Dispatcher: Hancock County 911. Where is your emergency?

Bethany Gilmer: Please send somebody to 119 Marie Avenue, Weirton West Virginia right now. Please right now.

Dispatcher: Okay.

Bethany Gilmer: Please right now.

Dispatcher: Okay. 119 what?

Bethany Gilmer: 119. 119 Marie Avenue, Weirton, West Virginia.

Dispatcher: What’s the problem?

Bethany Gilmer: hangs up

Joe Sexton: It’s 2:51 a.m. in Weirton, West Virginia, an old steel town outside of Pittsburgh. Weirton likes to call itself one of the safest small cities in America.

Dispatch: Dispatch 31

Mader: 31

Dispatch: Got a female stating she was at 119 Marie Avenue, stating they needed someone right now. She sounded hysterical, hung up the phone, will not answer on callback. Believe it’s going to be at 119 Marie Avenue.

Mader: Pulling into Marie now, 119.

Joe Sexton: The officer who shows up is Stephen Mader. A white, rookie cop with a hometown pedigree – he graduated from the local high school, served with the Marines, had started a family with the girl he took to the prom. The streets of Weirton are quiet at that hour. It takes Officer Mader, alone in his patrol car, just under three minutes to get to 119 Marie.

Dispatch: Hancock County Dispatch.

Bethany Gilmer: Yeah, you just called me back. Um, there’s- my ex-boyfriend’s here. He has a gun. He has a gun. He has a – he doesn’t have a clip in the gun.

Dispatch: Did you say he has a gun?

Bethany Gilmer: Yes, there’s no clip.

Dispatch: Is he there? Because I’ve gotta.

Bethany Gilmer: upset

Dispatch: Ma’am.

Bethany Gilmer: Yes, yes, yes.

Dispatch: He’s there and he has a gun?

Bethany Gilmer: Yes, and there’s no clip in the gun. He’s drunk. He’s drunk. He took the clip out of the gun and he said he was going to threaten the police with it just so they would shoot him but he doesn’t have a clip in the gun. Oh, please, please.

Dispatch: Okay. All right. I have an officer there now, okay?

Bethany Gilmer: Okay. Alright thank you.

Joe Sexton: If you fear the worst, you aren’t wrong. Stephen Mader is never told the gun might not be loaded, and soon, a 23-year-old black man – R.J. Williams – is dead.

Officer: Shots fired, dispatch. Shots fired.

Dispatch: Ten – four.

Officer: We need, uh, ambulance, fire.

Dispatch: Attention Weirton Fire. Attention Weirton Fire.

Dispatch: The suspect in the driveway. Is he down or not?

Speaker 3: He’s down and out.

Joe Sexton: Another young African American man dead of a white cop’s bullet. Grimly familiar in its basic particulars. But the fatal shooting at 119 Marie Avenue set off a startling series of events. You might be surprised to know that Stephen Mader was fired shortly after the shooting, an almost unheard of case of swift discipline for an officer. But what you might be genuinely shocked to learn is why he was fired.

This is a story of police and the use of lethal force. It’s just not the one you might expect.

Raney Aronson: I’m Raney Aronson, Executive Producer of the PBS series FRONTLINE. This time on The FRONTLINE Dispatch a story in collaboration with ProPublica. Our reporter is Joe Sexton.

Joe Sexton: Officer Stephen Mader at first drove past the address on Marie Avenue. Backing up in his patrol car, he saw R.J. Williams standing in front of the home at 119. Mader ordered him to show his hands.

Stephen Mader: And in his right hand he had a silver pistol. So I drew my duty weapon. And I’m telling him you know drop the gun, drop the gun. And I’m back-stepping around his car for cover, you know, and I’m like drop the gun, drop the gun and he’s like no man just shoot me… And he just keeps on saying, like no, seriously, shoot me.

Joe Sexton: Deadly police shootings are sadly commonplace in America. I’ve covered a bunch of them in my time as a newspaperman.

Tough stuff. And race is often an explosive factor. But each shooting is its own story. As a reporter, and later as an editor, I’d tried to force myself to be open to nuance, to be suspicious of cliché, to be prepared for surprise.

But I’d never heard anything like the shooting in Weirton and what happened in its aftermath.

A colleague told me about this story last year, but ultimately wasn’t able to report it. I’d read some of her interviews and stayed up late going through a huge volume of material — a West Virginia State Police investigation, Stephen Mader’s interview with superiors in the hours after the shooting, a sworn deposition of the Weirton police chief who’d fired Mader.

And of course, I’d listened to the devastating 911 tapes. Probably too many times.

Bethany Gilmer: They’re outside yelling right now and he said he’d put the gun down. He said he’d put the gun down.

Dispatch: Okay, ma’am, just settle down, all right?

