The aunts of Korryn Gaines spoke with 11 News about the police shooting that took their niece's life and what they think contributed to her mistrust of police. 
 
 The family of Korryn Gaines is looking for answers after the hours-long standoff ended with Gaines dead and her 5-year-old son also shot. 
 
 The big question from the family of Gaines was why such lethal force had to be used. 
 
 "We see hundreds of videos where these people are taken into custody without harm. What was so different in this situation? If they truly felt like something was wrong with her, then address her accordingly," aunt Dawn McGee said. 
 
 Family members say police had Korynn Gaines' father record a message to her during negotiations Monday. They do not know whether it was used. 
 
 
 
 "She was sitting on the floor. The weapon was on her lap beside her. She didn’t fire until they fired on her," aunt Shannon Gaines said. 
 
 Distraught and desperate for answers, Shannon Gaines and Dawn McGee, both aunts of Korryn Gaines, question what happened Monday in Gaines' Randallstown apartment and its deadly conclusion. 
 
 The 23-year-old was shot and killed after police said Gaines threatened to kill officers after nearly six hours of negotiations with a hostage team. Gaines' 5-year-old son was with her. 
 
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 Gaines aunts said to characterize the boy as a hostage is wrong. 
 
 "He wasn't a hostage. He wasn't a hostage. She would never do that. Before she would hurt her baby, she would jump in front of a bullet for him. She would not hurt her kids, and for them to keep portraying her as that kind of person is awful," Shannon Gaines said. 
 
 There is no police body camera video of what happened inside the apartment. Part of what was going on was recorded and posted by Gaines to her Instagram account, until police got Facebook to take it offline. The family calls it an attempt to silence Korryn Gaines. 
 
 "Because she was broadcasting it to people who cared about her. They had to make her feel alienated, and they had to assassinate her right there with her baby sitting right there, and try to paint it like she's the one that was wrong. She's the one that was crazy. It is not right," Shannon Gaines said. 
 
 In a Facebook post Monday during the standoff, Gaines wrote, "Don't tell me what to do. I'm home. Tell those gang members outside door to go away from my home and family." 
 
 The family said Gaines suffered a miscarriage after her arrest in March, and blamed her encounter with police. 
 
 "So why would she trust them now? Why would she trust once they come into her house that they are not going to hurt her again?" Shannon Gaines said. 
 
 Shannon Gaines said a county police supervisor told them Monday that police went to the house to serve one warrant for Korryn Gaines' boyfriend, who was taken into custody. A police spokesman refutes that, saying police had two warrants when they first arrived -- one for him and one for Gaines. 
 
 About deactivating the social media account, police said people were egging her on. 
 
 Court documents show police initially used a key obtained from the landlord to open the door, but found it chained, and then kicked it in to gain entry. It was after that police saw Gaines with the gun. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 Social network granted emergency request from Baltimore County police as she broadcast the standoff before she was killed, officers say 
 
 In the middle of a five-hour standoff that ended in the death of 23-year-old Korryn Gaines, Facebook granted an emergency request from the Baltimore County police department to take her social media accounts offline, police have said. 
 
 Baltimore County police officers shot and killed Gaines on Monday after she barricaded herself inside her Randallstown apartment with her five-year-old son and pointed a shotgun at officers attempting to serve an arrest warrant on charges stemming from a 10 March traffic stop including disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. 
 
 Black woman shot dead by police during alleged standoff while holding son Read more 
 
 Gaines was using social media to broadcast the standoff, which began when officers showed up on Monday morning to serve a warrant. Police officials asked Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, to suspend Gaines’ accounts through what police called a “law enforcement portal”, a part of the site open to certified law enforcement agencies. 
 
 At some point after that, police shot Gaines, killing her. 
 
