A U.S. Park Police officer was arraigned on an involuntary manslaughter charge Monday for allegedly shooting and killing a fellow officer early Sunday morning in Fairfax County.
Police said three off-duty park police officers were hanging out and drinking alcohol at an apartment on Old Meadow Road in McLean, Virginia, when 25-year-old Alexander Roy accidentally shot and killed his colleague, 22-year-old Jesse Brown Hernandez.
Video captured a massive police response outside the apartment shortly after midnight.
In dispatch audio, the dispatcher can be heard saying those involved were “trying to control bleeding and some of these people may be off-duty law enforcement."
A neighbor who declined to provide her name heard what was happening and ran for cover.
"I was like, if I can hear everything, I don't want any stray bullets coming into my apartment, so I ran to my room to stay far away,” she said.
Once she heard things calm down, she went back to her front door.
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"I peeped like through my peephole, and I saw him open his door with his hands up," she said, referring to Roy, who was arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter.
Roy, a United States Park Police officer, was with two coworkers and a fourth person inside his apartment when the shooting happened.
“Inside the apartment they were consuming alcohol. They were attempting to dry-fire firearms," Jim Curry, of the Fairfax County Police Department, said.
“Dry-firing” is when someone pulls the trigger of an unloaded gun, but Roy's gun was loaded, and police said he accidentally shot and killed Hernandez, another Park Police officer.
“Alcohol and guns don't mix, and that's certainly a lesson that we have to remind our community and the younger adults involved in this, too," Curry said.
News4 asked the U.S. Park Police for background on the two officers, but the department declined to provide any information other than a statement it issued Sunday, which expressed sympathy for the friends, family and coworkers of the officers involved in the incident.
Roy is due back in court in February.
