PAWTUCKET — The woman had a history of alcohol and drug abuse before she stole a vehicle at knifepoint from teenagers and tried to run over state police and Pawtucket officers in her way.

The man had a history of drug abuse and break-ins when he was seen at the door of a tenement in Pawtucket with a gun in his hand.

Within a span of just over 36 hours, both were shot to death by Pawtucket officers. Bridget DeGrafft, 49, of Attleboro, died early Thursday morning, and Jason Audette, 34, of 544 Central Ave. in Pawtucket, was killed Friday afternoon.

Now, a multi-agency task force is investigating the incidents separately, and the Pawtucket police chief said he will have an independent committee review officer-involved shootings. The four officers involved in the fatal shootings are on administrative duty during the investigations, as is standard in such cases.

As Audette’s relatives listened from a back bench in Municipal Court yesterday morning, Pawtucket Police Chief George L. Kelley III offered his condolences to the families.

“What I think everybody has to realize is that the person they know is not the person the police encountered,” Kelley said. “They were on a mission — not wanting to give up what they were doing.”

Kelley defended the officers’ actions. This is a tough city, the chief said, where the police deal with thousands of calls and myriad situations, he said. “Police take a lot of weapons off the street and deal with a lot of impaired people, and we deal with those people successfully,” Kelley said. “On these two encounters, our officers did everything they could in the situation.”

But his words and the police explanation about what unfolded in Audette’s case didn’t satisfy the family members, some of whom bolted from the courtroom when they heard the police had fired 10 to 12 shots at him.

Later, at the tenement house at 62-64 Coyle Ave. where Audette died, his sister, uncle and cousins said that they didn’t understand why the officers killed him. He was a good person, they said, who’d gone quietly with the police in the past.

They said they were surprised that Audette had a gun — he was a big man, about 6 feet tall and muscular, and didn’t need a gun to make his point, said Jim Andrews, an uncle. Audette knew some of the people who were living in one of the apartments at 62-64 Coyle Ave. — people who left the day after he was killed, said his sister Michelle, 33.

The family said all they knew for sure was that Audette had believed his days were numbered if he remained in Pawtucket.

He’d struggled for years with drug addiction and brushes with the law, his family said. (Court records show he had pleaded no contest to larcenies, break-ins, assaults and drug possession going back to 1989.)

Then, Audette finally moved out of Pawtucket in the last year and began building a new life in Florida. He’d graduated from his drug-rehab program there and was working in construction, Michelle Audette said. Then, he came back to Rhode Island last month to face a charge of violating the terms of his license suspension. He asked the court to let him move his probation to Florida.

“He told the judge if you don’t let me go back, I’ll either be dead or in jail, and he was right. He knew,” said Kristen DeCosta, a cousin, as she stood near bouquets of flowers stuck in a chain-link fence. “He wasn’t this animal people are making him out to be. He couldn’t make it here. He knew too many people here, and people knew him.”

The police won’t discuss Audette’s relationship with the people living in the Coyle Avenue tenement. On the hot, sunny Friday afternoon, the police got a 9-1-1 call about a man with a gun trying to break into the building.

As officers ran to cover both entrances, Officer Donna Joyal came around the house and slammed right into an armed Audette in the driveway, the chief said. There was a man and two children sitting in a van in the driveway, the chief said, and Joyal shoved Audette away from them.

The police yelled for Audette to drop his gun, said Detective Sgt. Roberto DaSilva. He was just 10 to 15 feet away and pointing a loaded .32-caliber semiautomatic at them, DaSilva said. “At this point, the officers felt that their lives were in danger and they had to resort to deadly force,” DaSilva said.

All together, Officers David Holden, 26, Mark Ramos, 31, and Christopher LeFort, 37, fired about a dozen shots at Audette with .40-caliber Glock service weapons, killing him. The incident happened within seconds. The chief couldn’t say whether Audette had fired any shots.

These three officers are on administrative duty, as is Officer Derrick Smith, who is believed to have shot and killed Bridget DeGrafft, 49, when the Attleboro woman pinned him with a stolen car after police officers and state troopers boxed her in in Warwick. Smith is now on crutches, suffering injuries from the stolen car pinning him against his cruiser.

The last time the Pawtucket police shot and killed someone was in April 2006, when a patrolman killed a man who had robbed a convenience store and rammed a police cruiser.

“They’re not easy,” Kelley said of the aftermath of police shootings. “There’s a lot of scars. It takes a long time to heal.”

amilkovi@projo.com