‘Shield’ actor Michael Jace charged in wife’s shooting death

 

By Alan Duke

LOS ANGELES (CNN) – Michael Jace, who played a Los Angeles cop in TV’s The Shield, has been charged in the fatal shooting of his wife, police said Tuesday.

April Jace, 40, was found shot to death in her south Los Angeles home by police called there to investigate a shooting, Los Angeles Police Detective Lyman Doster said.

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“At this moment the motive of the murder is believed to be domestic violence,” a police news release said.

Investigators detained Jace, 51, at the couple’s Hyde Park area home Monday night and booked the actor on a homicide charge early Tuesday, according to Doster.

Jace was booked into a Los Angeles jail with bail set at $1 million.

The FX police drama The Shield was the biggest and longest-running role in Jace’s 22-year acting career. He appeared in 89 episodes as Julien Lowe, who started as a rookie officer in an inner-city Los Angeles police precinct in 2002 and rose through the ranks to become a detective before the series ended in 2008, according to the Internet Movie Database.

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He acted on several episodes of Southland, another TV drama about Los Angeles police, between 2009 and 2012.

Jace often played a law enforcement or military officer on television shows. He is credited with roles in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Private Practice, The Mentalist, Burn Notice and NYPD Blue.

He had the title role of Michael Jordan in the 1999 TV movie about the NBA star, Michael Jordan: An American Hero.

Jace played Officer Brown in Russell Crowe’s 2009 film State of Play, and he portrayed a Black Panther member in the 1994 blockbuster movie Forrest Gump.

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CNN’s Dottie Evans contributed to this report.