Investigators in the Greenspoint area spent Thursday afternoon piecing together an officer-involved shooting at the intersection of Greens Road and Imperial Valley Drive.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office says a deputy stopped when he spotted a man acting erratically at the intersection.
Sheriff Ed Gonzalez says the man was holding an object and was approaching the deputy despite his several commands to stop.
“He thought he saw something in his hand, what it was exactly, we’re not sure yet,” Gonzalez said. “But the male kept advancing toward the deputy.”
The deputy fired one shot and killed the man, according to Gonzalez.
The sheriff tried to temper the anger from a crowd that gathered at the intersection soon after the shooting.
“But he threw his hands up,” a woman asked. “But what if he threw his hands up?”
“We don’t know that,” Gonzalez replied. “That’s why we’re out here to investigate. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”
Family members of the man who was killed have identified him as Danny Thomas, 35, who they claim was severely depressed. Thomas later died at the hospital.
“We’ve been through everything together he had my back through everything,” said Thomas’ sister Kita Thomas. “And he promised me wouldn’t leave me, and they didn’t leave. They took him from me.”
Thomas’ family members said the man had been through an unimaginable tragedy recently.
KHOU 11 reported on Thomas’ wife, Sheborah Thomas’ arrest after she allegedly killed the couple’s two children.
Police say Sheborah Thomas drowned the children in a bath tub of a home in the Third Ward and then put their bodies beneath a neighbor’s house.
Danny Thomas was serving a prison sentence for drug possession at the time of the murders.
Family members say the father was never the same after that.
Investigators would not confirm if there is video of the Greenspoint-area shooting.
Witnesses say one woman with video on her cell phone was taken to the back of a squad car with deputies who took her phone for evidence.