Police Brutality / Individual record
Kavonda Earl Payton
Kavonda Earl Payton, 39, died after Aurora, Colorado officers shot him following a vehicle pursuit on January 15, 2015.
- Record ID
- PB-086
- Incident date
- January 15, 2015
- Outcome
- Fatal
- Location
- Aurora, CO
- Agency
- Aurora Police Department
- Category
- Fatal on-duty police shooting
- Age (reported)
- 39
What happened
Police responding to a reported convenience-store robbery in Aurora on January 15, 2015 spotted a vehicle they associated with the call and chased it. Officers brought the vehicle to a stop with a pursuit-intervention maneuver. Kavonda Earl Payton exited and ran. According to the account supplied by police and reported by the Associated Press, Payton had a handgun, did not obey officers' commands and was shot. A second person in the vehicle was arrested and accused of robbery; that person's charges should not be conflated with proof of Payton's conduct at the moment he was killed. Payton was 39. His family arranged visitation and a church service in late January, and friends remembered him in public condolences. The records found here do not independently resolve distances, timing, or whether nonlethal tactics remained feasible after the car was stopped.
Investigation & findings
Contemporaneous reporting describes a fatal officer-involved shooting and an investigation. No independently verified final criminal charging decision about the shooting was located.
Washington Post Fatal Force v2; 2015–2024
Source record details
- Source incident ID
- 57
- Race code in source
- B
- Race source method
- not_available
- Gender (source)
- male
- Armed status (source)
- gun
- Flee status (source)
- not
- Agency IDs (source)
- 21
Last reviewed: October 25, 2026
Sources & records
- Primary source
- Additional source
- Methodology and national police killings trackingMapping Police Violence · Dataset/methodology
- Fatal Force v2 — fatal on-duty police shootings, 2015–2024The Washington Post · Dataset
- Fatal Force methodology and data limitationsThe Washington Post · Methodology