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Calif, Davis police officer, 22, gunned down on her beat; suspect found dead

https://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article224275110.html

Davis

The call came into Davis police just before 7 p.m. Thursday, a three-car accident near 5th and D streets that by any measure would be considered routine.

Officer Natalie Corona, 22, who graduated from the Sacramento Police Department’s training academy in July and completed her field training just before Christmas, responded to the scene alone.

Corona, whose father spent 26 years as a Colusa County Sheriff’s deputy, was an eager rookie officer, a young woman who started with the department in 2016 as a community service officer and who stayed on the job even when funding for her position ran out.

She posted tributes on her Facebook page to fellow officers, including those who died in the line of duty.
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Thursday night, she became one of the fallen when a suspect at the accident scene opened fire and gunned her down, sparking a nightlong siege in this quiet college town that lasted into Friday morning.

“She was a rising star in the department,” Davis Police Chief Darren Pytel said in a somber news conference just before midnight. “She just worked like you can’t believe.”

Officers from throughout the region and the Bay Area swarmed into Davis following the shooting, forcing shelter-in-place warnings for UC Davis students and prompting a flurry of text, phone and email alerts to the community.

Corona was rushed to the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, where she was pronounced dead late Thursday, while officers surrounded a home a block away from the shooting scene where they believed the suspect might be hiding.

Police spent hours trying to coax the suspect out, using floodlights and commands on loudspeakers for him to emerge with his hands up. At one point they sent in a robot and ignited flash bang grenades.

By 1:30 a.m. Friday, police finally announced what they found inside the rental home in the 500 block of Fifth Street.

“The shooter has been found, deceased, inside a home near 5th and E St in Davis with what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” Davis police wrote on Twitter.

The announcement did not name the suspect or provide a motive for the shooting.

Ninety minutes earlier, officers from Davis’ tight-knit department gathered at police headquarters to announce Corona’s death, making her the first Davis officer killed in the line of duty in six decades.

“We’re just absolutely devastated about the loss,” Pytel said, adding that he had notified her parents.

“I haven’t seen anybody work harder in a part-time capacity and be more motivated to be a police officer than Natalie,” said Pytel, who joined the Davis Police Department in 1983. “She was just an absolute star in the department and someone that pretty much every department member looked to as a close friend, a sister.”

Before she entered the academy, the Davis Police Department ran out of funding for the paid position she had been in. She didn’t care; she showed up to work as a volunteer, Pytel said.