Bethany Gilmer: Don’t fire, don’t fire, don’t fire. No, no, no, no, please, please, please, please, please.

Officer: Shots fired, dispatch. Shots fired.

Joe Sexton: In the end, I couldn’t let go. I had a day job as an editor, but decided I’d find a way to report the Weirton story myself.

Joe Sexton: First, you need to know something about the cop who was fired. By lots of measures, Stephen Mader seemed like an ideal candidate to be a Weirton cop. He’d grown up in town, and married his high school sweetheart. After high school, Mader had served in Afghanistan, the latest in a long line of soldiers in his family. The local VFW Post in Weirton has made a tradition of hanging banners with the portraits of Weirton’s veterans around town. Two of them are Mader’s relatives.

Stephen Mader: Both my grandfathers were in the military, uh, one in the Air Force, one in the, uh, Army, and my dad was in the Navy. I looked at it as like, a family tradition kind of thing, and they had said the Marines were the most challenging so I said, “I’ll take that one.”

Joe Sexton: In Afghanistan, Mader was responsible for identifying improvised explosive devices, and he spent months in Helmand Province, one of Afghanistan’s most volatile corners.

Mader returned to Weirton in 2013, and soon applied to join the police department. It wasn’t the pay that sold him on the idea. His starting wage was $16.53 an hour. But Mader knew how much the city loved its cops. When he was a kid, local stores used to give out baseball cards with the faces of the department’s officers.

The Weirton police department was thrilled to have Mader. The department was down a few officers, and when Mader and two other recruits officially signed on, Weirton Police Chief Rob Alexander talked up their potential in a local TV news segment.

Rob Alexander via broadcast: “There’s a lot of things involved in this testing procedure. And these three candidates aced all those.”

Joe Sexton: To Mader, the camaraderie and structure of a police force felt familiar. And the job didn’t scare him. Cops mostly responded to reports of shop-lifting or fights in a bar. There’s no record of any officer having been killed in the line of duty in the history of the Weirton Police Department. In the Marines, Mader had been trained to kill or be killed. On the streets of Weirton, the lethal option didn’t have to be the only one. After his first months with the department, Mader’s training officer wrote up a report on his progress. Mader had had a few missteps, but the report predicted a bright future. It took care to note that Mader always had his fellow officer’s back.

Dispatch: Dispatch 31.

Stephen Mader: 31.

Joe Sexton: Which brings us to 2:51 a.m. on May 6, 2016.

Dispatch: Got a female stating she was at 119 Marie Avenue, stating they needed someone right now. She sounded hysterical, uh, hung up the phone, will not answer on callback.

Joe Sexton: The young woman who called 911 was Bethany Gilmer. She was with R.J. Williams, her ex-boyfriend, and their baby boy at their house. By her account, R.J. had been drinking. There had been an argument. She said R.J. pushed her, and she’d punched him in the face. Now, R.J. was headed to his car in the driveway to get his gun, a Smith & Wesson pistol. When he got back, he said he was going to shoot himself in the head in front of her and the baby.

R.J. had lived the bulk of his life with his mother and siblings outside Pittsburgh. He’d done some training to be a car mechanic, but had worked for the last several years as an aide at a local home for the disabled. His family and co-workers said he had a gift for connecting with the residents.

R.J. was the third of four boys. He grew up to be a solid high school point guard. He wrote poetry, and stashed his work along with other keepsakes in a shoebox. But he was also a deeply insecure teen, who had struggled with anxiety and depression, and for a while had been tormented by a bad case of acne that kept him hidden out at home. His sisters, Natasha and Heather, told me about his struggles, saying they’d watched their brother with a mix of admiration and hurt. Here’s Heather:

Heather: I do think he struggled with confidence. Um, we always say that RJ had probably one of the prettier smiles of all the siblings, and whenever he would laugh or he would smile, he always covered his mouth, like he was embarrassed, or he just wasn’t confident.

Joe Sexton: And Natasha:

Natasha: “He was very deep, he was very spiritual, and he was very sensitive, which is not your average man. And um, it just, he didn’t understand himself, and he didn’t appreciate those aspects of himself even though it is what made him such a special individual.

Joe Sexton: Months before the fatal encounter at 119 Marie, in the early hours of January 1, 2016, R.J. had become a father. His sisters told me the baby made him incredibly happy, and proud.

TV News Clip Announcer: New at 10 tonight, Trinity Hospital welcomed its first baby of the year. Proud parents Ronald Williams the 2nd and Bethany Gilmer welcomed their first child into the world Saturday morning. Ronald Dale Williams the 3rd was born by C-Section and weighed 8lbs, 3oz.

Joe Sexton: R.J.’s mother, Ida, told me R.J. had been eager to provide for his boy, and so he had taken on extra shifts at the home for the mentally disabled where he worked.

