A police officer in Massachusetts was fatally shot over the weekend, sparking a daylong manhunt that ended with the suspected attacker dying in a shootout with police.
During this confrontation, authorities say Jorge A. Zambrano, 35, who is accused of shooting Officer Ronald Tarentino Jr., also shot and wounded a Massachusetts state trooper. The state trooper, who has not been identified, is expected to survive his injuries, according to Joseph D. Early Jr., the district attorney for Worcester County.
The bloody saga began early Sunday morning, when Tarentino of the Auburn, Mass., police force pulled over an Infiniti SUV at about 12:30 a.m. Tarentino was shot after stopping the car. He was then brought to a hospital in Worcester, where he later died, police say.
During the hours that followed, a number of law enforcement agencies — including local police forces, the state police and the FBI — began to search for the suspected attacker.
On Sunday evening, not long after 6 p.m., officers confronted Zambrano in an apartment in Oxford, Mass. Authorities say a brief exchange of gunfire in the second-floor bedroom ended with Zambrano fatally wounded and an unidentified trooper shot in the shoulder and taken to the hospital.
“The suspect appeared from inside the closet and fired on the troopers, striking one of them,” Col. Richard D. McKeon, head of the Massachusetts State Police, said during a news conference. Officers “returned fire and struck the suspect, inflicting life-threatening injuries,” he said.
The trooper who was injured is an 18-year veteran and a former Navy SEAL. McKeon said police are not releasing the trooper’s name to give his family privacy. On Monday, a state police spokesman said the trooper came out of surgery late Sunday night and remains in the hospital.
McKeon said police continue to investigate Tarentino’s death. The SUV that police believe Zambrano was driving when he encountered Tarentino was found at the property where Zambrano was killed and the trooper injures Sunday, and it has been towed and will be processed for evidence, the state police say.
Tarentino, a father of three, had been with the Auburn force for two years, transferring there after seven years with the police department in Leicester, Massachusetts, according to police officials.
He became the 38th police officer to die in the line of duty this year, according to groups that track law enforcement deaths.
So far this year, more police officers are dying from gunfire than other causes, with 19 officers fatally shot as of Monday. At the same time last year, 14 officers had been shot and killed, according to the National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund. (The overall number of officers who have been killed is down from the same time last year, as fewer officers are dying in traffic accidents and from other causes.)
In 2015, traffic stops were the leading circumstance that ended with an officer being shot and killed, the National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund said. In addition to such stops, the officers killed this year have been slain during a number of different incidents, including serving an eviction notice, responding to a home standoff that turned violent or, in Virginia, a trooper killed by a man inside a bus station.
Tarentino came from a law enforcement family. According to officials in Medford, Mass., his father, Ronald, retired from the police force there, while his uncle Lawrence James is an officer there.
“I just wish people had a little bit more respect for what they do – nobody has respect for them anymore,” Sharon Tarentino, his mother, told the Boston Herald. “You never think it’s going to happen to you, it hits you like a sledgehammer. It’s just not fair.”
Police officers from around the country, as well as retired officers and relatives of law enforcement officials, have expressed similar sentiments to what Sharon Tarentino said over the weekend. Even as the number of officers fatally killed has fallen, these officers and their family members say they are increasingly anxious amid a greater focus on police officers who use deadly force.
Sharon Tarentino told the Herald that her son was a “happy-go-lucky” man with three sons in their teens and 20s.
“It was his family and his job,” she said. “It took him a little while to figure it out. But that’s what he wanted to do.”
