The law enforcement officer who was shot to death Friday night while providing security at a high school basketball playoff game in New Orleans was 38-year-old Martinus Mitchum, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the killing. 
Investigators say Mitchum, a Tulane University police officer who was moonlighting at George Washington Carver High School, was killed after a school staff member got into an argument with a man trying to enter Carver’s game against Warren Easton High School. Mitchum overheard the dispute, intervened and tried to escort the man off campus.  
The man pulled a gun and shot Mitchum in the chest, police said. Paramedics took Mitchum to University Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. 
Orleans Parish sheriff’s deputies who also were at the school arrested a suspect in the shooting. The suspect wasn’t immediately identified.
The Carver-Easton game was called off.
Multiple shots reported near Carver High gym
Sources said Mitchum’s family was notified of his death later Friday.
Mitchum also was a reserve deputy constable at 2nd City Court. Tulane’s website said he began working for the university’s police force on July 26, 2019. 
He also had worked at Landry-Walker High School in Algiers and John F. Kennedy High School when it was near City Park, according to newspaper records, and as an officer for the Loyola University Police Department. He graduated from the Slidell Police Department’s basic reserve police academy in 2014, said Sgt. Daniel Seuzeneau, an agency spokesperson.
Mitchum maintained an active presence on social media networks and often commented on law enforcement. Just two days before his death, he wrote he could support requirements that officers wear body cameras and favored officers being decertified if they performed their jobs poorly or were shown to be racist.
On Thursday, he retweeted a message from Vice President Kamala Harris supporting the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which is named for the man killed by Minneapolis police in 2020 and aims to overhaul qualified immunity for law enforcement, among other things.
Mitchum also favored courts holding repeat offenders accountable rather than releasing them on no bail or low bail.
News of Mitchum’s killing caused an outpouring of condolences on the networks he frequented. One Twitter user recounted how Mitchum had just “checked on” him last week and wrote: “Get your rest.”
Charles Carmouche, a local high school basketball standout who went on to play at the University of New Orleans, LSU and University of Memphis, wrote that Mitchum believed in him “when nobody did” and also checked in on him regularly. 
“We really lost a great dude,” Carmouche said.
John Simerman and Matt Sledge contributed to this report.