
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, July 30, 1994                   TAG: 9408020029
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEWPORT NEWS                                LENGTH: Short

GIRLFRIEND: POLICE GUILTY OF `MURDER'

A woman whose boyfriend was shot and killed by a police marksman after police said the man held a gun to her head contends she never was in danger and that police murdered her boyfriend.

``They didn't have to kill him,'' Laura Kirby said Thursday after the funeral of her boyfriend, Donald D. Vanfossen. ``They murdered him. He's had that gun since the day I met him. He never used it.''

Kirby, 25, said Vanfossen had taken cocaine about four hours before he was shot Monday at a motel where the couple was staying. She said they planned to marry this week.

Kirby said people walking past their room upset Vanfossen. She tried to get his .357-caliber handgun away from him because ``I was afraid he might hurt himself,'' but he wouldn't give it up.

Kirby said she was standing with her back against Vanfossen's chest when the fatal shot was fired from a marksman's rifle on a second-story balcony across the parking lot. She said Vanfossen had the gun in his right hand and both arms were wrapped around her waist. She was not injured.

Police spokesman Bill Roth said two internal investigations of the shooting are under way but that preliminary reports indicated officers were responding to calls that ``the hostage was being physically abused'' and reacted accordingly.

by CNB