He Told Me “You’re Dead.” Then He Kept Walking Toward Me.

The first thing I remember is the blood. Not because I had never seen blood before, but because it made everything about the scene feel unreal. I had gone to a residence on Four Wheel Drive in Thornton after a homeowner called 911 about his tenant, Ethan Freeman. Freeman had reportedly injured himself, was bleeding, and was complaining of chest pain. It sounded like a call where someone needed medical help. In fact, I had already encountered Freeman earlier that day at a local school, when he had asked for an ambulance. He had been cooperative then. Our interaction had been brief, ordinary, and completely nonconfrontational. So when I walked toward his apartment that afternoon, I wasn't expecting to meet someone who would eventually force me to make a decision in a matter of seconds.

I approached the apartment and asked, in a conversational tone, what was going on. The response was immediate and aggressive. Freeman began yelling obscenities at me. When I looked inside, I saw something I had not expected to see: he was completely naked, bleeding, and holding a piece of wooden furniture in one hand while behaving in a sexually explicit manner with the other. He continued shouting at me and repeatedly threatened to kill me. I immediately backed away from the front of the apartment. I drew my service pistol and radioed that my life had been threatened. But I didn't immediately fire. Instead, I tried to talk to him. I wanted to slow the situation down, create distance, and give him a chance to come back from whatever state he was in. From where I was standing, I couldn't see inside the apartment anymore, but I could hear sounds of things being broken. Every crash made me wonder what would happen next.

For roughly a minute, I stayed outside and kept talking to him. Freeman continued threatening me. I kept trying to calm him down, but I also knew that I had to be prepared if he came out. There is a strange feeling that happens in situations like that, where your body is preparing for something your mind is still hoping won't happen. I wanted the conversation to work. I wanted him to stay inside. I wanted the ambulance call to remain an ambulance call. Then suddenly, Freeman came through one of the apartment windows. He was still naked and covered in blood. He looked directly at me and said, “You're dead.” Then he started walking toward me.

I began backing away immediately, telling him to stay back. He didn't stop. I kept moving backward, trying to create space between us, but he continued advancing. At first he was walking, then he was closing the distance faster than I could safely retreat. I remember looking at the space between us and understanding how quickly it was disappearing. I had less-lethal equipment with me, but Freeman was getting too close for me to safely transition from the firearm I already had drawn to another option. That decision was not theoretical anymore. I had seconds. He had repeatedly threatened to kill me. Now he was moving directly toward me after coming through a window, covered in blood, ignoring repeated commands to stay back. The question was no longer whether I wanted to use force. The question was whether I believed I could survive waiting any longer.

When Freeman reached approximately ten feet away, I fired two shots in quick succession. He collapsed to the ground. The scene that had been moving so quickly suddenly became still. Freeman died from his gunshot wounds. I later explained that I fired because I feared for my life. My concern wasn't simply that he had said something threatening. It was that I believed he was about to reach me within seconds and do exactly what he had repeatedly threatened to do. I believed he could take my own firearm during the struggle and use it against me. Even if I survived that encounter, I believed he could seriously injure or kill me. Those thoughts were running through my mind as the distance between us disappeared.

But there was another person who had seen what happened. The homeowner who called 911 was there and witnessed the shooting. And throughout the entire encounter at the residence, my department-issued body camera had been recording. That footage mattered because it captured something that memory alone never could: the distance between us, the commands I gave, Freeman's movement, and the speed at which the encounter developed. Later, the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office released the body-camera footage. For anyone watching it afterward, the most important part might look like only a few seconds. But those seconds were built on everything that came before them—the earlier threats, the attempt to create distance, the sounds of destruction inside the apartment, and the decision to keep talking instead of immediately using deadly force.

What stayed with me afterward was how different Freeman had seemed earlier that same day. The first time I encountered him, he had asked for an ambulance and had been cooperative. Nothing about that interaction told me what I would face hours later. That is one of the hardest things about emergency calls: you don't always get the full story before you arrive. You respond to what someone needs in that moment, and sometimes the person standing in front of you is behaving completely differently from the person you encountered earlier. I could not know what had changed for Freeman, and I couldn't diagnose or explain what was happening inside his mind. I only knew what I could see and hear, and I had to make decisions based on that information.

I still think about the distance between us. Ten feet doesn't sound like much, especially when you're reading about an incident afterward. On paper, it is just a measurement. In that moment, it felt like a countdown. Every step Freeman took reduced the amount of time I had to react. I had already moved backward. I had already told him to stay away. I had already tried talking to him. And I had already heard him tell me that I was going to die. The gunfire lasted seconds, but the decisions leading to those seconds had started long before he came through that window.

That's what I remember most now—not simply the shots, but the window. Freeman came through it covered in blood, and once he was outside, there was no longer a wall separating the emergency from me. Everything that had been happening inside that apartment suddenly moved into the open. From that point forward, I had only seconds to decide what I believed was necessary to survive. And sometimes, when people watch a body-camera video, they focus on the final two seconds because that's where the outcome happens. But the real story begins much earlier, with the call for help, the first conversation, the threats, the broken objects, the attempt to create distance, and the repeated command to stay back. The gunfire was the ending of the encounter. It wasn't the beginning.