PHILADELPHIA — The teen who shot four people including a SEPTA police officer in a standoff Wednesday was shot and killed by police, not by a self-inflicted gunshot wound as police initially reported, department officials said Friday.
Zyhiem Terrell-Hartman, 18, was fatally shot by police after barricading himself inside a Frankford apartment and shooting at officers from a second-story window for nearly 90 minutes, police said.
“No, it wasn’t suicide. We shot him,” said a high-ranking law enforcement official who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the case. “He was hit at least twice, with one of those shots being in the head.”
The incident began around 7 p.m. Wednesday, when Terrell-Hartman got into a fight with a 33-year-old man outside the Arrott Transportation Center, police said in a statement Friday. Terrell-Hartman shot at the man, striking him twice in the neck, and two women waiting for the bus nearby were also struck by bullets, police said.
Philadelphia police officers responded to the sounds of gunfire and said they saw Terrell-Hartman fleeing the scene. They chased him for about three blocks, before he ran into a house that had been converted into apartments. Police said he tried to escape through a back side door, before running back inside.
Terrell-Hartman burst into a man’s second-story unit, busted out two windows, and started shooting down at the officers outside. SEPTA officer Ervis Onuzi, an officer trained in the use of long g who responded to the scene as back up, was shot in the abdomen and critically injured. Some officers were pinned by flying bullets and were rescued by a SWAT armored vehicle.
The shootout lasted nearly 90 minutes, and Terrell-Hartman streamed parts of it on Instagram Live, his family said.
His mother, Keysha Hartman, said she received a frantic call Wednesday night from her other son, who told her his brother was live-streaming himself in a standoff with police.
They rushed to the scene, desperate to try and talk him down, she said. But when Hartman arrived, she said, her son was already dead.
Police initially said Terrell-Hartman died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. That assessment, they said Friday, was based on “preliminary evidence,” but after an autopsy, they concluded that he had been shot by police.
Hartman, 42, said she never believed that her son took his own life. An employee in the Medical Examiner’s Office told her that her son suffered from multiple bullet wounds to the head and shoulder, injuries that she said seemed inconsistent with self-inflicted wounds.
“He was who he was,” she said. “But he did not kill himself.”
In a statement Friday, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw called the ordeal “harrowing.” She said the use of deadly force was “the most serious action a police officer can undertake” and pledged a full investigation.
“During this incident, four innocent people were shot,” Outlaw said. “The fact that this occurred in the area of a busy transportation hub and neighborhood makes it even more harrowing.”
A spokesperson for the Medical Examiner’s Office, declined to comment, citing the pending investigation. John McNesby, president of the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #5, also declined to comment.
Onuzi, 28, a three-year member of SEPTA’s police force is expected to recover from the injuries he sustained in the shooting. The two women struck by bullets were in stable condition, police said, and the man shot outside the transportation center was intubated and being treated at Jefferson Torresdale hospital.
Hartman said she has spent the last two days agonizing over what could have led her son to shoot four people.
“I know something happened for him to snap that way, and that’s the part of the story I haven’t gotten yet,” she said.
Hartman said her son carried a gun in the past. Court records show that he was arrested twice on gun charges when he was 17, in September 2020 and March 2021. Both times, he was adjudicated delinquent for possessing a firearm.
Terrell-Hartman, known to friends and family as “Johnny,” was the third-eldest of six siblings, including four brothers. He was Muslim, but grew up attending Genesis Baptist Church in the Lawndale section of the city. His mother called him “a gentle giant,” but acknowledged he had his troubles.
He lived most of his life with his aunt and uncle in Germantown during family turmoil, Hartman said. His uncle, who was like a father to him, had a stroke about a week ago, she said, and has been in a coma ever since. Her son, she said, was deeply upset about that.
Terrell-Hartman attended Frankford High School but finished his schooling at Youth Forestry Camp #3, a residential behavioral health facility in Central Pennsylvania.
He graduated from the facility with a high school diploma in 2021 and briefly returned to Philadelphia before moving to Georgia to live with his aunt, said his cousin Kenya Pippen, 43. He returned to Philadelphia in December to get an identification card, and was supposed to return to Georgia but kept delaying it, Pippen said.
In the meantime, his housing was not stable, and he stayed with various friends and family, his mother said. He had gotten into trouble in Frankford before, she said, and she worried about his staying in the area.
Hartman said she remains mystified at her son’s actions.
“Something happened. He was not that kind of monster to hold his gun out and shoot people like that,” she said. “Something happened ... to make him even pull his gun out.”
(Staff writer Anna Orso contributed to this story. )