But pretty soon things started to come undone with his girlfriend, Bethany. We reached out to her for this story, but she declined to be interviewed. From the police report, we know she thought R.J.’s anxiety issues had returned with a vengeance. That his drinking had worsened things. Bethany said R.J. had become erratic and volatile, even paranoid.

It all meant R.J. saw less and less of his son. Anxious, depressed, even a bit desperate, he’d stopped eating regularly and had lost weight. He was worried he’d lose his son, and confessed as much to his sister Heather:

Heather Poole: He called me on a Tuesday. I was in bed, and he called me around three in the morning. I was startled by his phone call cause of how late it was, so I made sure to get up and answer it. And, um, he just said that he was in so much distress and he was unleashing all these emotions that he was dealing with; the anxiety that he was dealing with because it had been a couple weeks since he had seen his son.

Dispatch: Dispatch 31. Look out for a weapon.

Joe Sexton: In his cruiser outside 119 Marie, Stephen Mader at first didn’t realize who R.J. was.

Stephen Mader: I’m backing up, and I see a, uh, black male standing outside his car door. And uh, you know, I stop, I roll my window down. You know, I said, you know, “Where’s 119 at?” And he said something like, “Oh, it’s right here. Why, what’s up?” So I put my cruiser in park, get on the radio and said, you know, dispatch I’m out here at 119. I get out and I’m walking around the trunk of his car, and I said, you know, “Oh, we got a call about a domestic out here, do you want to tell me what’s going on?” And he said something like, “Oh, nothing’s going on. You can leave.”And I said, you know, “No, what’s going on out here?”And when I rounded the trunk I saw his hands were behind his back and, you know, I said, “Show me your hands.” And he said, “No, I don’t want to do that.” You know, I said, “Show me your effing hands.” And he said, “Aw man, why you gotta be cussing at me.” And he brought his hands down to his side and in his right hand he had a silver pistol.

Stephen Mader: 31 dispatch, I got a gun here.

Stephen Mader: So, I drew my duty weapon and I’m telling him, you know, “Drop the gun. Drop the gun.” And I’m back stepping away from him around his car for cover. And he’s back stepping towards the house. And he, uh, he’s telling me, you know, I’m like, you know, “Drop the gun. Drop the gun.” And he’s like, “No, man just shoot me.” I told him, “I’m not gonna shoot you brother, just put the gun down.” And he says, he just keeps on saying like, “No, seriously, shoot me.” And I said, “Bro, I’m not gonna shoot you just put the gun down.”

Joe Sexton: Mader says he knew what was up: suicide by cop. He’d read news accounts of such episodes, and how they almost always came with controversy. They were a dreaded feature of police work. Vivian Lord, a professor of criminology in North Carolina, has spent two decades studying the phenomenon. She says some researchers now believe that a third or more all fatal police shootings could involve people trying to get the police to kill them. But there has been little formal research.

Vivian Lord: It’s very difficult, because you know, when we talk about Suicide by Cop, we’re talking about individuals who are dead. And so there’s really not an opportunity to talk to them and find out what exactly their intent was. So you have to use what we call psychological autopsies to try to figure out what happened.

Joe Sexton: Academics now know the incidents most commonly involve men, often with mental health histories, and often under the influence of alcohol or drugs. The behavior of the suicidal is typically impulsive, but Lord says it doesn’t have to be final.

Vivian Lord: Most individuals that go into an attempt are gonna be ambivalent uh, in their desire to die. So, you know they try to train officers to try to find out um, what might help get this individual to put down their weapon.

Joe Sexton: 3,000 or so police departments across the country – about a fifth of all of them — have made something called “crisis intervention training” a part of the training their officers receive. But Lord says it’s hard to say how many departments do more specific work on suicide by cop scenarios. In North Carolina, where Lord teaches, officers do get that kind of instruction, and Lord has helped develop the training programs. She says that 911 dispatchers need to be trained in safely relaying as much information as possible. But it’s typically the first officer on the scene who has the most information.

Vivian Lord: In general, when calls happen, the first officer there is the one in command of the scene. And part of that is because there’s information: a) that they first got from the telecommunicator, but also information that’s occurred while they’re there.

Joe Sexton: Stephen Mader admits it was scary outside 119 Marie. The only light came from nearby streetlamps. His adrenaline was pumping. He said it felt like it could be one of those “Oh, shit” moments.

The dispatcher never mentioned this was a potential suicide. But it was clear to Mader that R.J. Williams wanted to die. Mader had never been trained on how to respond to such a situation. But identifying one didn’t seem hard. Williams was avoiding eye contact. He was looking around to see if anyone was watching. He wasn’t being belligerent. His gun was pointed at the ground. There was no one else on the street. Mader says he did not regard R.J. as a threat. And R.J. was only repeating a single sentence: “Just shoot me.”

