KSP: Body camera shows moments before undercover LMPD officer shot, killed attempted carjacker
“Based on bodycam footage, Mr. Jaggers was armed when he opened the driver’s side door of the police vehicle,” KSP Capitan Paul Blanton said.
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LOUISVILLE, Ky. — WARNING: This story contains graphic content that may be disturbing for some readers. Viewer discretion is advised.
Kentucky State Police have released officer body camera video of the fatal police shooting in the Portland neighborhood earlier this month.
On June 19, Mark Jaggers Jr., 21, was shot and killed by an undercover detective with the Louisville Metro Police Department’s Fugitive Unit.
Detective Matthew Hayden was conducting surveillance of a home for a separate case in an alley near Griffiths Avenue and North 22nd Street around 1:30 p.m.
The body camera footage shows Jaggers, who is wearing a black mask, running up to the undercover officer and opening the driver’s side door. He then points a handgun inside the car.
Credit: Kentucky State Police
Newly released body camera footage shows Mark Jaggers Jr. pointing a gun at undercover officers after opening the door of their car.
Hayden, a 10-year veteran with LMPD, immediately draws his gun and fires several shots at Jaggers, who then falls to the ground.
The video then shows Hayden waiting for backup to arrive and officers begin performing CPR and other life-saving measures on Jaggers.
EMS eventually arrived on the scene and transported Jaggers to UofL Hospital where he later died from his injuries.
Credit: Kentucky State Police
A screenshot highlights the gun Mark Jaggers Jr. held as he reportedly tried to carjack an undercover LMPD officer.
“Based on bodycam footage, Mr. Jaggers was armed when he opened the driver’s side door of the police vehicle, and when the bullets fired by Officer Hayden struck him,” KSP Capitan Paul Blanton said.
KSP’s investigation remains ongoing and Blanton said no further information will be released until it is complete. It’s unclear how long that could take.
Days after the shooting, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg said Officer Hayden “acted appropriately, heroically, and bravely, and rapidly in response to someone trying to carjack his car while he was in the line of duty.”
Greenberg also released a statement on Thursday and said,
“I want to thank the Kentucky State Police for their assistance with this investigation and I appreciate their hard work to release this video in a timely manner. Any time a person loses their life like this it is a tragedy. In this case, it is clear from the video that the officer was protecting his own life from an armed assailant. He quickly called for help, rendered aid, and made sure to record the entire encounter by activating his body-worn camera.
This is another tragic example of why we must keep guns off our streets and ensure we are doing all we can to prevent young people from turning to violence and crime. Our administration and the entire community remain committed to that goal.”
Louisville police say man fatally shot while trying to carjack undercover police officers
- Jun 19, 2023 Updated Jun 20, 2023
A man was shot and killed by an LMPD officer Monday afternoon after police said he tried to carjack two undercover officers.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — A man was shot and killed by a Louisville Metro Police officer Monday afternoon after police said he tried to carjack two undercover officers in Louisville’s Portland neighborhood. But the man’s father is pushing back on what police say led up to his son’s death.
According to Interim Police Chief Jackie Gwinn-Villaroel, the incident took place just after 1:30 p.m. near the intersection of Griffiths Avenue and North 22nd Street.
Gwinn-Villaroel said two undercover officers with LMPD’s Fugitive Unit were inside a vehicle attempting to apprehend a suspect in an unrelated investigation when their vehicle was approached by a man in his 20s.
According to Gwinn-Villaroel, the man had a gun and attempted to carjack the officers.
One of the officers — a 10-year veteran of the department — shot the man with his service weapon.
The officers immediately tried to render medical aid, according to Gwinn-Villaroel, but the suspect died as a result of his injuries.
Neither of the officers were injured.
Hours after the shooting, a man named Mark Jaggers reached out to WDRB News. He said his son, Mark Jaggers Jr., wasn’t trying to carjack anyone and that he thought the car was dumped off near their Portland home and wanted to take it for a joyride. When he opened the door, two undercover officers were inside.
“That car was sitting here for three hours,” said Jaggers. “My son thought it was a stolen car.”
Jaggers said he watched video from a neighbor’s security camera after the shooting. He said the alley where it happened is a known drop-off spot for dumped cars.
“The suspect attempted to carjack the officers with a gun,” Chief Gwinn-Villaroel said at the scene. “One of the officers shot the suspect with his service weapon.”
Jaggers said when he got the call, he heard someone screaming “in the alley.”
“And when I got here, that’s when I saw my boy on the ground,” he said.
Jaggers’ son died at the hospital. His father is pushing back on the accusation that his son was trying to carjack the officers. He doesn’t believe his son knew anyone was inside the car.
“My son thought it was a dumped car. I know it’s still illegal, I know. But it’s not worth getting shot over,” he said.
Hours after the shooting, in the same area where it happened, friends and family released balloons in his memory as they wait for more answers and Jaggers prepares to bury his son.
Kentucky State Police will lead the investigation into the shooting, Gwinn-Villaroel said. The agency has statewide jurisdiction and investigates police shootings throughout the state at the request of local law enforcement agencies.
Police later said Rex Wright Jr., 23, is the person detectives were initially looking for. He turned himself in after the shooting. He was wanted for a non-fatal shooting incident.
Wright is charged with one count of assault and six counts of wanton endangerment in connection with an incident on May 28, 2023.
Copyright 2023 WDRB Media. All Rights Reserved.
Why the mid-30s are a major turning point for men’s heart health
Men face a higher risk of cardiovascular disease earlier than women, so experts recommend seeing a doctor for regular check-ups.
SOURCE: Maskot/Getty Images via CNN Newsource
Men develop a greater risk of cardiovascular disease years earlier than women — starting at around age 35, according to a new long-term study.
