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Trump is a leading figure for blue lives matter on all social media platforms and so is sheriff Clarke at RNC

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Trump is a leading figure for blue lives matter on all social media platforms and so is sheriff Clarke at RNC

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Read: Trump's vision of lawless order
This is notable because Acevedo, who is nearly as adept a Twitter user as the president, has been a respectful but fierce and consistent critic of Trump's. Who knows whether Trump is unaware of Acevedo's past remarks or simply doesn't care (though he's not known for magnanimity toward critics), but he didn't mention the past disagreements. The things on which Acevedo has differed from Trump aren't just picayune matters-though Acevedo did pointedly rebut a bogus claim about crowd size at a Houston rally last fall. Many of them cut straight to the heart of Trump's perspective on police.

For example, on Wednesday Trump said, "In my administration, we understand that reducing crime begins with respecting law enforcement. We will not tolerate smears, or slanders, or assaults on those who wear the badge and police our streets. In order to keep every American safe, we are making officer safety a top priority-unless you'd rather not have that."

This is a familiar refrain. Trump has often been more blunt, making it clear that he endorses police brutality. In July 2017, speaking on Long Island, Trump said this:

When you see these towns and when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of the paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough. I said please don't be too nice. Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you're protecting their head, you know, the way you put your hand over? Like don't hit their head and they've just killed somebody. Don't hit their head. I said you can take the hand away, okay?

Acevedo was one of many top cops who criticized Trump at the time:

To be clear, inappropriate attempt at gallows humor does not reflect values of respect & commitment to constitutional policing of profession https://t.co/lGJeLa6nm1
- Chief Art Acevedo (@ArtAcevedo), July 28, 2017

Trump also devoted much of his speech Wednesday to immigration, speaking about the need for a border wall and tough immigration policies.

"It is the core responsibility of government to establish and enforce clear rules for entry and admission into our great country," he said. "These immigration laws exist to protect our families, our communities, and the security of our entire nation. When these laws are violated, innocent Americans-including millions of hardworking legal immigrants-are left to pay a very heavy price."

Here, too, Acevedo has taken issue with the administration's policies, especially separating children from their parents at the border:

American values? Conservative values? Progressive values? Judeo-Christian values? Family values? History & God will be unkind to those who are silent or support this oppressive, inhumane, unGodly policy. God is watching us, we can't hide from him. WWJD? https://t.co/pPsFvLQv57
- Chief Art Acevedo (@ArtAcevedo), June 17, 2018

Acevedo wasn't the only officer whom Trump called onstage. The president also recognized John McMahon, the sheriff of San Bernardino County, California. McMahon praised Trump's support for police as "incredible," but he also said that "the relationships we have with our federal law-enforcement partners are absolutely incredible." That could be read as a veiled criticism of Trump. As much as he has adopted "Blue Lives Matter" rhetoric, Trump has also consistently undermined the rule of law and attacked the integrity of the FBI, the top federal law-enforcement agency.

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president of the major cities chiefs association

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recognition of the houston police department

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Read: Trump's vision of lawless order This is notable because Acevedo, who is nearly as adept a Twitter user as the president, has been a respectful but fierce and consistent critic of Trump's. Who knows whether Trump is unaware of Acevedo's past remarks or simply doesn't care (though he's not known for magnanimity toward critics), but he didn't mention the past disagreements.

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Are The News Against or with The Men In Blue?

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Are The News Against or with The Men In Blue?

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Fox News is one of a couple outlets that put a little work in blue lives matter, and report on these issues a lot on their program, but have to be careful because a lot of their users are all kinds of colors, and races, so they don´t want to cause to much controversy. As do the other News Networks, so they are all watching what they say.

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A county in Oregon has agreed to pay a former employee a $100,000 settlement after she sued the county for racial discrimination because a co-worker had posted a "Blue Lives Matter" flag in an office in support of local police.

The former employee, Karimah Guion-Pledgure, had worked as a corrections technician for the Multnomah County Department of Community Justice since 2011 but agreed to drop her lawsuit and resign as part of the settlement, the Portland Mercury reported, although she will be permitted to apply for another county job.
TODD STARNES: UC DAVIS STUDENTS PROTEST PHOTO OF SLAIN POLICE OFFICER HOLDING BLUE LIVES MATTER FLAG
In her lawsuit, Guion-Pledgure alleged that other county employees had retaliated against her after she complained that the pro-police flag was offensive, the report said.

The plaintiff, a black woman, contended that the phrase "Blue Lives Matter" had co-opted the phrase "Black Lives Matter," and thus denigrated and diluted the original term.

According to the Mercury, the woman who sued originally protested the flag by displaying photos of people of color who had been killed by police officers. Department managers then asked her to remove the photos but she refused because the pro-police flag was allowed to stay in place.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
A county spokeswoman, Jessica Morkert-Shibley, said county officials were working on policy revisions intended to avoid such disputes in the future, the Oregonian reported.

The plaintiff had originally sought $420,000 in her lawsuit, the newspaper reported.

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Dispute over pro-police 'Blue Lives Matter' flag results in $100G settlement for county employee who sued

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A county in Oregon has agreed to pay a former employee a $100,000 settlement after she sued the county for racial discrimination because a co-worker had posted a "Blue Lives Matter" flag in an office in support of local police.