 “We did in fact reach out to social media authorities to deactivate her account, to take it offline, if you will,” the Baltimore County police chief, James Johnson, said on Tuesday. “Why? In order to preserve the integrity of the negotiation process with her and for the safety of our personnel [and] her child. Ms Gaines was posting video of the operation as it unfolded. Followers were encouraging her not to comply with negotiators’ request that she surrender peacefully.” 
 
 He added that it took more than an hour from the time police contacted Facebook for the account to be taken down. He said the account had not been deleted and that it would now be used as evidence. 
 
 Though Baltimore County has implemented a body camera program, it is only a few weeks into implementation and according to police none of the officers involved were wearing body cameras, meaning the Facebook video could become particularly important. A police spokeswoman, Elise Armacost, said the department was obtaining a warrant to obtain the videos as evidence. 
 
 Activists, however, see such video as the only hope of countering the police narrative. “They get on the 11 o’clock news or the Baltimore Sun with the police side and then everyone forgets it,” said Duane “Shorty” Davis, a Baltimore activist who regularly films encounters with police. “They control the narrative, but in controlling the narrative they have to control social media, because it’s our narrative,” he said. “To keep our message from getting out, they’re going to take [social media] out.” 
 
 Control of video footage has been contested in two other recent controversial police shootings. The man who owned the convenience store in Baton Rouge where Alton Sterling was killed by police last month said officers took the surveillance video without a warrant or his consent. He hid the cellphone he used to tape the video of the shooting from the police, and shared it with media organizations. 
 
 And Diamond Reynolds – who used used Facebook’s live video feature one day later to film her boyfriend, Philando Castile, after he was shot by police in a suburb of St Paul – has claimed that police physically took her phone and deleted the video of Castile dying. “They took my phone. They took over my Facebook,” she said. “Everyone who shared my video, they don’t want you guys to be a part of this; they don’t want us to support each other.” 
 
 
 
 
 
 In 2012, when most social media sites were still in their infancy, James MacArthur, a black Baltimore activist and blogger who produces an internet radio show under the name Baltimore Spectator, livestreamed a standoff with police on his show. Like Gaines, MacArthur was publicly critical of police and was legally armed. When officers attempted to serve a failure-to-appear warrant at his home – the same thing that led to Gaines’ barricade – MacArthur would not come out and the incident ended in a lengthy standoff with police. 
 
 MacArthur broadcast the entire situation, including his negotiations with police, drawing a large audience. He believes that that online audience is one of the only reasons he is alive today. “I knew that was my only chance,” MacArthur said. “What’s most noteworthy about my incident was my use of social media and you see that they went immediately after that in this case.” 
 
 Gaines had filmed police on previous occasions, including during one incident which led to the warrant she was being served with when she was killed. In March, according to police reports, an officer pulled Gaines over because she had a piece of cardboard with writing on it instead of a license plate. “Any government official who compromises this pursuit of happiness and right to travel, will be held criminally responsible and fined, as this is a natural right and freedom,” the cardboard plate said. 
 
 Gaines told the officer he had no authority to question her. One officer threatened to use a Taser. She said they would have to murder her in order to get her out of the car, in which she had her two children. 
 
 In one of at least three videos she took during the incident, she coached one of the children: “Make sure you record everything,” as an officer grabbed her by the wrist to pull her from the car. 
 
 In captions on Instagram videos of the incident, Gaines said that the officers “threatened to break my limbs”. 
 
 Gaines said she spent two days “in isolation and being starved nd [sic] with no water”, before she was released with charges of disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and littering. 
 
 She did not show up to court to face these charges, which resulted in the bench warrant three officers showed up to serve on Monday morning. According to Johnson, the police chief, they were also serving a warrant on her boyfriend, Kareem Courtney, for a domestic violence complaint that Gaines brought against him. 
 
 The couple would not allow the officers in and the police got a key from the apartment management. According to Johnson, when they tried to open the door, a security chain kept it from opening all the way. “They could clearly see a female that they believed to be Ms Gaines seated on the floor, a child nearby, who immediately began to wield a shotgun around, bringing it up to ready position, pointing it directly at the officers there to serve the arrest warrant,” Johnson said. 
 
