Police fatally shot an alleged gunman in an Alabama mall. Now they say he wasn't the shooter after all.

Man killed by police amid Black Friday shooting was not the gunman, authorities say

A man fatally shot by police at a Hoover, Alabama, mall on Thursday night was not the gunman who wounded two people following an altercation, officials said Friday evening, contrary to initial police statements. The actual shooter is thought to be still at large.

Police in the Birmingham suburb originally claimed Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford Jr., 21, was the shooter responsible for injuring another man and a young girl in the Black Friday shopping shooting. But in a later statement, they said their "initial media release was not totally accurate" and Bradford is now, at most, thought to have been "involved in some aspect of the altercation."

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.