Newly released bodycam video shows moment Tacoma officer shot armed man in late-August

TACOMA, Wash. — Newly released body camera video shows the chaos in the moments before a Tacoma police officer shot and killed an armed man.

The shooting happened nearly a month ago in the 6700 block of South Madison Street in Tacoma.

Peter Tyler Collins was shot and killed during a 16-minute shootout with Tacoma police back on Aug. 28.

We showed the video to some neighbors who were there when it happened.

Watching the video seemed to bring it all back for them — the fear and the uncertainty of what would happen next.

What sounded like a gun battle ended here with a man shot dead.

The video begins with images from a neighbor’s Ring camera.

We hear Peter Collins demanding that Tacoma police officers stop following him as he retreats into his home. Officers had concluded by then that he had already committed fourth-degree assault against a relative.

The next time they saw him, he was out back.

“Let me see your hands, man,” an officer yells at Collins. “Do not get in the car, man.”

“What?” Collins replies.

“Do not get in the car,” the officer yells.

Then, gunfire erupts.

“Shots fired,” officers shout. “Shots fired! Shots fired!”

Kimberly Lott watched the video. She had hunkered down inside her apartment when the shootout happened.

“So, it’s really all him shooting,” she said.

Lott remembers the terror she and her neighbors felt.

“It’s just really crazy that somebody that’s mentally unstable can even have like those type of guns,” she said.

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The Pierce County Force Investigation Team released the video as part of its ongoing investigation into the shooting. Investigators concluded Collins fired off 15 rounds, while Tacoma police officers returned nine rounds, all of them over a 16-minute period.

The last shot came from a TPD officer, identified as Christopher Munn, who fired his weapon 183 yards away.

“Okay, he reloaded,” an officer shouts. “Are those shots coming from the outside?”

Then one shot. “Shots fired! Suspect’s down,” Munn says.

When officers made their way over to Collins, they confirmed he was no longer a threat, with his weapons laying nearby.

It was the end of what another neighbor described with just one word.

“Chaos,” he said. “Total chaos.”

Investigators said Collins was wounded twice, once by Munn and by a self-inflicted gunshot.

The neighbors whom we talked to had very different opinions about what the police did.

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