A former West Virginia police officer says he was fired earlier this year for not shooting a distraught man standing in the street with an unloaded gun.
Stephen Mader was a Weirton police officer when he responded to a call of a domestic incident on May 6. The former U.S. Marine told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he arrived at the scene to find 23-year-old Ronald "R.J." Williams Jr., of Pittsburgh, armed with a handgun.
Mader said his first instinct was not to shoot the man.
"I saw then he had a gun, but it was not pointed at me," Mader told the Post-Gazette.
Mader said when he told Williams, who had the gun pointed at the ground, to drop the weapon, Williams said, “Just shoot me.”
"And I told him, 'I'm not going to shoot you, brother.' Then he starts flicking his wrist to get me to react to it," Mader told the newspaper. "I thought I was going to be able to talk to him and deescalate it. I knew it was a suicide-by-cop."
When two other officers arrived to back Mader up, however, Williams pointed the gun at them, Mader said. Not knowing at the time that it held no bullets, at least one of the officers fired at Williams, striking him in the head and killing him.
A West Virginia State Police investigation found the shooting to be justified, the Post-Gazette reported in June. That probe into Williams' death determined that after drinking heavily, he got into an argument with his ex-girlfriend, who told investigators he'd threatened to kill himself in front of her and their five-month-old son.
After she called police, he reportedly unloaded the gun and told her, “You know what? I’m going to make the cops do it.”
Mader, who told the Post-Gazette that he believed the officer acted appropriately by shooting Williams under the circumstances, said he reported back to work 11 days after the shooting to find out that he was being put on administrative leave.
The chief of police told him he'd "put two other officers in danger" by not shooting Williams, the former officer said. Less than a month after being put on leave, Mader was terminated.
Two other incidents were reportedly listed on his termination letter: an April incident in which he and two other officers – the same two involved in Williams’ shooting – failed to report an elderly woman’s death as being suspicious, and a March complaint in which a woman claimed Mader swore at her during her husband’s arrest for disorderly conduct.
It was not immediately clear if the other two officers were reprimanded for their alleged failure of duty in the elderly woman’s death.
People who'd read about Mader's claims expressed their outrage Tuesday on social media, many of them saying that departments across the nation needed more officers like him.
Williams' family, who questions the circumstances of his death, and the West Virginia Civil Liberties Union continue to look into the fatal shooting.
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