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A Grand Rapids police officer was not charged after he shot and killed Gabriel Desean Hood during a March 2010 moped stop, with a Kent County prosecutor's review finding the officer acted in self defense.

Officer Donald Lake, a 15-year veteran assigned to the department's north service area, stopped the moped about 4:30 p.m. on March 18, 2010, on Center Avenue NE near Ann Street on the city's northeast side. Kent County Prosecutor William Forsyth said Lake pulled it over because state law does not allow a second rider. Hood, 33, and his 17-year-old passenger, Shaykila Sledge, both gave false names and ages.

Lake was frisking Hood and starting to handcuff him when Hood twisted free, lost his jacket in the struggle and ran east between two houses, according to Forsyth's opinion, which cited the officer's cruiser video. Hood had told Lake he was unarmed, but pulled a 9 mm handgun from his waistband within a few steps. The driveway he ran down dead-ended at a 7-foot fence he could not climb.

Lake ordered Hood several times to drop the weapon and then yelled, "Drop it. Drop it or I'm going to kill you," according to the officer's radio traffic and cruiser video. Forsyth's review found Hood turned and pointed the gun toward Lake. Lake fired five shots, hitting Hood three times in the chest. Hood died at Spectrum Health Butterworth Hospital. Police said he never fired.

Forsyth announced on April 13, 2010, that the shooting was legally justified. "The evidence in this matter is overwhelming that Gabriel Desean Hood presented an immediate danger of death or great bodily harm to Officer Lake and that Officer Lake acted properly," he wrote. Sledge told investigators the night of the shooting that she believed Hood was about to fire on the officer. Police Chief Kevin Belk had said days earlier that he saw nothing in the case that concerned him. Lake, placed on paid administrative leave after the shooting, was not charged.

Hood was a parole absconder who stopped reporting to his parole agent in the fall of 2009, state records showed, and he was wanted on drug and weapons charges. He had served prison time for a 1997 armed robbery conviction that was reduced from a homicide charge in Detroit, and for a 2005 cocaine delivery conviction in Kent County. Officers found heroin, marijuana and $1,258 on him, Forsyth said. Hood's fiancee, Delannie Lawn, called the shooting unnecessary and said he had drawn the gun only to get rid of it, an account Belk said the evidence did not support. The Grand Rapids Press reported in December 2010 that the Smith & Wesson pistol Hood carried had been stolen from a Lowell Township home less than three months before the shooting.

The attached audio is a 30-minute recording of Grand Rapids police radio traffic captured from a scanner. It carries several channels at once rather than a single dispatch channel, and it covers the stop, the foot chase, the shots-fired call, the request for an ambulance and the perimeter officers set up afterward. Because more than one channel is running, unrelated routine traffic from those other channels is mixed in throughout, so much of the half hour is ordinary police business that has nothing to do with the shooting.