Updated: 09/15/2015 5:58 PM | Created: 09/07/2015 4:50 PM
By: Blair Miller, KOB.com and Lauren Hansard, KOB Eyewitness News 4

New Mexico State Police confirmed Monday they are investigating an officer-involved shooting that occurred in Hobbs around 12:30 a.m. Monday.

Hobbs police said Tuesday that officers were called out to a home early Monday on a domestic battery call.

State police, who are investigating the shooting, said Tuesday that Hobbs police responded to an Allsup's convenience store and met 42-year-old Tanya Verrett, who told police she had been battered by her husband, 42-year-old William Verrett, at their home.

According to state police, Tanya told police the two had been in a dispute and she told Hobbs officers that William had a shotgun.

State police said five Hobbs officers and a supervisor showed up to the home in the 1200 block of Park and found William Verrett with a shotgun.

State police said Verrett refused to drop the gun and pointed it at officers, at which point officers shot at him, striking Verett several times. He died at the scene.

State police identified the officers who shot Verrett as Douglas Evans, Troy Brackeen and Alvin Mattocks.

KOB counted at least five bullets in a back fence at the home Tuesday. A neighbor said a bullet went into his bedroom.

This was the fifth officer-involved shooting in Hobbs since January in a city of about 40,000 people. Before this year, there hadn't been a single officer-involved shooting in Hobbs in five years.

Hobbs Police Chief Chris McCall tried to give an explanation for the increase Tuesday.

"It's an anomaly for the Hobbs Police Department and we hope that it's not a continuing trend," McCall said. "We hope that we can start working through these issues and bring all of our calls to a safe end – for both the citizens that we encounter and our officers."

Chief McCall says there isn't a specific reason for the increase.

"The officers that respond to these calls, they're reacting to the situations that they have in front of them,"McCall said. "Obviously, we want to conduct every call that we go to in the easiest manner we can, with as little force as possible used."

But he says officers have been training how to deal with shootings over the past year.

"We've been watching…the trends going on in the nation and we've been working to try to mitigate that through training, through crisis and intervention training…to try to give our officers more tools to work through these scenarios."

On January 17, a Hobbs officer was involved in a shooting at the Diamond Lil's Bar.

On April 15, two Lea Co. Task Force officers exchanged fire with two Hobbs residents who were armed with multiple weapons, including an AK-47.

On June 17, a bystander and the armed suspect were both killed in an exchange of gunfire with Hobbs police. The bystander was likely hit by the suspect's gunfire, according to state police.

Then, Aug. 13, the Lea County Drug Task Force shot a suspect after a high-speed chase.