Ogden officer-involved shooting followed repeated calls for man to drop weapon, video shows
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- Matias Yosino is pictured during a confrontation with Ogden police on Nov. 5, 2023, that left him dead. The image is a still from surveillance footage included in a video report into the matter released Monday, Nov. 20, 2023, by the Weber County Attorney’s Office.
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- An Ogden officer is pictured during the Nov. 5, 2023, confrontation with Matias Yosino in northern Ogden that left Yosino dead. Yosino had ignored officers’ commands to put down his weapon, according to a preliminary video report released Monday, Nov. 20, 2023, by the Weber County Attorney’s Office. The image is a still from police body-camera video included in the report.
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- Matias Yosino is pictured during a confrontation with Ogden police on Nov. 5, 2023, that left him dead. The image is a still from police body-camera footage included in a video report in the matter released Monday, Nov. 20, 2023, by the Weber County Attorney’s Office.
OGDEN — The deadly Nov. 5 confrontation between Ogden police and a man outside an Ogden home lasted about a minute and followed repeated commands from the officers for the man to drop the weapon he was holding.
According to audio of the confrontation, released Monday by the Weber County Attorney’s Office, the responding officers fired at least 10 times on the man, identified as Matias Yosino, after he refused to comply with their orders. Chief Eric Young said in a press conference hours after the incident that Yosino had pointed his weapon — later determined to be an airgun — at responding officers.
Preceding the confrontation outside a home in the 200 block of North Eccles Avenue, Yosino had sounded upset, according to audio of the 911 call to Weber County dispatchers reporting his behavior. “I want to f—— die!” Yosino can be heard yelling in the background during the call.
The audio and police body camera footage of the incident released on Monday, however — a piece of the ongoing investigation into the matter by the Weber County Force Investigation Team — don’t offer insight into what may have prompted Yosino’s behavior. The video report, posted online to the county attorney’s YouTube page, also doesn’t make any sort of call as to whether officers were justified in the use of force. That determination comes when the probe is complete.
However, the new information offers more details about what happened. The Nov. 5 incident — coming nearly two years after police were called to the same northern Ogden home on a “weapons disturbance” call — was the fifth deadly officer-involved shooting in Weber County this year and the third in Ogden.
Police were called to the home in the 200 block of North Eccles Avenue around 1:20 a.m. on Nov. 5 by a female who said Yosino — 19, according to the Weber County Attorney’s Office — had arrived, drunk. Yosino, she went on in the 911 call, had a gun “and he’s making very threatening gestures and he’s yelling and he’s saying that if I call the cops that he’ll just handle it himself and take himself out.”
Next, Yosino can be heard in the background yelling. “You’re f—— crazy and I know I’m not. You made me like this,” he says, among other things, though it’s not clear to whom.
The first two arriving officers approach the home via Eccles Avenue, according to body-camera footage worn by one of them, encountering Yosino, now outside.
“Show me your hands,” one of the officers commands.
“Who is that?” Yosino responds.
“Ogden city police. Show me your hands. Stop. Show me your hands,” the officer yells.
The back-and-forth continues.
“Give it to me. Give it to me mother——,” Yosino says at one point.
Sirens from additional arriving officers are heard and the new arrivals command Yosino — who can’t be seen in the body camera footage — to drop the weapon he’s holding.
“Drop it! Drop it!” an officer orders, one of many simultaneous commands from the responding police.
“No!” Yosino answers.
Ultimately, the officers fire about a minute after the arrival of the first respondents, and Yosino is killed on the scene. “Seven officers responded to the call and ultimately fired their individual weapons. The officers were standing in close proximity to each other,” reads narrative in Monday’s video report.
Audio of the shooting can be heard, with 10 gunshots, maybe more, audible. But the screen of the Weber County Attorney’s Office video goes black, per a Utah state law that allows immediate family members of targets of such shootings to ask that footage not be publicly released.
A still frame from video of one of the officer’s body cameras shows Yosino “in a shooting stance” confronting the responding police in Eccles Avenue, according to Monday’s release. The weapon he was brandishing was an air gun, according to Weber County Attorney Chris Allred.
“It appears to be a 1911 style firearm, but in fact turned out to be a CO2-powered pistol,” Allred said in an email in response to a Standard-Examiner query on the matter. Weapons in the 1911 style are modeled after a popular gun manufactured starting that year for the U.S. military, according to Guns and Ammo, a gun publication.
Yosino was wearing armor, of sorts — “a homemade metal breast-and-back plate fashioned from metal street signs,” reads narrative in the video report.
The Ogden Police Department handles its own probe after such incidents to determine if officers followed proper protocol in their response. However, Lt. William Farr, the department spokesman, offered no comment on the matter.
Farr said, however, that the seven responding officers, placed on administrative leave after the incident, as is standard, have returned to normal duty.
The Nov. 5 incident followed deadly shootouts between Ogden police and Brian Simonton on June 6 and Alex Lopez on June 13. Elsewhere in Weber County, an officer-involved shooting in Roy on July 7 left a suicidal man, Steven Kirkman, dead. An April 27 shootout between North Ogden police and Jeffrey Roberts left Roberts dead after the man killed his brother.