physical confrontation occurred between the suspects and a store clerk. During the struggle, a suspect pulled out a gun and shot the clerk in the back.
Police said the store clerk returned fire with one of his two legally registered firearms during the armed robbery. The clerk reportedly fired several rounds from his gun and struck one of the suspects multiple times.
The wounded suspect was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The man was identified as 26-year-old Jashar Haslam of Hartford.
The clothing store clerk was treated for his gunshot wound at the crime scene and taken to a hospital. The clerk’s injuries are considered not to be life-threatening, according to WVIT.
Despite police responding within minutes, the second suspect fled, and law enforcement has yet to locate the would-be thief.
East Hartford Police Department officer Marc Caruso said, “They will be talking to witnesses, they’ll be going through a significant amount of camera footage, both our town’s cameras, the store’s cameras, neighboring businesses’ cameras. There’s still a lot of work to be done. It’s our Downtown East Hartford area, so it’s probably the most densely populated area. It’s a high-traffic area.”
Caruso said of the armed robbery, “As of right now, it seems to be an isolated incident.”
Navdeep Singh, manager of the neighboring Bruno’s Liquor store, said of East Hartford, “It’s a very decent area, don’t get me wrong besides from this. This is like the first time that I know anything like this happened here.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Defensive Gun Use Tracker, which catalogs occurrences of legal gun owners using firearms in self-defense, noted that the clerk used both of his guns.
“This man used BOTH guns. Unclear if he engaged in a shootout and ran out of ammo in the first gun, or if he double-fisted two handguns at the same time,” the Defensive Gun Use Tracker said of the shooting on Twitter.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up!
East Hartford store clerk fires at and kills attempted robberwww.youtube.com