Two police officers were shot and killed in a hotel parking lot in Mississippi on December 15. The shooter has been identified as a 43-year-old veterinarian who was a mother of three children. Police reported that the woman shot the officers in front of her eight-year-old daughter while she was being questioned in her car by the officers.
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigations said that Amy Brogdon Anderson, from Ocean Springs, opened fire on the two cops outside a Motel 6 in Bay St. Louis and then allegedly shot herself. Her 10-year-old daughter was in Anderson’s car during the incident.
Anderson, who was reportedly well-liked in the community and did not have a criminal record, was parked in her SUV in the hotel’s parking lot in the middle of the night, when two police officers arrived at around 4:30 am to do a welfare check. The Bay St. Louis Police Department officers interrogated Anderson in her car, questioning why she and her daughter were there at that hour.
Anderson had checked into the motel a couple of hours earlier, but then decided to leave, and told the staff at the front desk to call the police because she believed someone was following her.
Sergeant Steven Robin and Officer Branden Estorffe, both 23 years old, questioned Anderson for about a half an hour before she shot them. During their conversation, one of the officers had called Child Protective Services. Anderson had said that she wanted to leave, but the officers told her they were not finished talking to her, according to a witness who was a guest at the motel.
First responders rushed Officer Estorffe to Memorial Hospital in Gulfport, where he died a few hours later. Officer Robin was pronounced dead at the scene.
When police arrived they found Anderson, dead with a gunshot wound to her chest.
Although police believe that the 43-year-old woman shot herself, the officers fired their weapons, so an autopsy report will determine if Anderson died from a self-inflicted wound.
The eight-year-old girl was not injured during the deadly incident. It has been reported that she told police that she handed her mother the gun that killed the officers.
“Momma told me to give her the gun, so I gave her the gun,” the child told a witness at the motel, according to the Daily Mail Saturday.
According to Anderson’s Facebook page, she had recently started working with MedVet Mobile, a 24-hour animal hospital, as an emergency veterinarian focusing on small animals.
Bay St. Louis Mayor Mike Favre consoled the victims’ families and asked the community to pray for the families and the Bay St. Louis Police Department.
According to the witness, the child said, “Momma told me people are trying to kill us.”