{"id":223491,"date":"2026-03-27T19:06:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T19:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/223491\/"},"modified":"2026-03-27T19:06:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T19:06:08","slug":"south-houston-police-officer-shot-in-head-during-deadly-gunfire-exchange-houston-public-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/223491\/","title":{"rendered":"South Houston police officer shot in head during deadly gunfire exchange \u2013 Houston Public Media"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\"South<\/a><\/p>\n

Sarah Grunau\/Houston Public Media<\/p>\n

There was a deadly exchange of gunfire near the intersection of 6th Street and Avenue A in South Houston on March 27, 2026.<\/p>\n

A man died and a police officer was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the head Friday morning in South Houston, where there was an exchange of gunfire after what was described as a “low-speed chase.”<\/p>\n

Officers with the South Houston Police Department attempted to make a traffic stop, initiating a vehicle pursuit that lasted about 10 minutes, Cpt. Jon Laird told Houston TV station KHOU<\/a>. The driver pulled up to a home near the intersection of 6th Street and Avenue A, where Laird said the vehicle was registered, and two officers then approached.<\/p>\n

“The officer on the passenger side noticed that the driver had a shotgun and yelled, \u2018He’s got a shotgun,'” Laird told reporters at the scene. “Then the driver shot the officer in the head with a shotgun. And officers returned fire.”<\/p>\n

Sign up for the Hello, Houston!<\/a> daily newsletter to get local reports like this delivered directly to your inbox.<\/p>\n

Laird did not name either the officer who was shot or the accused shooter. He said the injured officer underwent surgery at a hospital and was in the intensive care unit, but in stable condition, while the driver of the vehicle officers pursued was pronounced dead at the scene.<\/p>\n

Laird said the wounds sustained by the man who died were “possibly self-inflicted.”<\/p>\n

“The officers returned fire with pistols,” Laird said. “His injuries, it looks like, were done with a 12-gauge shotgun.”<\/p>\n

Joshua Martinez, a nearby resident, shared video footage with Houston Public Media that indicated a total of 10 gunshots were fired during the encounter.<\/p>\n

The morning shootout was atypical for his neighborhood, Martinez said.<\/p>\n

“You hear a little bit of gunshots here and there on Saturdays, Friday nights, because people get drunk and all that stuff,” he said. “But you don’t actually see anything serious like this.”<\/p>\n

The same could be said for the South Houston Police Department, according to Laird, who said the small municipality near Houston has 32 officers on its force.<\/p>\n

“We don’t have officer-involved shootings every day, but we have them from time to time,” Laird said. “Our officer getting shot in the head, that’s a big deal to us.”<\/p>\n

Houston Public Media\u2019s Sarah Grunau contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sarah Grunau\/Houston Public Media There was a deadly exchange of gunfire near the intersection of 6th Street and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":223492,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[5456,56,58,57,865,66,223,52813,672,56949,86906],"class_list":["post-223491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-deadly-shooting","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news","tag-law-enforcement","tag-local","tag-news","tag-officer-involved-shootings","tag-police","tag-south-houston","tag-south-houston-police-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223491\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}