He Was Being Detained for a Stolen U-Haul. Then He Reached for the Officer’s Gun.

The first thing I remember was how quickly a routine detention stopped looking routine. One moment, I was watching a man who had just been identified near a stolen U-Haul, and the next, he was fighting me for my firearm. There was no long argument, no warning that made what was coming obvious. Brandon Lemagne had pulled the U-Haul into a gas station parking lot, gotten out, and walked away. When I approached him, the situation still felt manageable. I told him he was going to be detained because he had been driving a stolen vehicle. We started walking toward my cruiser, and then he attacked me. His hands went straight for my duty weapon. He grabbed the holstered firearm and tried to pull it free while striking me in the head. Suddenly, the thing that had been a stolen U-Haul investigation became a fight over whether I would keep control of the weapon on my own belt.

I remember the feeling of being pulled backward across the pavement. He wasn't just holding onto the gun; he was trying to take it from me. My duty belt stayed on, but the struggle dragged the holstered firearm from its normal position at my hip toward the front of my waistband. Every movement made the situation more dangerous because neither of us could simply let go. Then Lemagne opened the door of the cruiser and forced me into it. Somehow, during the struggle, the vehicle went into gear. The cruiser suddenly accelerated backward with me trapped underneath him. I remember realizing that this was no longer just about the firearm. Now the moving police vehicle itself had become part of the danger. I got onto the radio and called for emergency assistance, telling dispatch that the suspect had my firearm. Outside, the cruiser was moving backward through the parking lot, and there was almost nothing I could do to stop what was happening.

The cruiser struck two vehicles belonging to people who had nothing to do with the confrontation. Then it slammed into a business and finally stopped. For a moment, the crash gave us something the fight had not given us: stillness. But the assault wasn't over. Lemagne remained on top of me inside the cruiser, and I was still fighting to keep control of the weapon. When the other officers arrived, they were walking into a scene where they had almost no time to figure out what was happening. They knew only what they had heard over the radio: an officer was under attack, and the suspect had access to the officer's firearm. Master Police Officer Kenyatta Momon and Police Officer First Class Christopher Grubb arrived and confronted the struggle inside the damaged cruiser. One of them discharged his firearm while Lemagne remained on top of me. Another officer moved in and tried to pull Lemagne away from me.

There is something people don't always understand about moments like that. From the outside, a confrontation can look like a series of individual decisions, each one separated neatly from the next. In reality, sometimes there is no clean separation. One action creates another before anyone has time to process the first. The stolen U-Haul had brought us there. The detention had started the contact. The assault had turned it physical. The attempt to take the firearm had transformed the danger. Then the cruiser went backward, hit vehicles, hit a business, and stopped with an officer and suspect still fighting inside. By the time backup arrived, there was no longer a simple question of arresting someone for a stolen vehicle. The officers had to deal with an active physical struggle involving a firearm that was still holstered but being fought over.

The second officer eventually succeeded in pulling Lemagne off me and out of the cruiser. Then another shot was fired. Lemagne was struck in the upper body and was pronounced dead at the scene. I survived the assault and was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment. Later, I was released. But surviving the physical injuries is only one part of an incident like this. There is always the question of what happened in those few seconds, what each person saw, what each officer knew, and why the force used became necessary. That is why incidents involving police shootings don't end when the scene is secured. The officers involved have to give investigators their accounts, evidence has to be examined, and the actions of everyone involved have to be reconstructed.

Investigators also had to establish where all of this began. The U-Haul had been confirmed stolen from Richmond on May 3. The license plate reader alert on May 11 led officers to the vehicle in the Alexandria section of Fairfax County, where Lemagne was located. Surveillance footage captured the beginning of the encounter at the gas station, including the officer speaking with Lemagne before they walked toward the cruiser. Then the footage showed the struggle that followed. Those pieces matter because the final seconds of an encounter can never be understood properly without the moments immediately before them. What looks like an isolated shooting can actually be the final point in a chain of events that started somewhere much earlier.

The officers who fired their weapons were identified as Master Police Officer Kenyatta Momon, a 24-year veteran, and Police Officer First Class Christopher Grubb, an eight-year veteran. Both were assigned to the Mount Vernon District Station and were placed on restricted duty while the investigation continued. That status itself is important because an officer's involvement in a shooting does not automatically answer every question about the shooting. Investigators still have to determine what happened, what each officer perceived, and whether the force used complied with applicable law and department policy. At the same time, the officer who was attacked had to live with the fact that his own firearm had been pulled from his hip during the struggle, even though it never came free of the holster.

What stays with me most isn't the sound of the gunfire or even the crash. It's the image of that duty belt. The firearm was still holstered, but it had been dragged from the place where it normally rested at my side to the front of my waistband while someone fought to take it. That small detail tells you how close the situation came to becoming something even worse. A stolen vehicle brought the police to that parking lot, but the stolen vehicle wasn't what nearly killed someone. The danger came from what happened after the initial contact—how quickly a detention became a physical assault, how quickly that assault became a struggle over a firearm, and how quickly a police cruiser became a moving piece of the confrontation.

I think that's why the beginning matters so much when we look back at an ending like this. At 4:06 that afternoon, it was just an alert from a license plate reader and a stolen U-Haul sitting in a gas station parking lot. By the time the cruiser finally stopped, two civilian vehicles had been struck, a business had been damaged, an officer had been injured, and Brandon Lemagne was dead. Everything happened within one chain of decisions and reactions. And when I think back to that parking lot, I don't remember the U-Haul first. I remember the firearm still locked in its holster—and how close everything came to changing because someone tried to pull it free.