A retired police lieutenant fatally shot a woman during a training exercise at a Washington D.C. library, authorities said.
Jesse Porter, 58, a former lieutenant with the Metropolitan Police Department, was arrested after 25-year-old Maurica Manyan, of Indian Head, Maryland, was killed, according to a Friday statement from the Metropolitan police.
He is accused of involuntary manslaughter.
Porter’s attorney Kevann Gardner declined to comment Friday.
Porter was working for a private contractor that was training police who work for the library system when the incident happened Thursday afternoon, police said.
He was teaching officers how to use expendable batons when he fired a single shot from his firearm, police said.
"While in the conference room, the instructor discharged a single round from a firearm which struck the decedent. A firearm was recovered on scene," police said.
There were about six people in the room at the time of the shooting, including other library police officers. The city’s public library system has its own force of full-time special police officers.
Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee said it was unclear why Porter had live ammunition during the exercise.
“It’s not good practice,” Contee said at a news conference. “I’m not sure in this situation why the trainer had a live weapon in the training environment. But it is not good practice to do this.”
A police report filed in Superior Court for the District of Columbia detailed witness accounts of the shooting. When an officer arrived on scene Thursday at the Anacostia Neighborhood Library, Porter was one of two people performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on Manyan.
Porter told that officer the group was taking a class picture and joking around when he removed his weapon from his holster and heard it discharge.
“The defendant kept repeating something to the effect of, ‘I thought I had my training gun. Why did I do this? Is she Okay?'" the police report said.
Although Porter had a weapon with live ammunition, there were "multiple brightly colored plastic training guns" found that were incapable of firing projectiles and commonly used in law enforcement training, the report said.
The shooting was captured on library cameras, the report said.
Manyan's brother, Radcliffe Manyan, 23, of Prince George's County in Maryland, said Friday his sister was a "lovely person."
She was also a mother and took care of her father, he said.
Radcliffe Manyan said his family was grieving and trying to figure out what happened.
He said his sibling's ultimate goal was to break into a government job, as a police officer or otherwise.
"This was her first step," Radcliffe Manyan said. "She wanted to get into the government by age 25 — which she did."