The police officer at the 2nd City Court and campus policeman at Tulane University who was shot dead Friday night outside a George Washington Carver High School playoff game was 38-year-old Martinus Mitchum, according to several sources with knowledge of the murder.
Investigators say Mitchum was killed after a school official started arguing with a man trying to get into Carver’s game in his gym against Warren Easton High School on Block 3000 on Higgins Boulevard around 6:30 pm on Friday. Mitchum heard the dispute, intervened and tried to escort the man who was arguing with the employee off campus.
Chaotic scene leaves officer dead out of basketball game
But then the man who was being taken pulled out a gun and shot Mitchum in the chest, police said.
Paramedics took Mitchum to the University Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
Members of the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office who were also at the school arrested a suspect in the shooting. The suspect was not immediately identified.
Sources said Mitchum’s family was notified of his murder on Friday night. The officials canceled the rest of the game between Carver and Easton.
In addition to working as a substitute reserve police officer at the 2nd City Court, Mitchum was a member of the Tulane University Police Department, the police said. Information from Tulane’s website shows that he started working for the university police force on July 26, 2019.
He had also worked at Landry-Walker High School in Algiers and at John F. Kennedy High School when he was near City Park, according to newspaper clippings.
Mitchum maintained an active presence on social media and used to comment on law enforcement. Just two days before his death, he wrote about how he supported the requirement that police officers use body cameras and the loss of a certificate if they did their jobs inappropriately or if they showed themselves to be racist.
On Thursday, he retweeted a message from Vice President Kamala Harris supporting the George Floyd Justice in Policing law, which bears the name of the man murdered by police in Minneapolis last year and aims to review the qualified immunity for law enforcement officials, among others. other things.
He would also press for the courts to hold repeat offenders accountable, rather than releasing them without bail or low bail.
The news of Mitchum’s death on Friday caused an intense outpouring of condolences on the networks he frequented. A Twitter user told of how Mitchum had just “checked him out” last week and wrote, “Rest.”
Former UNO, LSU and Memphis basketball player Charles Carmouche, a local high school senior, wrote that Mitchum believed him “when no one believed” and also checked him regularly.
“We really lost a great guy,” said Carmouche.
Several shots reported near the Carver High gym