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Our Community-With or Against out men in blue

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Our Community-With or Against out men in blue

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The people who are against the men in blue are the people who are involved with Black Lives Matter, and the community's that are tired with the brutality and the abuse's or so the community states. The people who are with the men in blue are the communities that believe the cops are need to stop the crime rate, and the other half of the people are from any type of political, or police family.

-This is a video/Article of ways the police are trying to build trust between the Stockton citizens.

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STOCKTON - Police Chief Eric Jones credited outreach efforts by his department along with input and cooperation from the community for a favorable evaluation by the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice.

The largest and most comprehensive effort ever taken to tackle police-community trust and mistrust in the United States released findings on Thursday through the Urban Institute that showed the Stockton Police Department has improved considerably in all seven categories measured in the project: procedural justice, police department legitimacy, police bias, community-focused policing, perceptions of the law, relatability of police and willingness to partner with the police. The conclusions were based, in part, on feedback from surveys conducted in October 2015 and September 2017, in which 400 surveys were completed, about a 23 percent response rate.

The other cities that took part in the national initiative were Birmingham, Alabama; Gary, Indiana; Forth Worth, Texas; Minneapolis; and Pittsburgh.

"In particular, residents' perceptions of and experiences with their local police department, police-community relationships and neighborhood conditions improved considerably in Minneapolis and Stockton," the report stated.

Jesse Jannetta, a senior fellow with the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., said, "Stockton has done some very high-level work in this area."

Jones said Stockton was selected for the national initiative because trust and crime issues have existed here for decades, and, "we had a willingness to do some things differently, to look at developing policy based on community input, and they felt we had the willingness and capacity to do so."

The national initiative sought to promote more equitable, just and respectful policies in improving relationships between law enforcement and community members. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs launched the national initiative, which consisted of officer training, departmental policy changes and community engagement designed to repair and strengthen police-community relationships by addressing deep historical roots of distrust in the police among people of color and other marginalized populations.

"We didn't know what the results were going to be," Jones said. "We do know that the results are very positive by moving in each category in a better direction, not just for the amount of trust that the community had in police, but also in officers' perception of themselves and their interaction with the community."

Training officers in the concepts of procedural justice and implicit bias was a foundational component of the national initiative. Between December 2015 and April 2018, every sworn officer in the six police departments participated in three full days of training that covered conceptual procedural justice, tactical procedural justice and implicit bias. A new reconciliation process was developed that consists of five components, including fact-finding and sustained listening.

Stockton PD conducted more than 100 listening sessions, more than any of the test site cities, in areas where there is the most mistrust, which generally are high crime areas.

Policy changes within Stockton PD during the national initiative implementation period included, but were not limited to, mandated annual officers' mental health training, added procedural justice language to general order on how canines are deployed (May 2016) and policy on release of body camera footage (July 2017).

"It's very promising," Jones said. "We do know these results are not what we ultimately want. We want to continue to improve. We know we have a lot of work to do.

"We're not done. We're just getting started."

Contact reporter Bob Highfill at (209) 546-8277 or jhighfill@recordnet.com. Follow him on Twitter @bobhighfill.

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Stockton Police make strides in building trust

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STOCKTON - Police Chief Eric Jones credited outreach efforts by his department along with input and cooperation from the community for a favorable evaluation by the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice.The largest and most comprehensive effort ever taken to tackle police-community trust and mistrust in the United States released findings on Thursday through the Urban Institute that showed the Stockton Police Department has improved considerably in all seven

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It is a counter movement in the United States advocating that those who are prosecuted and convicted of killing law enforcement officers should be sentenced under hate crime statutes. It protects our officers in blue, and is a counter movement to black lives matter, because all lives matter.

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Where people should go to promote blue lives matter would have to be located in Compton because they(The Citizens) are changing how people view the police officers.

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This is a article/video of a on-duty police officer who gets a 911 call from a young mom who husband has got a gun with no clip in it because he was highly intoxicated.

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PART II. You Should Never Have Been a Cop"

At 9:06 a.m. on Oct. 10, 2017, Rob Alexander, the chief of police in Weirton, took a seat in an office in downtown Wheeling. He was about to take part in a first for him: giving sworn testimony about his decision to fire one of the three officers involved in the death of Williams.

Alexander stated his name, swore to tell the truth and got the basics out of the way. He said he had been a member of the Weirton Police Department for 23 years, the last three as chief.

"What are your job duties in your current position as chief of police?" asked the lawyer taking Alexander's deposition.

The chief took a stab at humor. "Babysitter," he said.

The lawyer moved on. There was sensitive and complex ground to cover.

The officer Alexander had fired had been shocked by his dismissal. He had hoped to spend his entire working life on the Weirton force. Convinced he had done nothing wrong, the officer sued, and now, 17 months later, Alexander had to explain his decision under oath.

One of the officer's lawyers, Maggie Coleman, wanted to explore the Police Department's training on the use of force. Alexander acknowledged that fatal police shootings were not common in Weirton; he could remember just two in his more than two decades with the department. He later declared that the Williams case was the first he had overseen as the head of the force. Alexander said that he was sure his officers had received some training on the use of force while in the academy, but that he wasn't sure how often or how specifically they had been trained on the issue once they were on the streets.