 Johnson said they immediately summoned tactical and support personnel who obtained a separate warrant charging Gaines with assaulting a police officer. 
 
 At some point, Courtney left with the younger of the two children in the apartment. He has been charged with second-degree assault related to a fight with Gaines and released on his own recognizance. 
 
 In one of the videos of the standoff which has remained online, Gaines asks her five-year-old child: “Who is outside?” When he answers that it is the police she asks why. “To kill us,” the child says. 
 
 Around 3pm, according to Johnson, Gaines “brought the weapon up to the ready position, announced to one or more of the tactical team personnel: ‘If you don’t leave, I’m going to kill you.’” 
 
 Instead of leaving, an officer fired, and Gaines returned the fire. “Our personnel returned three rounds of fire, striking her and killing her,” said Johnson. 
 
 No officers were injured, but Gaines’ child was also shot. He was wounded in the arm and is in a good condition in hospital. “We do not know at this moment in time if the child was struck by our round, her round, shrapnel from our round, shrapnel from her round,” Johnson said. He said they did not know where the child was when the shooting occurred. 
 
 The names of the officers still have not been released, in accordance with the contract the county has with the police union. 
 
 The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Maryland strongly condemned the action, saying in a statement that police “decided that they needed to use deadly force to execute that warrant, and needed to expose themselves to the known risk of deadly force being used on them, knowing that a five year old child might be in the line of fire”. 
 
 The Associated Press contributed to this report 

 A police standoff in Randallstown, Md., on Monday in which a 23-year-old woman with a shotgun was killed after the police say she had been encouraged by her online followers to defy their orders has highlighted an unexpected role of social media in violent encounters. 
 
 During the standoff, which lasted several hours, videos from inside the apartment were posted to the Instagram account of the woman, Korryn Gaines, 23, whose 5-year-old son was also in the home, according to the Baltimore County Police Department. 
 
 The police said Ms. Gaines had repeatedly pointed her shotgun at officers, at least once while her son was in her arms. At one point, she said she would kill the officers if they did not leave, the police said. An officer fired once at Ms. Gaines, and she fired back, the police said. Then officers fired three shots, killing Ms. Gaines. Her son also sustained injuries in the crossfire, though they are not considered to be life-threatening. 
 
 Critics of the police have welcomed social media — especially live video — as a way to document their interactions with officers, hoping it would lead to better police behavior or eliminate conflicting stories. In July, a Facebook video broadcast by the girlfriend of Philando Castile, after a police officer shot him during a traffic stop in Minnesota, drew wide attention.
– The world might've seen more of Korryn Gaines' five-hour standoff with police Monday, but Facebook granted a police request to shut off her account. The social media site deactivated Gaines' Facebook and Instagram accounts, which she was using to broadcast the standoff before she was fatally shot in Randallstown, Md. Baltimore Police Chief James Johnson says the department made the request because "followers were encouraging her not to comply with negotiators' request that she surrender peacefully," and police were about the safety of her 5-year-old son and officers, reports the Guardian. Such requests aren't exactly rare: The New York Times reports that Facebook received 855 from government entities in the last half of 2015. But Gaines' aunt isn't buying the police explanation. "They had to assassinate her right there with her baby sitting right there, and try to paint it like she's the one that was wrong," she tells WBAL. According to Johnson, Gaines, 23, wouldn't open her apartment door when officers arrived to serve a warrant for failing to appear over a March traffic stop, which she also recorded; she later claimed police held her for two days "in isolation … with no water." When police entered her apartment with a landlord's key, Johnson says Gaines pointed a gun at officers and threatened to shoot. Gaines' aunt says the gun "was on her lap" and she only returned police fire. She was shot and killed, and her son was shot in the arm but is listed in good condition.