WEST VALLEY CITY, Utah, Nov. 19, 2025 (Gephardt Daily) — A man is in custody after an officer-involved critical incident Wednesday morning near Redwood Road and 3300 South.
The man was at a temporary shelter, and had been asked to leave.
He got into a van and “rammed into an officer’s vehicle who was here working security at the shelter,” West Valley City Police spokesman Roxeanne Vainuku told reporters at the scene.
“The force of that impact pushed the vehicle up over an embankment. The officer got out of the vehicle and fired upon the suspect’s vehicle. The suspect was not hit during that encounter.”
The suspect then fled the scene, Vainuku said.
“An officer pursued that suspect a short distance. The suspect then returned back to the parking lot of the shelter where he was taken into custody.”
The incident meets the criteria for an Officer-Involved Critical Incident (OICI).
“So an officer-involved critical incident protocol team, which is headed up by UPD, is investigating,” Vainuku said.
The protocol requires an outside agency to investigate to ensure impartiality, she said, “and to make sure that every incident like this is investigated thoroughly and professionally. So we will be just kind of on the outside of that while another agency is investigating. That will take some time for them to work through the details of that.”
The OICI protocol team will “be working through their investigative process, and we’ll be cooperating with them fully to provide them any information that we can,” Vainuku said.
No injuries were reported as a result of the incident, Vainuku said. The officer inside the patrol vehicle when it was hit did not require medical attention.
Traffic was impacted when several lanes were blocked during the initial investigation, but as of about 12:30 p.m., only one lane remained blocked on Redwood Road.