When you evaluate a use of force by a Weirton police officer, what is that it you are trying to determine?"

"When was the last time you received training specific to constitutional limitations on the use of force by police officers?" the lawyer asked Alexander.

"I couldn't answer that," Alexander said.

Coleman then asked if Alexander had ever been trained in how to conduct a review of an officer's use of force.

"I do not, did not, have not," the chief said. "Sorry."

Coleman's focus on the use of force was no surprise, of course. It was the issue her client had been fired over. A young man was dead.

But her full line of inquiry then took a startling turn.

"Do you routinely review officer uses of force to determine whether or not the officer did not use enough force in the particular situation?"

Alexander, it turns out, had not fired the officer who shot Williams. He had fired Stephen Mader, who had chosen not to shoot the young man.

Alexander had concluded that the young officer had frozen in a life-and-death moment. He had determined that Mader, in not eliminating what he said was the threat posed by Williams, had put the lives of fellow officers at risk. Kuzma, the officer who had killed Williams, thought Mader should have shot him first.

Mader's actions at 119 Marie Ave. in May 2016 had instantly become the subject of analysis and gossip among the ranks of the tiny department. The word "coward" was being tossed around. Kuzma and Baker had taken the remarkable step of asking Alexander in writing never to assign them to work again with Mader. Two other members of the force signed on as well, and the memo was quietly slid under the chief's door.

In his lawsuit, Mader said that, apart from his statement the night of the shooting , he had never had the chance to explain himself. He was never interviewed by anyone in the Police Department, including the captain who recommended his firing as well as Alexander, the chief who approved it.

"The Weirton Police Department terminated Mr. Mader's employment because he chose not to use deadly force to shoot and kill an African-American man who was suicidal," his lawsuit alleged.

Tim O'Brien, one of the lawyers representing him, contrasted the punishment of Mader with the numerous and often incendiary cases in which officers around the country had killed young men of color only to face no sanctions.

"Here," O'Brien said at the time, "we have an officer who uses restraint and he gets punished. Something was wrong."

O'Brien alleged that the punishment had a purpose. That the city and Police Department wanted to protect themselves from any claim by the Williams family that Kuzma had shot R.J. needlessly. Finding fault with Mader for not shooting Williams, then, might help the city defend itself against any such claim and the scrutiny it might attract.

"It's a profound case," O'Brien said in a recent interview. "Almost like a law professor made it up. It goes to the heart of when deadly force can be used."

Mader was sworn in as a Weirton patrolman in July 2015. His training lay ahead of him, but being added to the force along with two others that month was newsworthy in Weirton. Alexander told a local television reporter that his force had lost a number of officers to retirement, and he was eager to replenish its ranks. The department was budgeted for 38 officers, and with Mader and the other two recruits coming aboard, it had at least clawed its way back to 35.

Mader, in jacket and tie, told the reporter he was ready to brush up on local laws and "do the best I can." He said his starting pay was $16.53 an hour.

"There's a lot involved in the testing process," Alexander said into the camera. "And these three candidates aced all those."

Mader hit the streets in late December 2015. He was assigned a training officer, and that officer's report weeks later seemed encouraging. He complimented Mader's handling of paperwork and the taking of statements from witnesses and victims. He did say that Mader could do a better job of learning the city's streets and growing more comfortable talking on the radio, but didn't doubt he would get the hang of it.

"Mader is not afraid to ask questions if he doesn't know what to do and wants to improve in the duties of a patrolman," the training officer wrote.

On one thing, the training officer was clear: "When it comes to officer safety, Prob. Ptlm. Mader knows the importance in all different situations," he wrote. "And knows to always have a fellow officer's back."

Mader was becoming an officer at a raw moment for policing in America. Fatal police shootings of African Americans had roiled cities across the country, from Ferguson, Missouri, to Chicago to Cleveland to Charleston, South Carolina. At least two news organizations built databases to try to account for as many fatal police shootings as possible. The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its efforts, and two of its central findings were that people with mental illnesses made up large numbers of those killed, and that very few officers were ever prosecuted for even the most questionable of fatal encounters.

The hundreds of incidents and the attention they received wound up having an impact on many of the men and women serving in uniform. One Pew Research Foundation national survey of police officers found that 75 percent of them felt the shootings had increased tensions with black members of the communities they policed. Some 85 percent said the net effect had been to make their jobs harder, and 93 percent said they worried more than in the past about their personal safety. The number of officers killed in the line of duty, the survey showed, had increased as protests gripped one part of the country after another.

The same survey also showed that the vast majority of officers never fire their weapons during the course of their careers. Just 27 percent said they had ever fired their weapons, whether intentionally or accidentally. Mader actually fit the profile of the officer most likely to fire his weapon: male with a military background.

But in his months on the street, Mader had had few occasions even to feel the need to draw his gun. He had done so while conducting a sweep of a suspicious building, for example, or carrying out a potentially problematic traffic stop. But that was about it. The only two incidents that had caught the attention of his superiors involved the arrest of a man after a dispute over a parking ticket and Mader's response to a report of a woman in cardiac arrest.

