I was assigned coverage on this for a couple days. Guy wasn't mentally ill, but he was off-balance because a friend had committed suicide a few days prior. Mod turned out to be some kind of dual-18650 box topped with a TFV4 Mini - I have the same tank and if the wide drip tip was installed it certainly could have been mistaken for a gun barrel.
Stupid move on the guy's part for pointing anything at a cop, but this may have been a suicide by cop thing. Media, both local and national, haven't done much if anything with the vape angle.
The bigger problem, as I see it, is this was a 5150 call, cops knew they'd be encountering someone unstable, and instead of sending the psych team they sent a regular unit. One cop followed his training, kept a distance, and prepared to deploy a taser. The other cop ran up to within a couple paces of what he knew was a person acting crazy and fired before the first got the taser off.
All that said, this was probably avoidable had the police followed protocol, but it's one of the more generally defensible cop killings of unarmed black people I've seen in the last year or so since that became a thing the news pays attention to.