Mader didn’t.

Stephen Mader: “Whenever he knew I called his bluff, he was just kind of like, ‘Come on, you know like, just shoot me.’ I was just, I was concentrating on him, trying to drop his gun. And I mean, I know it sounds corny, but it was kind of like I’m trying to put it in a way where I…I didn’t want to shoot him you know. I don’t want to say this, because it’s really corny, but it’s kind of like sacrificing my well being for him, and that’s where my mind went to was that I’m not just going to shoot this kid for my well being. You know, I wanna wait to see more from him.”

Joe Sexton: And so Mader waited. Then, chaos.

Bethany Gilmer: They’re outside yelling right now and he said he put the gun down. He said he’d put the gun down.

Dispatch: Okay, ma’am, just settle down, ok?

Bethany Gilmer: Don’t fire, don’t fire, don’t fire. No, no, no, no, please, please, please, please, please. Officer: Shots fired Dispatch, shots fired.

Joe Sexton: Four shots rang out outside 119 Marie. Seconds earlier, two backup officers had arrived on the scene after hearing the same radio call Mader had taken. Each in their own patrol car, they’d almost collided when they came to a stop up the block. The officers, Ryan Kuzma and Michael Baker, jumped from their cars, and saw Mader with his gun drawn facing R.J. with his Smith & Wesson in his hand. Startled, R.J. raised the gun and swung it back and forth – from Mader to the arriving officers and back again. R.J. began to walk toward Kuzma and Baker. All three officers screamed at him to drop the gun before Kuzma opened fire. One shot hit the ground, another hit a tree and then a house on the block, another a car tire. Mader said he could instantly hear the hissing of air. Kuzma later said he paused after the third shot and again took aim. His last bullet pierced R.J.’s skull behind the right ear.

Dispatcher: What happened?

Bethany Gilmer: I don’t know. I don’t know. They fired. I don’t know.

Joe Sexton: R.J. was down. Baker, the second backup officer got to him first. R.J. was gasping for air. Baker said the desperate breaths then became something more like gurgling. The Smith & Wesson was located and on inspection the officers saw it had no bullets. An arriving lieutenant saw to it that, per protocol, R.J.’s lifeless body was handcuffed as blood pooled under his head in the driveway. Then someone threw a white sheet over the body.

In the fatal encounter’s aftermath, R.J.’s family raised questions about the necessity of the shooting. Several family members wrote to the U.S. Department of Justice asking for an investigation. They wanted Ryan Kuzma, the cop who had shot R.J., held accountable. They retained a West Virginia trial lawyer, Jack Dolance.

Jack Dolance: The problem for the police is that there was an officer who’d showed up first, Officer Mader, and that officer had been there, de-escalating the situation. He saw that RJ Williams was not a threat. Which, as it turns out, he was absolutely correct about that.

He was holding an unloaded gun, and was having, from all accounts, the worst night of his life. The problem for the police is that the situation was under control, until the other two officers showed up. They rolled up, almost hit each other, jumped out of their cars. Within five to eight seconds, one of them started firing wildly, into the night, in a residential neighborhood, and hit somebody’s vehicle next door, hit a house next door, and then, eventually, one of his shots eventually hit this young man in the back of the head, and killed him. And it could have been avoided. That’s a problem.

Joe Sexton: But the only problem the Weirton Police Department identified in the deadly events outside 119 Marie Avenue was Stephen Mader, the cop who had chosen NOT to shoot R.J. Williams. The department spelled its reasons out in a letter delivered to Mader’s home a month after the shooting. The letter said Mader had been negligent in failing to take action in a life or death moment. In not eliminating the threat posed by R.J., he’d left the backup officers at risk. He was unfit to be a cop. “The unfortunate reality of police work,” the letter read, “is that making any decision is better than making no decision at all.”

Joe Sexton: Stephen Mader was blindsided by his firing. He told me the Weirton Police Chief who signed off on his termination had never even spoken to him about the incident.

Stephen Mader: As soon as I got handed that letter, I was outcasted, you know, just like that, you know? No one tried to contact me to see if I was okay. No one tried to, you know, say, hey man, you know, try to fight it or whatnot. It was just, it was nothing.” “It was like I didn’t exist to them anymore, you know?”

Joe Sexton: The local district attorney, obligated to look into any fatal police shooting, had concluded publicly that none of the three officers had done anything wrong, Mader included. No one seemed interested in exploring what the 911 dispatcher had been told about R.J. being suicidal and the gun not being loaded. On one level, you can appreciate why the dispatcher might have been reluctant to pass along the unconfirmed information. If Bethany was wrong, and the gun was, in fact loaded, officers could die. But what if the officers had been told R.J. might be suicidal? Would that have changed anything?

