Three large armored vehicles surrounded his vehicle and SWAT team members approach it with guns drawn. They broke the white sedan's passenger window and opened the door, but the man had already shot himself.
The man who was identified as Mustafa Mustafa was immediately taken to St. Joseph's hospital in Burbank but he died several hours later. It seems that Mustafa, 27, was a businessman of Pakistani origin who apparently lost his business, which pushed him to a suicidal act. "He was distraught over financial stuff," Lt. Greg Doyle told KTLA-TV.
As we have already reported, the chase began around 8 p.m. when police tried to arrest Mustafa, who was being sought for an alleged armed assault on his girlfriend late Monday night, in the 4000 block of Lankershim Boulevard. When police arrived at the scene, Mustafa ran away in his Bentley and that's how the chase began.
Although Mustafa never exceeded 40 mph, he managed to lead the cops in a three-hours slow-speed pursuit southbound on the Hollywood Freeway, to southbound Interstate 5, back to the Hollywood Freeway then southbound on Interstate 405. At about 11:15 p.m., he stopped his car and an unknown woman walked up to the vehicle, spoke to him and then walked away.
Then the car's trunk suddenly opened, which made it extremely difficult for cops behind the vehicle to see what he was doing. Because Mustafa was "despondent, allegedly armed, " and potentially suicidal as officer Karen Smith of the Los Angeles Police Department claims, the cops stood close by with weapons drawn, but did not move in. Yet, when the SWAT officers decided to break the passenger's window with a crowbar, it was too late as Mustafa had already killed himself.
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