Tustin Officers Fatally Shoot Man After Woman Found Dead in Apartment

Tustin police fatally shot a man Monday afternoon after finding a woman unresponsive inside a Briarwood Apartments unit, in a case that escalated within minutes from a domestic call to a homicide investigation and then to an officer-involved shooting. The man allegedly advanced toward officers holding a knife before they opened fire, according to police.

Officers responded around 2:30 p.m. Monday to the complex in the 1400 block of Walnut Avenue after a domestic call that was escalated to a potential homicide, according to a Tustin Police Department release reported by CBS Los Angeles. Arriving officers found the woman dead inside the unit, then fired on the man after he allegedly advanced toward them with a knife, the station reported. Neither the woman nor the man has been publicly identified. CBS Los Angeles reporter Laurie Perez has been covering the investigation as it continues to unfold.

DA's Office Opens Independent Review

The Orange County District Attorney's Office has opened an independent investigation into the shooting, per the same account, under standard county protocol requiring outside prosecutorial review of every fatal officer-involved shooting in the county. That review will assess whether the officers involved could face any criminal liability under California law. As of the network's report, the investigation into both the woman's death and the shooting remained ongoing, and key questions — including the relationship between the man and woman and the exact timeline of her death before officers arrived — had not been publicly resolved.

Any use of deadly force by the responding officers will be measured against California's Penal Code Section 835a, which CalMatters notes was updated by Assembly Bill 392 in 2020 to require that officers use deadly force only when objectively necessary to defend against an imminent threat of death or serious injury. The law replaced California's former 1872 standard with a stricter, necessity-based evaluation framework, raising the bar for what officers must show to justify a fatal shooting.

Tustin Police Already Facing Scrutiny Over Force

The shooting lands at a moment of heightened scrutiny for Tustin police over deadly force. A federal jury ordered the city to pay $17 million in damages in April after finding that a Tustin officer used excessive and unreasonable force in the August 2021 fatal shooting of Luis Manuel Garcia, a mentally ill homeless man who was allegedly wielding a knife, according to the Los Angeles Times. That verdict followed a six-day federal civil rights trial, per the Daily Journal.

Monday's shooting also follows a string of fatal domestic violence cases tied to Tustin in recent months. In May, Tustin police investigated the fatal shooting of a 42-year-old woman near 17th and Yorba Streets, a case that led to the murder arrest of her ex-boyfriend near the U.S.-Mexico border after detectives initially treated the shooting as an isolated incident before identifying her former partner as a suspect. And in March, the Orange County District Attorney's Office charged an Orange County Sheriff's deputy with felony voluntary manslaughter for allegedly shooting and killing her fiancée inside their Tustin apartment in August 2025; the deputy faces up to 21 years in state prison if convicted, according to the district attorney's office.

Weapons Increasingly Present in Domestic Violence Calls

The Briarwood Apartments case also fits into a broader regional pattern documented by researchers who study intimate partner violence in Orange County. A decade-long study published in 2022 by the UC Irvine School of Law and the Orange County Domestic Violence Death Review Team, which analyzed 113 domestic violence fatalities across the county, found that 88 percent of victims were women, with roughly half of the fatal cases involving a known history of prior domestic violence.

Statewide, weapons are turning up more often in domestic violence calls. A July report analyzing California Department of Justice data, compiled by the Public Policy Institute of California, found that law enforcement handled roughly 163,000 domestic violence calls across the state in 2024, with 61 percent reporting the presence of a weapon — a 44 percent increase in weapon-involved domestic calls over the preceding decade. Orange County itself recorded 4.2 domestic violence-related police calls per 1,000 adults ages 18 to 69 in 2023, according to Kidsdata.org, below the statewide average of 6.1 per 1,000 adults.

The investigation into Monday's shooting at Briarwood Apartments remains active, with the Orange County District Attorney's Office continuing its review alongside the department's own internal process. Hoodline previously reported on a separate fatal stabbing case in Tustin in 2024, though that incident is unrelated to Monday's shooting.