MEMPHIS — A Memphis police officer shot and killed a man in a public library on Thursday afternoon after the man shot another officer, critically wounding him, the authorities said.
The Memphis Police Department, which has been under intense scrutiny after the beating that led to the death of Tyre Nichols last month, said that the man who was shot was pronounced dead at the scene. The officer was taken to a hospital in “extremely critical” condition, the department said.
Keli McAlister, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which was called in to investigate the shooting, said the Memphis police responded to a report of a man trespassing at a business near the Poplar-White Station Library around noon. The same man got into a confrontation with someone else about 30 minutes later inside the library, Ms. McAlister said, and when the police tried to talk to him, he pulled out a gun and shot an officer.
A second police officer then fatally shot the man, she said. Ms. McAlister said that both officers, as well as the man whom the police killed, were Black men.
The local district attorney, Steven J. Mulroy, had asked the state agents to investigate the shooting.
Police officers could be seen walking in and out of the library after the shooting and had cordoned it off with yellow tape.
The library is in an upscale area of the East Memphis neighborhood, surrounded by restaurants, bars and a Whole Foods grocery store. Directly behind the library is a 34-story office building called Clark Tower.
Sundiata Williams, who works in Clark Tower, said she was going downstairs to pick up a pizza around lunch time when she discovered that security had locked the front door to her office building.
“It kind of blew me,” she said. “I was coming down for lunch and they were like, ‘No, go that way.’”
Mr. Mulroy’s office is leading the prosecution of the five Memphis police officers who have been charged with second-degree murder in Mr. Nichols’s death after a videotaped beating in which officers punched and kicked Mr. Nichols and struck him with a baton.
Jessica Jaglois contributed reporting.