The Weirton police department had never announced Mader’s firing. Within the department’s ranks, word was that Mader had either panicked or, worse, was a coward, afraid to protect his own life and those of the two other officers. The only way Mader could process it all was that he had been fired because he hadn’t shot R.J. Williams first.

As a reporter, I was in novel territory. A cop left to believe he’d been fired for not shooting a African American man? It was hard to get my head around. I sure wanted to hear from Mader’s superiors. And so I tried over many weeks to get the authorities in West Virginia to discuss the case with me. I left notes. I showed up at homes. I left messages for the 911 dispatcher and contacted her supervisors. They wouldn’t talk about how she, or other dispatcher are trained, or if protocol had been followed the night R.J. died.

Mader’s firing had left him with a wife, two sons and no job. He loved trucks as a kid and thought maybe he’d like to drive one. But in a town that loved its cops and revered its veterans, Stephen Mader no longer felt fully welcome. At the local school or in a town supermarket, he avoided eye contact with the cops he’d worked alongside weeks before. He second-guessed glances he got from strangers at the mall.

Stephen Mader: It felt like everywhere I went it was like, do they know the story, do they know it’s me? I’d go to Wal-Mart or something and see people walking around and then am I getting certain looks?

Joe Sexton: R.J.’s family had been shattered by the shooting. I first went to see them last June. In a tidy apartment, they had all crammed in – mother, sisters, brother, nieces and nephews. Two years after the shooting, they still have lots of questions. And heartbreak.

Heather: “I think it’s gut-wrenching that R.J. knew that he could go out there and-and he could get shot by police.

Joe Sexton: RJ’s sister Heather:

Heather: I think that that is so disgraceful; that he can go out there with such conviction and know that he could get … if that’s what he wanted. If he wanted to be killed and, that he could get what he wanted. That that’s something that’s possible. Because that is what happened. You see it on all the time. It’s one police shooting after another. They shoot first and then they ask questions later.”

Joe Sexton: The story of R.J.’s death is complicated. He had a gun in his hand. He’d begun to wave it around. The cops had no idea it was unloaded. And a young woman and baby were somewhere nearby.

But Heather’s anger is not hard to understand. There’s no disputing that young black men are at a disproportionate risk when it comes to deadly encounters with the police. The numbers don’t lie. Young black males are 21 times more likely to be shot by police than their white counterparts, according to a ProPublica analysis of federal data.

For R.J.’s family, their treatment at the hands of the authorities turned their anger to outright suspicion. They said calls for basic information went unreturned. The state police investigator on the case promptly went on vacation. The family grew wary enough of their treatment that in the days after the shooting, they began to record calls with the police.

Sister: Hello?

Officer: You there?

Sister: Yes.

Officer: This is Trooper McMann, I spoke with you yesterday.

Sister: Yes. We’re calling because we would really like to pick up my brother’s belongings.

Officer: And listen, like it was explained to you, all right, the- the sergeant who’s in charge of the investigation is on vacation.

Sister: Okay.

Officer: And like I said, I explained this to you yesterday, all right?

Sister: Okay.

Officer: So calling in every day isn’t gonna change the fact that he’s still on vacation

Sister: Okay, can I …

Officer: So that’s-

Sister: … say something then? The sergeant who’s in charge of the case, um, is on vacation. Who released the statement to the news yesterday? Because I’m- I’m-

Officer: He did.

Sister: So he- he took a break from vacation to release the statement?

Officer: inaudible

Sister: And now he’s back on vacation?

Officer: Are you- are you gonna let me finish now or not?

Sister: I wanna say something to you. I have questions. Understandably. So if you could be understanding enough to let his sister, who loved him dearly, ask you a couple questions … I’m sure you have a brother. Please just put yourself in my shoes for a second and have some compassion. All right? He released a statement to the news, but he did not release a statement to my mother.

Brother: They put you on hold?

Sister: Are you there?

Brother: No.

Brother: He put you on hold.

Joe Sexton: Three weeks after the shooting, an article was published in the Pittsburg Post Gazette.

The article — headlined “Weirton Terminates Officer Who Did Not Fire at Man with Gun” — infuriated Weirton’s police chief and the man who had appointed him, the town manager. The two men held a news conference they said would set the record straight. They said Mader was the one who had mishandled the situation at 119 Marie and that this was just his latest failure. They said he’d once performed an illegal search and, in another instance, contaminated a crime scene. Travis Blosser, the city manager, did his best to make clear Mader had been on his way out anyway. According to Blosser, the R.J. situation was just the third strike.

Travis Blosser: “His termination revolved around three major incidents to us. Two of those major incidents qualified him for termination. The third just seemed to happen right after those two had occurred as well and we had done different avenues in terms of retraining, placing him with a different training officer. None of those seemed to work.