In the first, Mader had opened a car door to place the parking ticket inside to keep it from getting wet in case of rain. The owner of the car came out of his house and began swearing at Mader over the ticket and his decision to put it inside the car. The man kept swearing, and after his wife emerged as well, Mader and his training officer arrested him. The department's write up of the episode said Mader swore at the woman, telling her to "get back in the fucking house." Mader only remembers being exasperated, and muttering, "All this over a fucking parking ticket."

A sergeant later sorted things out. Mader told him his first training officer had said it was all right to place a ticket inside an unlocked car to protect it from rain. The sergeant told him he was wrong - that he shouldn't have done it or sworn in front of the couple. The ticket and arrest were vacated, and the man and his wife said they were happy with the way the department had handled the matter.

The second incident involved Mader's response to an April 12, 2016, call about a woman in cardiac arrest who eventually died. When Mader arrived at her home, emergency medical technicians were working unsuccessfully to revive the woman, and they had moved her to a staircase landing inside. Mader and two other officers who joined him regarded the incident as tragic, but in the end a medical call, and they soon left. A supervisor later determined that Mader had failed to deduce that the woman might have been the victim of foul play. Parts of her body, the senior officer said, were contorted in a way that might have suggested she had been assaulted.

The department never determined if foul play was involved, and no one was ever arrested for the woman's death. Still, a supervisor wrote a memo suggesting that Mader be disciplined for his handling of the call. Alexander, the police chief, later said under oath that Mader should have stopped the EMTs from trying to save the woman so as to preserve a potential crime scene.

Three weeks later, Mader was on the overnight shift, from 11:30 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. "The weather was getting warmer - that's when crime is higher," he said.

"I was hitting up different neighborhoods. Making sure my presence was known," he added. "I kept myself entertained as best I could."

Then there was the call to get to 119 Marie. There, he sized up Williams. Mader was thickly built and still muscular from his years with the Marines. Williams was taller than Mader but slighter. His family liked to joke that they knew he had arrived home late at night by his light, telltale skips up the staircase.

To Mader, there was nothing intimidating or menacing about Williams' demeanor.

"I was just trying to calm him down," Mader said. "It was really just talking to him like he was a human being - talk to him like a guy who was in a wrong state of mind, like a guy who needed to be calmed down, who needed help."

Mader had received no training in how to handle such situations. No one in the Weirton department had. But he was familiar with the phenomenon of suicide by cop, and aware that such shootings often proved controversial.

And so he waited.

"I didn't want to shoot him," Mader said. "I don't want to say this, because it's really corny, but I was kind of sacrificing my well-being for him. I'm not going to shoot this kid for my well-being. I'm going to wait to see more from him."

That said, he would fire if it were warranted. He wasn't interested in dying.

"I was ready to be first," Mader said. "As bad as it sounds, I'm going home."

When the backup officers, Kuzma and Baker, arrived, Mader said, it felt like a mixed blessing. He was grateful for the support, but fearful of what might happen. If Williams wanted someone to shoot him, two more people with guns had just turned up.

"Now this guy has a new option, he's got a new way to get it done," Mader recalled thinking. "That's what scared me."

When the standoff was over, Mader returned to headquarters. He gave his statement to a superior, and he replayed the events in his mind. It was amazing, he said, how quickly it all happened, but how long it felt in the moment. He said then what he still says today: he could not second-guess Kuzma's decision to shoot Williams.

But the shooting was the talk of headquarters, and some officers began to openly imply that Mader might have been frozen by indecision or, worse, been afraid to shoot. Mader said he opted to keep quiet.

"I let them say what they needed to tell me," Mader said.

Williams' death shattered a fiercely loyal family. Ida Poole, the matriarch, was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. Her father was a maintenance worker at a local hospital, and her mother tended the home. Poole would have a succession of men in her life, and with them both heartbreak (two of them died young) and blessings (seven children).

The children were a mix of races - the "Tribe of Ida" was one of their nicknames - and they traveled together, first to Ohio and then the Pittsburgh area.

"They called us the rainbow family," Heather Poole, the fifth child, said. "'You're all a bunch of blacks, Mexicans and whites.' But it was funny; it was like we ourselves never had a concept of race."

Natasha Ault, the fourth of Ida's children, said that when people mentioned that she had stepsisters or stepbrothers, she was confused more than hurt. "To me, we were always full brothers and sisters."

Williams was number six. His father, Ronald Dale Williams Sr., was an Army veteran in El Paso, and R.J. wound up spending parts of his childhood with his dad in Texas. R.J. had a talent for basketball and an affinity for the inner workings of cars. When R.J. was with him in El Paso, his father played the part of disciplinarian, pushing the boy enough that he attracted some interest from basketball programs at smaller colleges. When that didn't pan out, his father said he enrolled R.J. in the Job Corps, where he earned some certificates as an auto mechanic.

"I had him doing chores and cutting grass and attending school," his father said. "If I would tell him to do the dishes, he'd say, 'I don't have to do that with my mom.'"

Ida Poole, the family's center, exerted a great gravitational force, and Williams was drawn back to her and his siblings. Poole, who for a decade had worked at the Allegheny Valley School, a large campus outside Pittsburgh that houses scores of mentally disabled residents, found Williams a job in the school's laundry division. He was eventually promoted to caregiver. His father said Williams was proud of his steady employment and texted him photos of his paychecks.

