MIAMI -- Three Miami-Dade County police officers struggled with a man whom relatives described as mentally ill before one of the officers shot and killed the man.

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Witnesses Say Police Went Too Far

Randy Carlos Baker, a 49-year-old Army veteran, died on the way to a hospital after a male officer shot him around 5 p.m. Sunday, Miami-Dade police spokesman Sgt. Pete Andreu said. Baker's family said he died in the street where he was shot.

Andreu did not identify the officers involved, but said Randy Baker struck two of them in the head and gave them injuries that needed to be treated at a hospital. But Baker's relatives said he only fought back because the officers hit him first for no reason.

"He bothered nobody. They didn't have to kill him. They shot him three times in the head. They didn't have to do that to him," said Maggie Gross, Baker's cousin.

Police would not confirm that or any other details about the shooting, saying a homicide investigation was under way. But Mira Baker, also a cousin of Randy Baker, said he was walking down a street in the West Perrine neighborhood when an officer drove up and called him over to his patrol car.

"He said, 'I ain't done nothing. I'm going home,"' he quoted his cousin as saying. As he spoke, he threw his hands up in the air.

The officer got out of the car, grabbed Randy Baker by the shirt and started beating him with his police-issued baton, Mira Baker said. Then two female officers pulled up and also started beating him, he said.

Priscilla Dumas said she was getting off a county bus near the corner at the time police were pummeling Randy Baker. "They just beat him and beat him," Dumas said. "The man's face had so much blood, he couldn't see."

Baker's sister, Deborah Burnett, said her brother had recently stopped taking his medication, but that it had not made him aggressive or violent. Baker was in the U.S. Army and stationed in Germany many years ago, she said.

"When he got out of the service, he was just never right," she said.