Joe Sexton: The Post Gazette article also enraged Ryan Kuzma, the officer who had killed R.J. He was afraid it made him look like just another racist cop. That’s not how Mader saw it – from his point of view, both he and Kuzma had been justified in their actions that night. Mader understood why Kuzma shot. But Kuzma was furious with Mader for going to the press. So, soon after the article was published, Kuzma texted his former colleague. He didn’t mince words. He called Mader a coward. And not long after that, Kuzma confronted Mader in person at the truck-driving school Mader was attending in town.

Stephen Mader: I see Kuzma pull in in his cruiser, and I’m thinking “Oh, god,” you know, “Here we go.” and I was 50 feet away, he had started walking up to the instructor who was at the front of the truck, and he looks down towards me and the other student and, uh, he goes, “Hey Mader, did you get my text?” And I said, “Yeah, I got it.” And he was just like, uh, he was like “Pretty accurate?” And I said, ’cause he was calling me a coward and, and all kinds of stuff, and I said, “No, but okay.” And he goes, “What do you mean no?” And he starts just instantly, you know, screaming and stuff, and I said, you know, I started walking over to him, I was like “Kuzma,” I said, “I’ll talk to you, but I want to talk.” I said, “I’m not going to sit here and scream at you.”

Joe Sexton: Kuzma recorded the encounter on his smart phone. This is that recording. Kuzma talks first.

Kuzma: What did you do? You still did shit. You fucking sat there. You didn’t –

Mader: Because it was —

Kuzma: — try to tackle him. You didn’t try to stop him. You didn’t try to shoot him.

Mader: It was within seconds.

Kuzma: You put me and Baker in danger because you fucking sat there. You did shit.

Mader: It was within seconds, dude.

Kuzma: It doesn’t matter. What does seconds have to do with a guy leaving you and walking and advancing towards me and Baker? You did shit. That’s why I say you’re a coward because you did nothing.

Mader: Either way, if I were to have shot that kid, I wouldn’t have felt justified. What’s –

Kuzma: Well, then that’s on your own thought. You didn’t feel justified in trying to protect me and Baker with a guy walking towards us with a gun? You didn’t think that that would be justified? Are you —

Mader: I’m not going to — no, it’s not —

Kuzma: What do you not get about that?

Mader: It’s not that it wouldn’t have been that. It’s just I didn’t — I wouldn’t feel right living with it.

Kuzma: Well, then you should have never been a cop.

Joe Sexton: I may be an old, probably too cynical newspaper reporter, but listening to this made me catch my breath. Two cops in a heated, unrehearsed, emotional exchange about the concept of duty. The duty to protect. To protect citizens. And to protect each other.

Nearly 40 years into my career, a shouting match in a chance encounter at a truck lot in rural West Virginia seemed to get at the heart of so many police shootings.

What are the rules for a cop’s use of lethal force? How well does any given officer know them? When exactly does an officer’s right to protect himself and fellow officers trump his duty to protect the life of every citizen, even a disturbed and dangerous one? Could restraint really be seen as cowardice?

Every police department authorizes the use of lethal force if they fear for their lives or those of others. But are you allowed not to shoot if you fear for the life of the civilian holding the gun or the knife or the bat?

Maggie Coleman: I first learned about Stephen Mader and his case when I was on the bus riding home one evening, and I was reading the news on my phone. This story popped up about an officer who had been fired for not shooting someone. And I was sort of aghast

Joe Sexton: That’s Maggie Coleman, one of Mader’s lawyers. She and her colleague Tim O’Brien like to say they’ve both represented and sued more cops than any other lawyers in their part of the state. But neither had ever heard of a situation like Mader’s. They researched precedent. Scoured news accounts. Dived into arcane employment law. They found no case like it. But they found a way to frame it. They came to call it the theory of “Blue Lives Matter More.”

Maggie Coleman: I think that what happened is these officers were simply unwilling to accept the possibility that any one of their fellow officers would expose themselves or another officer to any amount of risk. They could not accept that. It’s not so much that blue lives matter. It’s for these guys blue lives matter more than the lives of anybody else that they encounter, so if there is any possibility that a situation poses a risk of danger to an officer or a fellow officer, they’re expected to shoot first, and I think it really bothered them and made them really uncomfortable that Stephen was willing to stop and wait for just those couple of seconds to try to evaluate the situation and determine what the level of threat really was. I think they couldn’t live with that. It had made them too uncomfortable and that’s why they felt he had to go.

Joe Sexton: I’d grown up in Brooklyn with kids who became cops. Some were knuckleheads. Some were saints. And in a city wracked by violence, I instinctively respected their informal credo – “At the end of the day, I’m going home.” That blue lives might matter more to the men and women putting on bullet proof vests every day felt understandable enough. I didn’t set out to report on cops, but my bosses thought I might be good at it – hey, I was Irish, a former sportswriter, a profane bullshitter. And lots of cops did talk to me. One of them was Michael Julian. Julian’s first years with the New York Police Department were in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Civilians. Cops. It seemed everyone was getting shot.