Shawnae Sallie worked with Williams at Allegheny Valley. Together, they helped care for the 12 residents of Building 2A, feeding and bathing them, keeping them entertained and safe. Williams was a natural, and the residents warmed to him, Sallie said. One of the residents and Williams bonded over their love for the Dallas Cowboys, the team of Williams' Texas youth.

But Poole and others in the family say Williams was also working at caring for himself. He'd spent part of his adolescence tortured by a bad case of acne, and he stayed at home for stretches to avoid embarrassment. Although he blossomed into a handsome and what his sisters said was an infectiously charming young man, Williams could still be deeply insecure - and anxious about his future. He sought out professional help for his anxiety and was prescribed medication. Feeling better, he declared himself cured.

"We always say that R.J. had probably one of the prettier smiles of all the siblings," his sister Heather said. "And whenever he would laugh or he would smile, he always covered his mouth, like he was embarrassed, or he just wasn't confident."

For a spell, the birth of Williams' first child, the boy nicknamed Tre, felt like the clarifying moment he was seeking. He had met Gilmer at work at Allegheny Valley. And he'd talked about going to school to become a respiratory therapist. His entire family was at the hospital when Tre was born. They looked through the window blinds of the nursery and saw the infant grab his father's finger.

"He changed his son, he ate with his son, he slept with his son," Natasha Ault said of her brother.

When the falling-out with Gilmer kept him from his son, Williams started to come undone. He worked extra shifts but ate little. He feared losing Tre and explored the idea of hiring a lawyer. He lost weight and showed signs of depression. He got the Smith & Wesson after he said he'd been held up at gunpoint.

Heather said she got a call from him one night at 3 a.m.

"I was startled by his phone call cause of how late it was, so I made sure to get up and answer it," she recalled. "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."

His mother now regrets maybe she didn't appreciate how unraveled her son was becoming.

"We got really smart over the years working with R.J.," Ida Poole said. "We were like his own support unit. We were there for him, knew how to calm him. We knew how to work with him. When he did get emotional, we knew how to settle him.

"I think we might not have realized how desperate maybe R.J. was."

Early on the morning of June 7, 2016, a month after Kuzma killed Williams in front of 119 Marie Ave., a lieutenant from the Weirton Police Department turned up at Mader's home. He knocked twice before Mader opened the door.

"I advised him I had an envelope to deliver to him and the contents would be self-explanatory," the lieutenant later wrote in a memo.

The cover letter in the envelope informed Mader that he'd been fired for failing to meet the standards of a probationary officer and for "apparent difficulties in critical reasoning incidents."

An attached memo from a captain in the department was more specific and more damning: "It is the opinion of this officer that Ptlm. Mader should be dismissed from employment by the City of Weirton Police Department before the close of his probationary period due to negligence on his part during the incident that occurred on May 6, 2016, in which a fellow officer had to react and unfortunately take the life of the suspect, Ronald D. Williams, Jr., to ensure the safety of the victim and her young son at 119 Marie Avenue, Weirton, West Virginia, Hancock County, as well as other officers on scene and other citizens residing in the immediate area.

"Ptlm. Mader was negligent in the fact that he failed to engage the suspect to end the threat of any further violence or potential loss of life as the suspect presented a clear and present danger to all people in the immediate area.

"The unfortunate reality of police work is that making any decision is better than making no decision at all."

None of what was in the envelope was self-explanatory to Mader. None of it made sense of any kind. He'd never once spoken with the supervising captain who had written up the paperwork recommending his firing. He believed he had made a conscious decision not to shoot Williams, and Kuzma had fired only when Williams had raised his gun and the three officers were at risk.

The day after Mader received the letter, things got stranger. The Hancock County prosecutor, Jim Davis, called a news conference to announce the results of the inquiry into the shooting death of Williams. Alongside Davis at the conference were Alexander, the police chief, and Gibson, who had led the investigation for the state police.

Davis announced that none of the officers involved could be blamed in the shooting, and certainly not criminally charged. Indeed, he offered nothing but sympathy for the three officers.

"They didn't seek this out," he said. "This was foisted upon them."

Asked directly by a reporter if the officers were blameless, Davis said: "Yes. Absolutely. It was tragic for everyone involved. I don't think any officer wants to be in that situation."

As a result, the names of the officers would not be made public, Davis said.

Mader was watching the broadcast of the news conference with his wife, Kaycie, at his mother's home. What he heard next stunned him.

Alexander announced that all three officers involved in the shooting were doing well and back at work. To Mader, Alexander's aim was clear: Make the shooting go away, and bury the fact that he had fired the one officer who had accurately read the scene at 119 Marie as a bid for suicide by cop.

"It was jaw-dropping," Mader said. "Kind of like a punch in the face."

Mader - baffled, incensed, unsure what to do - declared his intention to file an appeal of his termination and have a formal arbitration hearing. A lawyer he initially contacted thought his chances of prevailing were slim, since the city had wide latitude to fire a probationary officer, and suggested that resigning would be better. Ultimately, Mader decided that appealing was the right thing to do. His request for his hearing to be delayed was rejected, however, and the city made his firing final. He said the lawyer he had consulted told him he would no longer represent him.

