A welfare check led to the death of Sergeant Steven Robin and Officer Branden Estorffe from the Bay St. Louis Police Department. On Wednesday, officers checked on the welfare of a guest at the Motel 6 in Bay St. Louis, Miss.
Upon arriving at the motel, they encountered 43-year-old Amy Anderson and her 9-year-old daughter parked in front of the motel on Highway 90. Sergeant Steven Robin and Officer Branden Estorffe spoke with Anderson for about 30 minutes. Child Protective Services was contacted during this time.
Commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, Sean Tindell, shared additional insight on the interaction. Tindell claimed Anderson fired on the officers with her gun after pulling out her weapon.
During the encounter, Anderson was struck by gunfire, but it’s unclear whether the round came from her own weapon or an officer’s.
“We are waiting on a complete autopsy report before we know for certain which round did that,” Tindell says. It is “more likely” that she was struck by a bullet fired by an officer, he said.
There were two fatalities at the scene: Robin and Anderson. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation said Estorffe died after being taken to a local hospital.
According to Tindell, Anderson’s daughter sat in the passenger seat during the 30-minute encounter, but “we do not know whether she was there for the entire duration.”
“We are still working on getting all these pieces together because it is a chaotic scene,” he adds. “We have three dead people, two officers, a mother of three who is a veterinarian. We are putting together different pieces of body cam footage and trying to piece it all together so we can paint a clearer picture of what exactly happened.”
At the time of the incident, Tindell states that Anderson’s older children were not staying at the motel. They were staying with their father.
“Why she would leave her home in Jackson County, which is 30 minutes away, and get a motel room at the Motel 6?,” he says. “We know she had the motel room that night.”
Anderson studied at Mississippi State University and was a veterinarian for a long time, as represented by her Facebook page. A large part of her Facebook page is devoted to photos of her children and vacations.