On the evening of Tuesday, February 24, two Baltimore Police officers, Omar Rodriguez and Arthur Fuog, fired numerous shots at 37-year-old Dwight Hawkins after a short footchase, killing him in the street in his neighborhood of Belair-Edison. Rodriguez, a member of the Group Violence Unit, was also one of the officers involved in the death of beloved arabber Bilal Abdullah by the Upton Metro Station in June, the department confirmed.
“They went into the liquor store, and the individual and several other people in the store started to move around a little bit. The officers believed this individual was armed,” Commissioner Richard Worley said about the Tuesday shooting.
According to the Independent Investigations Division of the Attorney General’s Office, which investigates all cases of police-involved fatalities, the officers followed Hawkins as he left the store. Outside the store, Hawkins began to run.
“Officers gave the man multiple commands. As the man continued to run, he pulled out a handgun, coming in close proximity to one of the officers. Two officers fired their service weapons, striking the man,” the IID’s initial statement reads.
In a porch camera video shared on social media, Hawkins runs across a side street, between two cars, and up onto the other sidewalk, pursued by three officers screaming “Hands! Hands! Let me see your fucking hands!”
As Hawkins tried to run back across the road, one of the officers cuts in front of him. “Do it!” someone yelled and one of the officers starts shooting and continues shooting well after Hawkins has fallen to the ground. Another officer also fires, and someone yells “woooo!” in a way that sounded celebratory, followed by the word “fuck!” screamed in a way that sounded more invigorated than concerned.
The video is too grainy to see any evidence of a gun, but the body motions do not appear to show any brandishing or pointing of a weapon. Eleven shots can be clearly heard on the audio, although Worley in a press conference claimed at least sixteen shots were fired.
“Allegedly, if he did have a gun, the video shows he never pulled it out. He never pointed it,” Hawkins’ cousin Chante Fenner told WJZ. “We need justice, and it’s not right.”
Commissioner Worley told reporters that the officers knew Hawkins due to a lengthy arrest record, though according to Maryland Case Search, he had not been arrested since 2017. His family told WJZ that he had changed his life for his three kids and worked a steady job at a hotel.
Worley did not tell reporters that Omar Rodriguez, one of the shooting officers, was the officer who shot and killed Bilal Abdullah on June 17, 2025. According to BPD spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge, Rodriguez “returned from administrative duties in January,” meaning at most, he had only been back on the street for less than two months before shooting someone again.
The cases are strikingly similar, beginning with alleged suspicion that the person who was later killed was carrying a gun. In the case of Abdullah, there was allegedly a tip, which has never been confirmed, that he was carrying a gun in a bag. And in Hawkins’ case, the suspicion that he was carrying a gun after walking into a liquor store. In both cases, the men walked away from police — as they arguably had the constitutional right to do — and in both cases Rodriguez chased them (he initiated the chase of Abdullah). And in both cases, Rodriguez fired his weapon when other officers did not.
Tuesday night, Worley said that the two shooting officers would be placed on administrative leave while the IID investigates the case. Like Rodriguez’s shooting of Abdullah, his shooting of Hawkins will be investigated by the IID, which has brought charges against officers in only five percent of cases, a Beat analysis found.
Studies have shown that most cops never fire their weapons, but that those who do are more likely to shoot again, though there is debate about why the same officers continue to shoot. And officers have often complained of severe trauma following shootings.
The founder of the notoriously corrupt Gun Trace Task Force, Richard Willard, sued the department in 2012, claiming he still suffered PTSD from shooting someone in 2005 and that he did not receive counseling. And sometimes officers will claim that the PTSD they suffer causes future misconduct. In his sentencing, Thomas Allers, a sergeant in the same task force, sought to blame his crimes on the trauma that came from shooting a man holding a knife during his second day on the job. “He struggled to deal with suicides, decayed bodies, fathers shooting daughters in the head, pedestrians mown down in traffic, their bodies strewn over a wide area,” his attorney wrote. He was sentenced to 15 years.
In 2018, Vernon Herron, who was operating the department’s Officer Safety and Wellness Unit, told this reporter that “when an officer is involved in a critical incident, either myself or one of my colleagues will respond to the scene with a mental health professional. The officer will get a debriefing before he or she will go home, especially if they are involved in a shooting.”
The department did not immediately confirm whether these policies are still in place or whether Rodriguez received any treatment before returning to the street. But a social media account of the Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police, the police union, tweeted that the union’s president and vice president went to the scene to assist officers after Hawkins was killed.
Rodriguez is not uniquely violent. GVU and other plainclothes or “proactive” units have been involved in numerous shootings and such squads have a long history of abuse. GVU is closely connected to the District Action Teams, which have been involved in shootings and accused of constitutional violations since they were created after the disbanding of the GTTF in 2017. Jorge Omar Bernardez-Ruiz, who was one of the officers who brutalized Abdul Salaam and then two weeks later killed Tyrone West in 2013, was made sergeant of the Northeast District DAT unit in 2020.
Former Commissioner Darryl De Sousa and GTTF member Jemell Rayam both shot more than one person — and both were later sentenced to prison for subsequent crimes.
“This is another incident where if they had simply complied and put the gun down, we wouldn’t be having this press conference,” Worley said. He did not address whether or not it would have happened if the department had not put a recent shooter back on the street.
“If they running, they scared. They scared of y’all,” Lorraine Hawkins, a family member, told WJZ, noting that three officers could have tackled or tased Hawkins. “You don’t have to overkill a person. You don’t have to shoot a person 16 times.”
Sanya Kamidi contributed reporting.