The city never announced Mader's firing, and there was no local news coverage. For months it appeared that the incident at 119 Marie was over and done with. Mader, now with two children and no job, enrolled in a nearby truck driving school.

"It was like as soon as I was handed that letter, it was just like a wall went up," Mader said. "No one talked to me. I was an outcast, just like that. No one tried to contact me to see if I was OK. No one tried to say, 'Hey, man, try and fight it.' It was like I didn't exist to them anymore."

Then, on Sept. 11, 2016, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an article about Mader's firing. It included Mader's recounting of the shooting of Williams and the murky circumstances around Mader's termination. It quoted Jack Dolance, the lawyer who had spoken on behalf of the Williams family back in May. Dolance said it was "pretty clear" how the Weirton authorities had viewed the fatal shooting.

"Not only do they think he should have been shot and killed," Dolance said of Williams, "but shot and killed more quickly."

The article provoked a jarring response from Alexander, the police chief, and the Weirton city manager, Travis Blosser. The men called a news conference. They sat themselves in armchairs in front of the cameras, and behind them stood four officers, including the only two black officers in the Weirton Police Department. A modest gathering of local reporters turned out.

The men, without evidence, said that the Post-Gazette article was full of mistakes. But they saved their harshest comments for Mader. They repeatedly called him a disgruntled employee. The men claimed that Mader's actions at 119 Marie were, in fact, "not a direct reason" for his firing. He'd been on his way out anyway, they made clear.

The men claimed that Mader's two prior missteps involved in one case an "illegal search" (the parking ticket placed inside a car) and in the other "contamination of a crime scene" (his handling of the woman's heart attack). The men described the two incidents as possibly even graver than his conduct during the shooting.

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 occurred as well."

Mader was unfit to be a cop, they had determined, and they wouldn't stand by and see another bad apple somehow find a way to stay on a police force.

The Post-Gazette article turned out to also have infuriated Kuzma, who thought it had made him look like a racist killer cop.

Kuzma still had Mader's telephone number. He had texted Mader hours after the May 6 shooting to check in on him. "How you holding up?" he had asked Mader.

On Sept. 13, Kuzma's text to Mader was less warm. "You're nothing but a coward," he wrote. "And thanks for putting our officers in danger now. We have been getting death threats from all over the area because of your bullshit article."

"Had more respect for you," Kuzma added, "if you would of just fessed up to your lack of action and moved on."

Days later, Kuzma confronted Mader in person. Kuzma, in uniform, had responded to a call at the training school where Mader was taking classes to become a long-haul truck driver. Kuzma chose to videotape the encounter, later saying he wanted evidence in case anyone questioned what took place.

"Mader, you get my texts?" Kuzma asked.

"I did," Mader responded.

"Pretty accurate?" Kuzma asked.

Kuzma angrily accused Mader of having sought to cover up his own failings. Kuzma recalled that Mader had said "I don't know" when Kuzma had asked him what happened right after the shooting. To Kuzma, Mader's "I don't know" was evidence he had lacked the courage to act.

Mader did his best to explain himself. He told Kuzma that he'd said "I don't know" in an effort to spare Kuzma. In the moment, Mader said, he had wanted to protect Kuzma from the knowledge that, in killing Williams, he had just given a suicidal man the exact and awful outcome he had desired.

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I didn't want to put it on your conscience that the kid said, 'Just shoot me.'"

Kuzma wasn't impressed. "You still did shit," he said. "You fucking sat there."

Kuzma suggested that Mader might have tackled Williams. Or just shot him.

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The guy leaving you and walking, advancing towards me and Baker... That's why I say you're a coward because you did nothing."

"It was within seconds, dude," Mader said.

"It doesn't matter," Kuzma replied.

The raw, spontaneous shouting match in a West Virginia truck lot got at the heart of so many police shootings - the duty to protect. The duty for cops to protect each other. And their duty to protect citizens, even disturbed and dangerous ones. Could a cop decide not to shoot if he or she feared most for the life of the civilian holding the gun or knife or bat?

In front of Kuzma, Mader stood his ground.

"If I were to have shot that kid," he said, "I wouldn't have felt justified."

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It's just-I wouldn't feel right living with it."

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

In the late 1970s, when the film director Michael Cimino was looking for locations to film "The Deer Hunter," his epic Vietnam War drama, he became taken with Weirton. Almost 800 West Virginians had died in the war, and Weirton, like many of the steel towns around it, had sent many of its boys to Southeast Asia. To this day, its enlistment rates are high.

The city, in turn, has worked hard to pay tribute to its soldiers. In January 2016, representatives of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2716 in Weirton helped come up with the latest idea for honoring the community's warriors.

Thus was born the Weirton Military Banner Program. Banners, measuring 2 feet by 3 feet and displayed around the city each year from Memorial Day to Veterans Day, carry the names, service information and photos of local veterans. Chris Connell, a resident who had pitched in to help the VFW post get the program going, noted proudly that Weirton was the first West Virginia city to do so.

"This is a project to honor the men and women who have bravely given their time, and even their lives, to protect our country here and abroad," Connell told the local paper.

At least two of the banners that have since been hung honor Mader's relatives. But now Mader, a former Marine, had in the early fall of 2016 come to occupy a more complicated place in the city's regard.

