Replica handgun found next to 17-year-old girl shot dead by Fullerton officer, DA’s office says

A replica firearm that looked “identical” to a Beretta handgun was found next to a 17-year-old girl shot and killed by a Fullerton police officer on a busy freeway in Anaheim, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office said on Tuesday.

The DA’s office – tasked with investigating most police shootings in Orange County – released photos of the replica handgun a day after family members identified Hannah Linn Williams as the teen killed just after 7 p.m. Friday.

The teen’s family has demanded answers to what they said “appears to be another unjustified shooting of a young person of color.”

“We maintain that she was unarmed,” Rev. Jarrett Maupin, a spokesman for Williams’ relatives, said during a press conference in front of Anaheim City Hall on Tuesday. “A fake gun is a fake gun.”

They called for an independent investigation from the California Attorney General’s office, as well as the unpaid suspension of the officer involved in the shooting. He was on paid leave, and had not been publicly identified as of Tuesday evening, Fullerton police said.

The DA’s office said in a statement Tuesday the on-duty, uniformed Fullerton officer had been driving a marked police SUV on the eastbound 91 Freeway on Friday, July 5, taking his police dog to a veterinarian for a medical procedure.

The officer spotted the 17-year-old traveling “at a high rate of speed” on the 91 near Glassell Street, according to the DA’s office.

The police vehicle and the car driven by the girl “made physical contact” at some point, the DA’s office said.

Neither police nor prosecutors have indicated exactly what occurred in the moments prior to the officer shooting the girl. Relatives said she had been riding in a rental car Friday evening, but didn’t know where she was going.

One person told NBC4 she saw Williams standing on the freeway outside her vehicle, approach the officer and raise both arms while holding a gun. However, a separate witness who described the altercation to the Williams family told them she had a cell phone in her hands, rather than a firearm, Maupin said.

Relatives said they had no idea who the replica belonged to or how it wound up at the scene of the shooting. The 17-year-old’s father, Benson Williams, declined to allow investigators to search the vehicle she was driving without a warrant, Maupin said. He added that officers did not find the replica until after searching the car’s interior, suggesting that it might not have been on her person or otherwise in plain sight. The District Attorney’s statement, however, said the fake gun “was recovered at the scene next to the female.”

The teen was taken to a hospital, where she died.

“Losing Hannah was hard,” said the teen’s godmother, Lynnette Campbell, an activist affiliated with the NAACP. “The circumstances in which we lost her have made it that much harder.”

She described Williams as an honest, hard-working girl who “had her whole life ahead of her.” The teen had moved to Anaheim with her parents and siblings from Phoenix 11 months ago, Maupin said. She had worked at Knott’s Berry Farm for the past three months as a lifeguard, and volunteered at community health fairs with her parents, her godmother said. Williams was a senior in high school who planned to attend community college after graduating, Maupin said.

Hannah’s mother, Maria Williams, is Latina, and the teen’s father, Benson Williams, is black. The officer who shot her may not have been aware of the fair-skinned girl’s mixed ethnic background at the time of the shooting, Maupin said. However, the activist said any use of force, especially one resulting in the death of 17-year-old, has an impact on the civil rights community.

Campbell said that, in the days since the incident on the freeway, police have released more information to the news media than they have to the teen’s relatives.

“As of today, we still do not have clear answers about what happened to Hannah,” Campbell said. “The information that we have received from the police department has changed several times.”

The DA office’s investigation is ongoing. The office does not plan to immediately release any footage from police dashcams or body-worn cameras that may have captured the shooting, a spokeswoman said. In Orange County, such footage is often publicly released after the DA office’s investigation is completed, a process that usually takes months.

Relatives, fearing delay on the part of officials, have authorized an independent autopsy of Williams’s body, Maupin said. Relatives had expected the Orange County Coroner’s officer to hand over her remains on Tuesday, but were told that officials needed to hold the teen’s body for 48 more hours to take forensic photos.

The spokesman for the Williams family said he was in communication with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office to ask that state Attorney General Xavier Becerra investigate what happened, and whether the officer violated the law.

“We have three simultaneous investigations,” said Maupin. “Fullerton refers you to Anaheim. Anaheim refers you to Fullerton. And, the Orange County District Attorney, you know, has said very little, which is concerning. We cannot trust local police to investigate themselves.”