Portraits Begin To Emerge Of Man, Police Officer Involved In Fatal Nashville Shooting

This post has been updated to include additonal information about the Nashville Police Department’s Juvenile Crime Task Force.

Amid the investigation into last week’s shooting in North Nashville, a picture has begun to emerge of the man who died and the police officer who killed him.

The exact circumstances behind the death of 25-year-old Dan Hambrick on Thursday evening are still unclear. But investigators say it was another 25-year-old, Officer Andrew Delke, who fired the fatal shot.

Delke joined the Nashville Police Department in December 2016 and was assigned to Nashville’s East Precinct. He later joined the department’s Juvenile Crime Task Force, an assignment that would have required him to police other parts of the city, often in search of stolen cars. Investigators say this is what Delke was doing on the night Hambrick was killed.

Delke’s personnel file shows in that short tenure has had no disciplinary actions. In his only performance evaluation, he was praised for making arrests “almost nightly” and remaining “proactive throughout (his) shift.” In January, Delke’s supervisors nominated him for officer of the month, after he took two guns away from convicted felons.

But that sort of police work chafed the people closest to Hambrick, including Quintel Hudson, a friend of Hambrick tight enough that he called himself “his brother.” 

“I just feel like he was targeted. I feel like I’m targeted because I’m his brother, and whoever else is around us is targeted also,” Hudson said shortly before a rally in Daniel Hambrick’s memory over the weekend. “I’m thinking they already know who Dan-Dan is, and they just done what they done, and I don’t feel that’s right.”

Don Aaron, a spokesman for the Nashville Police Department, says that it knows of no prior interaction between Hambrick and the Juvenile Crime Task Force that Delke was assigned to.

The task force has arrested 321 people, charging more than 200 with felonies. Though the majority of those arrested by the task force so far have been adults, the police spokesman says task force’s responsibility is reducing crime by teens, not dealing with potential gang members.

Hambrick’s friends acknowledged he had a long history of run-ins with the law, starting when he was a student at Whites Creek High School. Court records show that in 2010 he pleaded guilty to a charge of robbery and was convicted of a separate charge of misdemeanor assault, when he threw a stapler at a girl, striking her in the face.

Later, Hambrick would be convicted on drug and weapon possession charges, and in 2013 he was accused of selling drugs within 1,000 feet of a school. He was due back in court next year on several felony drug and weapons charges. Police say he was a member of a gang.

But his friends and family described him as a loyal friend and son. Regardless of his past actions, they say, he should not have been fatally shot by a police officer.

WPLN’s Blake Farmer, Tony Gonzalez and Meribah Knight contributed to this report.