For some supporters of the Police Department, the article in the Pittsburgh paper left them viewing Mader as either a coward or a rat, a malcontent who had put himself ahead of the city's good name.

Mader still lived in Weirton, and he had no desire to leave. He and Kaycie had had a second boy three days before the article was published. He'd adopted Susie, a black Labrador who had seen duty overseas like Max. He had begun training to become an MP with the National Guard. The military, it seemed, was still happy to have him carry a gun.

"I love Weirton," he said, adding that friends, family and many locals he encountered while an officer had lent their support. "But what happened - it's always dangling over me."

In the end, the Post-Gazette article did shake loose something good for Mader.

"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," said Maggie Coleman, a lawyer in Pittsburgh. "This story popped up about an officer who had been fired for not shooting someone. I was aghast."

Coleman called her partner, Tim O'Brien.

"It was a completely unique set of facts for me," she said. "If this were true, we could not be creating that kind of incentive for police officers. Standing there on the bus, the very first thing I did was call Tim and say: 'Did you hear about this? I think we need to represent this guy.'"

Mader said Coleman contacted him via Facebook Messenger. She wanted to talk. The local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, not a frequent advocate for the police, became intrigued with Mader's situation as well.

In the weeks after his firing, Mader had sought to find a local lawyer to take up his case. He said he was repeatedly turned down. Some of the lawyers he approached had the city as a longtime client. Others said they couldn't imagine what kind of claim he could make. He counted 20 rejections.

But the Pittsburgh firm, along with the ACLU, eventually signed on. O'Brien, the lead lawyer, likes to say that his firm has both sued and represented more cops than any other in western Pennsylvania. It was his litigation that helped lead to a 1997 federal consent decree governing reform of widespread misconduct in the Pittsburgh Police Department.

In a recent interview, O'Brien said Mader met "every one of the criteria for who should be a police officer in Weirton, West Virginia. He's from there. He's married. He's raising kids. He's a Marine veteran. He's joined the West Virginia National Guard. And up until he did not shoot and kill this young African-American man, he was accepted as someone who should be on that police force."

The law firm spent weeks searching to find some precedent for Weirton's actions: dismissing an officer for not firing his gun during a fatal shooting. Cases, opinions, law journal articles - the lawyers came up empty.

Nonetheless, on May 9, 2017, Mader's lawyers filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia. He had been unfairly fired, his lawyers wrote, and then targeted for retaliation by city officials out to destroy his reputation.

O'Brien and Coleman said they spent a long time deciding how to frame the case for the public. There was some support for making it a Black Lives Matter issue, focusing on Williams.

But Mader was adamant: He would not question Kuzma's right to shoot, based on what was going on and how little Kuzma knew about the situation. Mader said he wanted to make the case solely about "honoring the prerogative of a police officer not to use deadly force."

Mader said he felt the Weirton chief had not honored that prerogative.

"The Weirton cops were extremely uncomfortable with the idea that any one of them would accept any risk whatsoever to another cop's life," Coleman said. "I think that's really what it came down to: the fact that Mader was willing to wait even those couple of seconds to assess the situation that could potentially be dangerous before he shot somebody. That was too much risk for them. They expect that if a cop's life is implicated in any way, the cop will always shoot first. I think they want to depend on that."

O'Brien agreed.

"It's the Blue Lives Matter More theory of policing," he said. "When in doubt, shoot. If you can shoot, you should shoot. If you have the choice of waiting that one second to see if you could protect the citizen's life and put your own life at risk, you must take the citizen's life."

In pressing their case, O'Brien and Coleman were not at all sure the legal claim they were making would prevail. But then they were handed what amounted to a gift.

The city of Weirton filed a response to the lawsuit, denying the claims. But it never opted to do what O'Brien thought was routine and expected - and perhaps perilous to his case. The city never filed a motion to dismiss the suit, a customary step that would have required a fairly vigorous testing of the merits of Mader's claims.

When the city chose not to, it became clear that Mader's lawyers would be able to compel police and city officials to provide what Mader long had waited to hear: a sworn account of how and why he had been fired, and what it was he should have done differently at 3 a.m. in front of 119 Marie Ave.

For Poole and her children, the hours and days after Williams' death were a nightmarish blur. She said the authorities treated them more as relatives of a criminal suspect than as the grieving kin of a suicidal young man, dead at 23.

Williams car, parked in front of 119 Marie, was impounded. State police investigators compiled records of every brush he might have had with the law: a DUI that was dismissed; a purported role as a getaway driver during an assault in Ohio. The official state police report included a claim by authorities in Ohio that had they encountered Williams when he was alive, they would have arrested him. What possible relevance, the family wondered, did the unsubstantiated claim have to an investigation of whether the Weirton officers had acted properly in a fatal shooting?

Family members said they had difficulty getting any information about the shooting and were taken aback when a Weirton officer, apparently frustrated with their questions, sarcastically wished Poole a happy Mother's Day. The family had called the state police but was told that Gibson, who was conducting the investigation, had gone on vacation days after the incident.

Fearing that the investigation was less than objective, the family decided to tape-record some of the interactions with the state police.

"We're calling because we would really like to pick up my brother's belongings," Natasha Ault said in one call.