The report, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association, followed more than 5,000 adults from young adulthood and found that men reached clinically significant levels of cardiovascular disease about seven years earlier than women.
Experts advise both men and women to monitor their heart health in early adulthood and to see their doctor regularly.
“Heart disease doesn’t happen overnight; it develops over years. One of the things I think oftentimes people aren’t aware of is that it can start really early in your 30s or 40s,” said study coauthor Dr. Sadiya Khan, professor of cardiovascular epidemiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
“Even if you don’t have heart disease at that time, your risk can start at that time.”
A long-cited “10-year gap” in cardiovascular disease between men and women is driven mostly by coronary heart disease, a narrowing or clogging of the heart’s arteries caused by plaque buildup, in men.
“The 10-year-gap is a commonly cited statistic that men develop heart disease about 10 years before women. A lot of the initial research on that looked specifically at coronary heart disease, a subtype of cardiovascular disease,” said senior study author Alexa Freedman, assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
The mix of risk factors for cardiovascular disease has changed over time, Freedman noted. “Smoking rates were higher for men, and they have lowered and are now more similar between men and women. Hypertension is now more similar between men and women,” she said.
Freedman’s team wanted to find out whether the gap exists in other types of cardiovascular disease, such as heart failure and stroke. The team examined premature cardiovascular disease, defined as disease occurring before age 65, and analyzed both overall cardiovascular disease and specific subtypes of coronary heart disease, stroke and heart failure.
Tracking heart health from young adulthood
The analysis draws on data from 5,112 Black and White adults across four US states who were enrolled in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study between 1985 and 1986, when they were between 18 and 30 years old.
All participants were healthy and free of cardiovascular disease when they enrolled in the study. Participants have been followed for a median of 34.1 years, with regular clinical exams and surveys; 160 women and 227 men experienced cardiovascular disease events.
Freedman said that participants entered the study well before the onset of most cardiovascular risk, so researchers were able to precisely measure when disease emerged — a major advantage over studies that enroll patients later in life.
The risk gap widens by the mid-30s
One of the study’s most striking findings came from an analysis of rolling 10-year risk windows. Rather than estimating a single lifetime risk, the researchers calculated the probability of developing cardiovascular disease over the next decade at each age.
Up until their early 30s, men and women had similar short-term cardiovascular risk. But at around age 35, the risk began to diverge. Men began to face a consistently higher 10-year risk than women. Case in point: By age 50, the 10-year risk of cardiovascular disease was about 6% for men, compared with roughly 3% for women.
Over the follow-up period, men developed cardiovascular disease earlier than women. By about age 50, 5% of men had developed cardiovascular disease — nearly seven years earlier than women, who reached the same level around age 57.
Specifically for coronary heart disease, the difference in risk between men and women was even more pronounced. “In our study, about 2% of men had developed coronary heart disease by age 48 or so, and for women, they didn’t reach that incidence until closer to 58, so we saw that 10-year gap,” Freedman said.
The study found that this difference was not explained by traditional risk factors such as blood pressure, cholesterol or smoking. However, Dr. Iris Jaffe, the executive director of the Molecular Cardiology Research Institute at Tufts Medical Center, explained that there are still other “social determinants that are hard to factor in.” She was not involved in the new research.
“Women do different kinds of work than men. Women are under different kinds of stress. Those kinds of things were not accounted for,” she said.
Jaffe also said that more research should be done to understand these biological differences. “I study the biology behind all of this, and I think that there’s certainly some biological difference between men and women that explain some of this that we’re only starting to begin to scratch the surface to understand.”
By contrast, the researchers found no meaningful sex difference in stroke risk; men and women reached similar stroke incidence at nearly the same ages. Heart failure also showed little difference early on, but men had a slightly higher incidence rate by age 65.
Despite the results of this paper, Jaffe emphasized that women should still monitor their heart health.
“I worry that a study like this will make women think that they don’t have to worry about their heart health. Ultimately, heart disease is a leading cause of death for women also,” she said. “Everyone should pay more attention in young adulthood to their health and to preventing heart disease.”
This is especially important because women’s risk for heart disease can accelerate after menopause, Khan explained.
“The hypothesis is that estrogen can be protective, so that women may develop risk for heart disease later, by about 10 years, but then after menopause, it catches up,” Khan said. “After menopause, and particularly during that perimenopause period for women, that risk can accelerate.”
The average age of menopause in the US is 52, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Putting prevention into practice
The study arrives as cardiovascular guidelines are slowly shifting toward earlier risk assessment. Updated American Heart Association risk equations now allow clinicians to estimate cardiovascular risk starting at age 30, rather than 40, a move Freedman said is supported by their findings.
The results also raise questions about health care access and utilization. Young adult women tend to have far more preventive care visits than men, largely due to reproductive health care, which may facilitate earlier risk detection and counseling, the study authors wrote.
“Young men are much less likely to see a doctor for routine care in their mid 30s and 40s, so increasing the preventive care visits, particularly for young men, is one way that we could potentially promote heart health and reduce cardiovascular disease risk,” Freedman said.
Jaffe recommended that young adults see a physician at least once a year and have their blood pressure and cholesterol checked. Need more guidance? She suggested that young adults follow the American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8, which are actions people can take to maintain healthy cardiovascular health.
“Most of them are to manage the traditional risk factors, like avoiding tobacco, managing your weight, managing blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, but then it includes eating better, being more active and getting healthy sleep,” Jaffe said. “Those are the things that everyone can do to decrease the risk of heart disease.”
Khan added that everyone should track their cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar levels. “Know where your risk factors are, you know where your risk is, and then you can act on it,” she said.