Mike Julian: There was one year where 10 police officers were killed and 40 were shot. And that same year police officers killed 100 and shot 400. And police officers fired their weapons 4,000 times that year. That was 1972. And you know, today police officers in New York fire their weapons 40 times, not 4,000.”

Joe Sexton: Julian went on to rise to the top ranks of the department and twice rewrote the department’s guidelines for the use of lethal force. , instituting a rule that allowed officers to fire at a fleeing subject, only if they believed them to be a direct threat. And writing a training program to help officers keep cool in a stressful situations. Much of his thinking in that work was shaped by an episode from his first years on the beat.

A deranged man wielding a pipe had come after Julian on the streets of Brooklyn. And Julian had taken cover behind a parked car. He kept his gun in his holster. Soon, backup officers arrived, the man was tackled and the pipe taken. Julian thought he’d done a great job. His backups thought he’d been a coward. He was a cop and he’d been attacked. He should have shot the guy.

Mike Julian: So a few hours later we went to court because in those days you arraigned an arrest the same day And I sat there, two women came up to me, an older one and a younger one, and they asked if I was Officer Julian and I said “yes” and they just started to cry on each of my shoulders and they said, “We watched. I watched my son chase you around a car and we were sure you were going to shoot him and you didn’t shoot him. And they just cried.”

Joe Sexton: I gave Julian all the materials relating to the Weirton case and Mader’s firing. It all struck him as rare. But even so, Julian thought the precedent it set was dangerous, that it risked reinforcing what he thinks is still wrong with the police culture around the use of force.

Mike Julian: Most police departments wouldn’t fire an officer who didn’t fire his gun. That’s rarely seen. But what we do see every day, is that police departments are not rewarding the officers who do hold their fire. Who show restraint. Who use de- escalation techniques. When you go to the award ceremonies for valor and heroism, it’s always the officer who fired the gun.

Joe Sexton: In the months after Mader’s firing, R.J.’s family came to hope the former cop might help them press a case against the Weirton police. The family thought he might make a good witness in a case challenging the necessity of R.J.’s death. Or maybe be a kind of spokesman for the better handling of police shootings. Here’s Natasha, R.J.s sister:

Natasha: It was such a unique case. You have two people here, one scenario. One does one thing, another does another thing. How can you say that both of them have the right to choose how they carry out that enforcement? How can, how can anybody have the right to say, “Well you decided not to, but I decided I will” and that’s okay? Nobody should have that power, and-and I thought, “What a beautiful opportunity. How many times is that going to happen for somebody to say they were wrong? Completely? Just flat out?

Joe Sexton: Mader felt terribly for R.J.’s family. But he made clear he would be of no help in any effort by the family to sue Kuzma or the department. He didn’t think Kuzma had done anything wrong. He recognized Kuzma hadn’t been there to hear R.J.’s pleas to be shot. There was a gun. They had no reason to think it wasn’t loaded. Kuzma, Mader says, was trying to eliminate a potentially deadly threat. He got that. And he said so to Maggie Coleman, one of his lawyers.

Maggie Coleman: He was, from the very beginning, absolutely adamant that he did not want to implicate Ryan Kuzma in any of this. He didn’t want Ryan to be blamed for R.J. Williams’ death. I think that his concern from the very beginning was the precedent that this set, and the incentive, or the disincentive that it gave to other officers to ever, you know, not shoot, to ever take a couple seconds to evaluate a situation.”

Joe Sexton: The final act of the fatal police encounter at 119 Marie Avenue played out in a conference room at a law firm in Wheeling, West Virginia. There, under oath, the Weirton police chief, Rob Alexander, had to account for his decision to have Mader fired.

The chief made clear that anyone who thought that Mader had been fired for not shooting RJ was wrong. He said it was that Mader hadn’t done anything – he hadn’t tackled RJ, or tased him, or otherwise eliminated the threat RJ and his gun posed. Which left the two backup officers vulnerable when they arrived on the scene. But as Maggie Coleman, Mader’s lawyer, questioned the chief, he conceded that tackling a man with a gun wouldn’t have been smart policing and that he didn’t even know if Mader had a taser.

Coleman got the chief of police to make some other concessions, too. She walked him through the mistakes the town manager had accused Mader of at the news conference the year before – the illegal search and the contamination of a crime scene. The illegal search, the chief admitted, had to do with Mader placing a parking ticket inside an unlocked car to keep it dry from the rain. And the alleged “contamination of a crime scene” involved Mader’s response to a reported heart attack victim. The chief thought Mader should have suspected foul play. But there had been other, more senior officers at the scene, and none of them had done anything other than treat the case as a heart attack.

