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Officer shoots man in Pleasant Hills store
Sunday, March 12, 2000 By Bill Heltzel, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
A Baldwin Borough police officer critically wounded a 30-year-old man during an altercation Friday night in a Sheetz convenience store in Pleasant Hills.
Charles Lloyd, no known address, was in critical condition yesterday in Mercy Hospital.
Allegheny County police, which investigates most shootings in the county in which police are involved, were called to the store at 251 Curry Hollow Road at 10:30 p.m. Investigators were told that Lloyd attacked the unnamed Baldwin Borough officer and gained possession of the officer's service weapon, county spokeswoman Margaret Philbin said.
The officer then shot Lloyd with a second weapon.
Neither Philbin nor Baldwin Borough Police Chief Chris Kelly would identify the officer, say why the officer was in the Pleasant Hills store or provide any other details.
"It's not in our jurisdiction," Kelly said, in deferring to Pleasant Hills and Allegheny County police.
Pleasant Hills police also would not talk about the incident.
A spokesman for Sheetz, Amy Hanna, also was unable to discuss the incident. "Our information is sketchy, and we don't want to say anything that hampers a police investigation."
The lack of information provided yesterday by county police via Philbin was the first major evidence of a new restrictive media policy. On Thursday, then-county police Superintendent Thomas Sturgeon issued an order barring any county police officers from talking to reporters. Generally, until that order, county police supervisors had been available to reporters to provide details about their cases.
Sturgeon's media order came on the same day the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a story about county homicide Sgt. Lee Torbin, who led the investigation into a fatal police shooting of an unarmed man by a North Versailles officer. The story reported that Torbin had written a letter on official county police stationary in which he denounced both the coroner's office, which recommended homicide charges against the officer, and his own union for not supporting all the officers involved.
Coroner Dr. Cyril H. Wecht said Torbin's letter threatened to jeopardize the working relationship between his office and county police, which collaborate on most death investigations outside the city of Pittsburgh.
Asked about the new media policy on Friday, County Manager Robert Webb said that until further notice, reporters must give their requests for information to Philbin. He gave no reason for the new procedure other than to say it was undertaken to provide a more appropriate way to disseminate police news.
Webb would not comment on whether Torbin had been disciplined.
Also on Friday, it was announced that Sturgeon, "at his own request," had been reassigned as assistant police superintendent and that Assistant Superintendent Paul Wolf had been named acting superintendent.
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