it was clear he was quizzing Acevedo to see if his story lined up.

“How long since you’ve seen him,” the officer asked Acevedo of the homeowner. “I saw him maybe about a month ago,” Acevedo said while showing the officer the bathroom’s plumbing. They walked back outside, and the officer left Acevedo in the driveway to find Elizabeth Cuevas and talk to her again, this time with Acevedo standing nearby.

“That way she knows you and you know her,” the officer said. Acevedo said her son hired him a month ago and gave him a key.

“Well guess what? We changed the locks,” Elizabeth Cuevas said, explaining that someone broke in a few days earlier and stole seven bicycles. “Did you steal the bikes too?” she asked Acevedo.

“I’m working,” Acevedo said.

“He’s not working on the house,” she said, not believing him.

“I promise you, I’m going to do a good job,” Acevedo said.

“No,” the woman said. “I don’t know you from Adam. I want to know how you got in the house if we just changed the lock on the door. That just happened a few days ago. No. He’s lying,” she said.

The officer said, “I’ve never had a guy break into a house and be working on it.” To try to verify his story, Acevedo tried to find the key he said he used to enter the front door that day. Acevedo looked at keys in the house but did not find one that opened the front door.

Acevedo was believable enough that two officers allowed him to enter the home alone because Acevedo said he was going to continue looking for the key. The officers waited outside on the front porch, discussing whether to believe Acevedo. “But he can’t seem to find the key he used to get in here. So he is a little screwy,” the first officer said.

Acevedo told the first officer his name was “Rick Burkiemer” and gave a birthdate and social security number. The information turned out to be false. He said his girlfriend dropped him off. The first officer went to his cruiser and ran the date of birth and social security number Acevedo gave but did not get a match in the database.

When the officer returned to the house, he told Acevedo the social security number and date of birth “doesn’t come back to anybody named Burkiemer” and “doesn’t match to a person.” He told Acevedo to put his hands on the wall. Acevedo protested, saying “I didn’t do anything.” A fellow officer stood close by. Suddenly, Acevedo bolted for the front door. The first officer chased after him into the house. Acevedo could be heard saying “I’ve got a gun on me,” which apparently was not true.

“So have I,” the officer said.

Acevedo went into an upstairs room, and the officer was behind a wall at the top of the stairwell with his gun drawn, ordering Acevedo to “Get on the ground,” and “Put that gun down,” but Acevedo said “No,” and “I’m not tossing it.” Then Acevedo gave the officer his real name, and the officer told Acevedo “Do not (mess) this up.” It was a tense situation, though both men spoke mostly in measured tones.

“I don’t care. I have nothing to live for,” Acevedo said, referring to the danger he was in. “I’m just trying to make some (deleted) money. My mom just died. I’m not doing this anymore. The truth is I met Cuevas in jail. He told me to come do some … work on the house.”

The officer asked Acevedo why he was putting himself in this position if he was telling the truth about having permission to be in the house, saying a “phone call could straighten this (deleted) out.”

“Because I don’t trust the police,” Acevedo said.

The officer told Acevedo to “Trust this. Toss that (deleted) gun down or this is going to end very badly for you.”

“I don’t care about that anymore,” Acevedo said. “I know where I’m going. I respect law enforcement, but this is wrong. You ever shoot somebody?”

“Yep,” the officer said.

“Well, you’re going to have to shoot me. I’m not going to jail. Hear me?”

“Gotcha,” the officer replied.

“At least three times. You understand?” Acevedo continued. After two seconds of silence, the officer fired three shots.

Another officer’s body camera shows the officer from behind, but neither the shooting officer’s body camera or the other officers’ body cameras captured those two seconds or showed what the officer was seeing when he fired.

Three seconds later, as the shooting officer moved forward, Acevedo is seen on a body camera on the floor in the hallway. He is making sounds, but not moving. Officers called immediately for an ambulance, handcuffed Acevedo, and an officer applied pressure to the wounds in Acevedo’s chest.

BCI DOCUMENTS

An Incident Summary / Overview BCI provided to prosecutors based on the results of their investigation states that the officer fired at Acevedo because Acevedo “ran out of the room he was inside and begins moving towards” the officer “while trying to get something out of his waistband.”

It states that Acevedo “then began to pull what appeared (to the officer) to be a chrome revolver from his waistband.”

After firing at Acevedo, the officer “observed an object on the floor not far from where Acevedo was lying in the doorway to the bathroom,” the summary states. The officer “believed it was a handgun, but when he looked closer, he realized the object was not a gun,” it states.

The summary contains a list of items taken as evidence at the scene. Among them was a “buffing wheel cleaning tool.” A photo in the summary about the object shows a buffing-wheel tool on a wooden floor like the one where Acevedo was killed. The tool is about the shape of a handgun but has a silver, metal wheel on the end where a gun barrel would be.

The placement of the photo in the summary suggests that it was the item the officer saw on the floor after shooting Acevedo. The officer later told investigators during an interview that he had never had any contact with Acevedo before that day.

Acevedo, a Boardman High School graduate whose address was in Boardman, had worked in home improvement and landscaping and had been a professional mixed martial arts fighter and boxer, according to his obituary. He won all but three of his 80 fights and was Toughman Champion at Packard Music Hall in 2004, it stated.

He had been in trouble with the law, most notably a six-year prison sentence in 2016 for punching and kicking his girlfriend in her Girard home in 2015. She had to have reconstructive surgery on her eye socket, she told a Tribune Chronicle reporter.

BUTLER

Lt. Brian Butler, of the internal affairs division, said of body cameras: “It’s just amazing the technology. I think I have a greater appreciation for it myself because I investigated 12 or 13 years (in internal affairs) without it, and now we have first-person, high-definition, perfect audio accounts from body cams.”

Before body cameras, internal affairs investigators would investigate from “whatever evidence we could gather. If there was surveillance video of it, that was outstanding. And that was very rare,” he said.

“This is such a great illustration of body cams and the transparency they provide us,” he said of the Acevedo case. Butler said it might be difficult to convey to someone all of the reasons this situation unfolded the way it did. Having body camera video and audio, makes that job easier, he said.

As for this shooting, he found it “very different” in that it “evolved for so long, that dialogue.” He said in most cases in which an officer fires at someone, it happens more quickly, not long after a person sees an officer in uniform.

A 2019 officer-involved killing in Niles, for instance, involved officers who shot at a man whose car was boxed in between multiple police cruisers. Officers fired multiple times from in front and behind the vehicle as the driver moved his vehicle forward and backward.

There was some body camera video and citizen video in that episode, but none that showed the moments before the gunfire started.

An officer-involved killing in 2022 involving Struthers police chasing a man in a vehicle ended quickly after the man’s car was boxed in on Youngstown’s West Side and an officer fired into the suspect’s car. There was body-camera video and a surveillance video in that episode.

Butler said the Acevedo case is the first time that the YPD asked BCI to handle the criminal investigation into an officer-involved killing. But since then, BCI has handled additional ones.