Disturbing body camera footage caught the moment the mother of a two-month-old baby lunged at police officers, prompting one cop to pull out a gun.
Maria Pike, 34, and her daughter, Destinii Hope, sustained fatal injuries in the police-involved shooting in Independence, Missouri on November 7.
The incident reportedly began after Pike got into a physical altercation with Destinii’s paternal grandmother, Talisa Coombs, amid concerns about the baby’s welfare, according to the Kansas City Star.
Coombs claimed Pike threw things at her and pulled her hair, and even attempted to push her down the stairs when she went to go check on her grandchild that day.
She then called the Children’s Division of the Missouri Department for Social Services and the Independence police, with family members claiming they thought Pike would just be arrested and given the help she needed for postpartum depression, KCTV reports.
But body camera footage released on Wednesday showed Independence officers approaching Coombs, looking visibly distraught, and her husband, Brian Coombs, outside a building at the Opal Springs Apartment at around 1.45pm.
Police then determined that a domestic assault had taken place, and got permission from the apartment manager to enter Pike’s apartment, where they found her clutching her infant inside a closet.
Independence police said they spoke with her for 11 minutes, only part of which was shown in the body camera footage released Wednesday, in which an officer asked her if she is OK or whether she had been hurt.
Pike only responded by shaking and nodding her head as she rocked her baby, but did not say anything at any point when she is on camera in the footage.
Independence police said they then tried to convince her to release her daughter, but she refused.
Instead, officers say, she walked past the cops to sit on a bed next to a nightstand, where there was a large knife.
The video even shows Pike sitting on the bed with the baby’s dad, Mitchell Holder, at the foot of the bed.
She could then be seen picking up the knife while still clutching her baby and raising it over her head before charging at an officer.
The footage released Wednesday stops before any shots were fired and it is unclear how many times the officer fired his gun.
All three of the officers who responded to the apartment that day are now on administrative leave amid a Police-Involved Incident Team investigation into the shooting.
But family members are calling for justice.
‘I want accountability. I want responsibility on the cop,’ Nina Book, Pike’s twin sister, told Fox 4 KC.
She said she and her sister would discuss growing old together.
‘I never thought a cop would take their lives,’ Book said of the mother-of-three, whom she described as ‘very talented,’ ‘bright and intelligent’ and a ‘great’ cook who was ‘proud of her Russian’ heritage.
‘She loved all children,’ Book continued. ‘It didn’t matter if they were close to her or not. She would light up in the room with other people’s kids. She was good with kids.’
In fact, Book said, during the last phone call she had with her sister, ‘she was really excited to tell me about her baby.
‘She told me she believed God was giving her another chance to have a child. She was going to anything and everything she could to not be separated from her child.’
But Pike had been suffering from severe postpartum depression, her family says, and in the moments after she gave birth to Destinii on August 22, she reportedly told hospital staff that she was homeless and she ‘felt like hurting herself,’ Talisa Coombs told the Star.
She said staff then tried to get Pike and her daughter some help, with someone from the Children’s Division asking Holder whether Pike and the baby could stay there.
Coombs noted that she also offered to let Pike and Destinii stay at her house, in an upstairs bedroom, but she didn’t want to.
So the grandma said she ultimately told a Children’s Division worker she would go to the apartment and ‘check up on Destinii as many times as I can.’
She claimed that in her granddaughters just two-and-a-half months of life, she visited her son’s apartment ‘like three times a day.’
Coombs also said the Children’s Division ordered Pike and Holder – who is reportedly living with dissociative identity disorder and is collecting disability checks – to go to therapy and counseling.
But when asked whether they ever did, Coombs replied, ‘not that I know of.’
The grandmother went on to claim that social services was called on the couple again at the end of October, when Pike allegedly tried to smother her child in the woods.
She said Destinii was taken to a local hospital, and Pike checked herself into a mental hospital for an evaluation three days later.
When Destinii was later released from the hospital, Coombs said, a Children’s Division employee brought her back to Holder’s apartment and told Holder and Coombs – who was at the apartment at the time – that Pike could no longer be left alone with the baby.
‘They did not ask me to take Destinii at all,’ Coombs recounted.
‘When they gave that baby to Mitchell, they didn’t give him no papers at all, saying anything about him having, you know, temporary custody until a hearing or nothing.
‘And usually, they’re supposed to give you this paperwork saying, “This is the plan right here and you need to follow this plan.” They didn’t give him one inch [of] a piece of paper at all,’ she claimed.
Coombs also claimed that the couple would repeatedly ignore the Department of Social Services phone calls and any attempts to help them, even cursing out a social services worker at one point.
Social Services eventually requested the couple and their child attend a meeting on November 6 – just one day before the fatal shooting, and Coombs said one of the social services workers she had been communicating with told her to accompany them to the meeting after they missed a previous one.
When the couple then refused to answer calls from the department on the day of the meeting, Brian said the Children’s Division worker told them he and his wife would get custody of the baby.
‘They said they were going to take that baby and give it to us to take care of until Mitchell and Maria got some help,’ he told the Star.
The Children’s Division employee also reportedly asked the grandma to check on the couple that day because they weren’t answering the phone.
‘They wouldn’t even open the door for me,’ she said. ‘I knocked on the door and I kept calling out the names. They didn’t open the door.’
A state worker then responded to the home, but their knocks also went unanswered, which led to police officers getting the same treatment when they were called, she said.
The police ultimately left that day, saying they could not act without a court order.
Coombs said the couple later called her and voiced their dismissal of state intervention.
‘[Their] exact words they said to me and my husband [were] “I don’t want the CPS in my life and I am going to get rid of them, if I have to call the police on them.”
The following day, just hours before the police-involved shooting, Coombs said she received a call from the Children’s Division employee, who asked her if she could check whether Destinii was still alive – which is when Coombs said Pike attacked her.
‘They should have done that themselves,’ Brian argued. ‘If they thought that baby was in danger, that’s their job. They should have went up there.’
‘If they would have went over there, done their job, the outcome would have been different, I know it would have. It wouldn’t have escalated to this.’
