Body-Camera Video Shows Chaos Around Fatal Police Shooting of N.J. Woman

Newly released police body-camera footage shows the chaotic scene when a police officer in Fort Lee, N.J., fatally shot a 25-year-old woman in her apartment last month after he responded to a call about a person experiencing a mental health crisis and holding a knife.

The family of the woman, Victoria G. Lee, had previously condemned the shooting, saying officers had escalated a nonthreatening episode to the point that it turned lethal.

The footage, released Friday by New Jersey’s attorney general, Matthew J. Platkin, shows the officer who fired the fatal shot, Tony Pickens Jr., and other officers standing outside Ms. Lee’s apartment door at a complex on Main Street just before 1:30 a.m. on July 28. The officers repeatedly asked, and then ordered, her to open the locked door.

“I’m going to break the door down,” Officer Pickens says at one point to Ms. Lee, whose mother is with her inside the apartment.

“Go ahead,” Ms. Lee responds, adding with a vulgarity, “I’m going to stab you” in the neck.

She continues, “Shoot me if you want to.”

“We don’t want to shoot you,” another officer says. “We want to talk to you.”

But about 45 seconds later, Officer Pickens forces the door open and, within seconds, fires a single shot at Ms. Lee, who is striding forward as officers yell at her to “drop the knife.” She is holding a large plastic jug of water in one hand and a small, unidentifiable object in the other, the footage shows. She then falls to the ground as her mother screams. She was declared dead at a hospital about 30 minutes later, according to a news release from the attorney general’s office.

The office is investigating the shooting and met with representatives of Ms. Lee’s family to review the footage before it was shared publicly, the release said. There are five videos, none longer than four minutes, which show different angles of the events before, during and after the shooting.

A lawyer for Ms. Lee’s family did not respond to a request for comment about the footage on Friday.

Police departments across the United States have come under increasing scrutiny for how they respond to people in mental distress, especially when those encounters lead to injuries and death. New Jersey started a pilot program called Arrive Together in 2021 that pairs responding law enforcement officers with mental health professionals, but most municipalities in Bergen County, including Fort Lee, do not participate.

Ms. Lee was told in 2017 that she had bipolar disorder, according to a statement from her family. The night of the shooting, a man called 911 twice to say that his sister was having a mental health crisis and to ask that she be taken to a hospital, according to recordings released by the attorney general’s office.

During the first 911 call, at 1:13 a.m., a dispatcher told the man an ambulance and police officers would respond. When the man said “just the ambulance” would suffice, the dispatcher replied that officers had to go on mental health calls to protect ambulance workers.

In the second 911 call soon after, the man asked to cancel the first call, but the dispatcher asked him why and told him mental health calls could not be canceled. The man said that his sister had a “foldable” knife, but she was “just holding it.”

As seen in the body-camera footage, Officer Pickens is the first officer on the scene around 1:26 a.m. and meets Ms. Lee’s brother as he is leaving the apartment. Officer Pickens pushes the door open to reveal Ms. Lee in a black T-shirt, standing behind her mother, who is cradling a barking corgi. Ms. Lee pushes the door shut.

As Officer Pickens urges Ms. Lee to open the door, several other officers arrive in the hallway and guide the brother away. By the time Officer Pickens forces his way into the apartment, the officers are crowded around the apartment door, including one who is holding a shield.

After Officer Pickens shoots Ms. Lee, she falls to the floor in the apartment’s doorway, water from the large jug spilling around her. The officers pull her into the hallway and frantically try to render lifesaving aid as some of them curse. A knife was found at the scene, the attorney general’s release said.

The Fort Lee Police Department did not respond to requests for comment about Officer Pickens’s employment status. He has been a Fort Lee officer since 2015, according to state pension records. The attorney general’s office declined to comment beyond its news release.

After reviewing the footage, Christopher Herrmann, an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the shooting appeared to be justified.

“The fact that there seemed to be urgency, the fact that she threatened, the fact that there was a knife — all those things point to a very kind of simple self-defense type of scenario,” Professor Herrmann said.

Ray Mey, a retired F.B.I. agent who serves as an expert witness with Park Dietz and Associates, said that knowing Ms. Lee had a knife had required the officers to take urgent action to get into the apartment. But he questioned the use of deadly force and suggested that officers could have tried to defuse the situation.

That the episode ended as it did is not uncommon. In 2020, the year before the Arrive Together program began, two-thirds of uses of force by law enforcement in New Jersey involved someone with mental health or substance abuse problems, according to the program. So did over half of those that turned deadly.