The chief also admitted that, before R.J.’s death, he’d never once thought of firing Mader.

The deposition was filmed. And watching it, it’s clear the chief wasn’t enjoying time under oath. He wipes his eyes, cracks his knuckles, looks away, forces a laugh or two. He admits that this was the first time in his career he’d overseen the investigation of fatal police shooting and that he’d never even asked Mader for his side of the story.

Eventually, Coleman got to the heart of it. Stephen Mader had made a decision at 119 Marie, she said, and the decision he made was to hold his fire. To not shoot RJ. Mader wanted that decision respected. It took a couple of tries, but Coleman got what Mader wanted.

Maggie: Consistent with the Constitution and the Weirton use of force policy, Mader was only permitted to shoot Williams if he believed that Williams represented an immediate risk of harm, serious harm, to himself or others, correct?”

Alexander: Correct.

Maggie: O.K. So if Mader didn’t believe that R.J. Williams posed an immediate threat of harm to himself or others, he would not have been permitted to shoot him under either the Constitution or Weirton’s use of force policy; is that correct?

Joe Sexton: The Weirton police chief took his time. It had been 573 days since he’d fired Stephen Mader. It had been a little more than a year since he’d publicly bad mouthed him in justifying that firing. Now, Coleman’s question hung in the air before him: Mader had been right not to shoot, correct? The police chief’s answer was a single word.

Alexander: Yes.

Joe Sexton: The city of Weirton moved to settle Mader’s lawsuit immediately after the chief’s depositions. The city admitted no wrongdoing, but Mader got $175,000. The money helped him buy a modest new home in a neighboring town. But he says he’ll never be a cop again. Five days a week, he drives long haul trucks, carrying either hazardous waste or crude oil. His attorney Tim O’Brien thinks the cost of Mader’s lost career is born by more than his family. The country’s in need of good officers.

O’Brien: The fact that Stephen Mader’s career as a police officer, as of now, has been ended, is sad for him and sad for us. It’s a shame that we don’t have somebody like him as a police officer.

Joe Sexton: One of Mike Julian’s jobs during his years with the New York Police Department was deputy commissioner for training. He says that because there are more than 18,000 police departments in the United States, it’s virtually impossible to ensure common, consistent, required training.

Mike Julian: Most of them have their own policies and procedures and, most important, their own culture. How do you get control over that?

Joe Sexton: And how Julian asks, do you consistently and reliably train officers not to shoot just because they can, but to shoot only because they have to. How to train them to balance their duty to protect the public and their understandable desire to protect themselves.

Mike Julian: You have this culture in police in general that says “I’m going to go home at night.” In the end “I’m going to be safe.” And I’m not so sure what that means because if they believed that entirely they’d be shooting at people everyday. Which they don’t. They shoot out of extreme fear and the extreme fear is because they’ve used bad tactics, because they’ve had bad training.

Joe Sexton: In September, I made one final trip to Weirton, and to R.J.’s family outside Pittsburgh. Their hurt was still raw. They still think R.J. was killed unnecessarily. And they are still disappointed in Stephen Mader. In the end, though, they are also grateful he was there at 119 Marie shortly before 3 a.m. on May 6, 2016. Amanda Delay, one of R.J.’s sisters, was the one family member who scommunicated directly with Mader.

Amanda: So when Mader, um, came out with his story, and said that he was there and that he called RJ his brother, and said that “I’m not going to shoot you, my brother,” like, um, um, it really touched me, because at that point I realized that my brother wasn’t alone, that there was someone there that was looking at him as a person. Um, so I found him on Facebook, um, and I ended up messaging him on messenger, just to thank him for, um, what he did for my brother, and for being there for him. Joe Sexton: And did he write you, message you back? Amanda: Um, yes, um, he did message back. Um, he said, um, that he just wished that he could have had a few more seconds, that he wished it would have turned out different, that my brother would be, still be alive.

Joe Sexton: The nine minutes in Weirton, West Virginia on the night of May 6, 2016 had left me with little to feel good about. R.J. was dead. Stephen Mader was no longer a cop. Weirton officials were locked in silence. Some of the country’s top police officials were skeptical about the prospects for uniform training for police officers nationwide. And then one day last month, a saw a headline out of Pittsburgh: 2 Pittsburgh Police Officers Hailed As Heroes.. The officers had been called to a report of a suicidal man. The man had raised what looked like a gun at them and told them to shoot him. When the cops didn’t, the man threw what turned out to be a fake gun away. The story, which unfolded all of 30 minutes from Weirton, included a final quote from one of the officers, Brandon Crane: “I felt like I really made a difference. It’s rare when you can actually be there at the right time, at the right place, and do the right thing and have a great outcome, where everyone walks away safely.” Reading the quote, I felt a little spark of something. It felt like hope.