Nobody wants to hear about a young person, a 13-year-old, dying. This is especially true when his death was caused by a cop. But heartbreaking though it may be, it fails to answer the question of whether it was a good shoot, no matter how angry an immigrant community may be about the death of one of its children.

The police stopped him and a friend who was straddling a bike on a quiet, working-class street around 10 p.m., officials said. The officers were investigating robberies and suspects described as Asian males with a black firearm. One suspect had been on a bike and the other had been walking, the police said.

When one officer asked to pat the boys down to “make sure you have no weapons on you,” Nyah fled, police body-camera footage shows. An officer chased after him, and the footage, when slowed down, shows Nyah turning with an object in his hand. The officer can be heard yelling “gun!” before tackling the teenager. Nyah held onto the object while he was on the ground, the police said. Seconds later, the footage shows, a second officer arrives. A gunshot is heard, but not seen.

The police said later that the object in Nyah’s hand was a pellet gun.

It’s not a mystery what happened. It was all captured on video.

The salient details aren’t in dispute. The police approached because the two youths matched the description of robbers using a gun. Nyah fled when the cops were about to do a pat down, which was entirely appropriate given that the two youths they were searching for were allegedly armed with a gun. And during his flight, Nyah, who fled rather than allow a pat down to ascertain whether he had a gun, turned with something in his hand, a black gun. The gun turned out to be a pellet gun.

Was the cop supposed to wait for Nyah to fire and, only then, find out whether the gun discharged a lethal round? Point a gun at a cop while fleeing and, well, bad things are going to happen. This doesn’t change because you’re only 13, still old enough to pull a trigger.

And yet, this shooting spurred outrage among a refugee group from Myanmar called Karen.

At the hospital, Utica’s lone Karen police officer spoke to Nyah’s parents, but she had not been at the scene and what she said about a shootout did not fully match what they later learned about the fatal encounter, the family said.

The discrepancies have intensified distrust between city leaders and the Karen, many of whom were already wary of military and police figures. Older Karen residents lived through decades of armed conflict with the government of their native country, a onetime British colony previously known as Burma. They endured displacements at home, fled state violence into neighboring Thailand and, as refugees, resettled in the United States.

There have been a spate of outraged protests stemming from a person of a certain race or ethnicity being killed by police, without regard to how or why. What “discrepancies” gave rise to issues here? What “discrepancies” change what is shown on the video? What was Nyah doing with a pellet gun at night, matching the description of armed robbers? What explains Nyah fleeing, with his pellet gun, from police?

The problem isn’t that the Karen community shouldn’t feel the pain of one of its youth being killed. It’s entirely understandable that they would, especially given their history as refugees in Myanmar. But there is nothing about that pain or that history that changes what happened on the street that night. It’s not that police targeted a child for death, but that even a 13-year-old with a gun can be an armed robber and kill a cop as he tries to flee.