The trooper on the phone, exasperated, said he had explained that Gibson was on vacation. "Calling in every day isn't going to change the fact that he's still on vacation," the trooper said.

Natasha took a breath and tried again. "I have questions, understandably," she said. "So if you could be understanding enough to let his sister, who loved him dearly, ask you a couple of questions. I'm sure you have a brother. Please just put yourself in my shoes for a second and have some compassion."

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Please just put yourself in my shoes for a second."

She waited. The line was silent. The trooper had put her on hold. He never came back to the call.

Dolance, the family's lawyer, saw no mystery in it all. A veteran trial lawyer - he'd also clerked for the West Virginia Supreme Court after law school - he had been introduced to the family by a friend. Dolance said he thought the authorities, in Weirton and at the state police, feared that Kuzma's killing of Williams was questionable. It was in their interests, he said, to withhold information and dig up dirt on Williams so they would have a consistent story to go public with eventually.

Dolance saw the shooting this way: The two backup officers raced to the scene full of fear, adrenaline and a readiness to shoot; that their two patrol cars almost crashed was evidence of their eagerness. Screaming at Williams to drop the gun and advancing on him and Mader fundamentally altered the dynamic at 119 Marie. And Kuzma wasted no time taking charge and taking action. While his concern might have been legitimate, Dolance said, it didn't authorize him to use deadly force as a first option.

"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," Dolance said. "He saw that R.J. Williams was not a threat. Which, as it turns out, he was absolutely correct about. 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" Dolance argued. "They rolled up, almost hit each other, and 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."

Davis, the Hancock County prosecutor, scoffed at Dolance's interpretation of the events. Davis, who has held the job since 1992, said his practice is to rely on state police investigations when weighing any possible charges against an officer in a shooting. He said each of the three other fatal police shootings he could remember reviewing were deemed justified. His finding that the shooting at 119 Marie was justified as well, he said, "was an easy call."

"He was in the presence of a weapon presumed to be ready to go," Davis said of Kuzma. "An officer's safety is important."

When the story of Mader's firing came out months later, Ida Poole and her children were hopeful that Mader might back them in their belief that the shooting was unjustified. They had been touched by the accounts that Mader had recognized Williams' distress. That Mader referred to Williams as "brother" made them smile. His restraint felt distinctive and powerful. They thought he might become a kind of spokesman for the better handling of police shootings.

"It seemed like such a great moment for change," Natasha Ault said.

Mader said he felt terribly for Williams' family. But he made clear that he would be of no help in any effort by the family to sue Kuzma or the department. His choice not to shoot did not mean Kuzma's decision to shoot was wrong.

Dolance was both disappointed and admiring. He said Mader struck him as honest and honorable.

"Mader was not willing to say the other officers did anything wrong. He's not saying that what they did was right. He's just saying that he can't say that what they did was wrong because he didn't see it through their eyes," Dolance said in a recent interview. "And of course, it would have been better for the family if we could have gotten some, you know, some sort of statement that the other officers clearly screwed up: 'I did everything right; they did everything wrong.' But that's not the kind of person that Stephen Mader is. He tells it how it is, and he had no agenda. Sometimes you have to accept the facts as they are, not as you would like them to be."

Without Mader, Dolance concluded, there could be no case against Kuzma and the Weirton police.

Informing Ida Poole and her children that Mader would not aid their cause, Dolance said, was excruciating. "I tried to be upfront," he said. "But it was the most difficult news I've had to deliver in my career."

In the year since his firing, Mader had made headway in navigating a new life in his hometown.

He'd learned to avoid contact of any kind with members of the Weirton police - at the supermarket or at the school their children attended together - and he'd found work as a truck driver hauling hazardous waste. He covered 3,000 miles a week and spent five nights away from his family. He'd had more time with his family as a police officer, but driving a truck paid better.

Still, there was the matter of his good name. To clear it, he had won the right to take sworn accounts from his accusers. Kuzma, the officer who had shot Williams and who had called Mader a coward, went first.

The questioning, on Oct. 9, 2017, would last 3 1/2 hours.

It began, as almost all depositions do, with some simple biography. Kuzma said he was in his 12th year on the Weirton force. He had never finished college and had worked for a couple of summers with Weirton's Sanitation Department before joining the police. He was married, with children.

The lawyers then set about exploring Mader's history with the department. The police chief and city manager had claimed in their news conference a year earlier that Mader had been a problem officer. If he had been, Kuzma should have known. The two men had spent weeks working the same shifts, and on a force as small as Weirton's, that meant they spent a lot of time answering the same calls.

Asked if, before the shooting, Kuzma had ever thought Mader was not suited to be an officer on the Weirton force, Kuzma said he had not.

O'Brien, the lawyer taking the deposition, then turned to the May 6 shooting. The questioning led Kuzma through a second-by-second recounting of the events in front of 119 Marie. And when they were done, Kuzma wound up in a place he likely could not have expected.

Kuzma told the lawyer he first saw Mader with his gun pointed at something, and only later saw that he was pointing it at Williams. Under questioning, Kuzma said that if Mader had not regarded Williams as a threat, perhaps he should have tackled him. Or moved to stand between Williams and the arriving officers. Maybe he could have shouted something about his belief that Williams was suicidal, Kuzma said.

Kuzma, though, said he was dead certain what Mader should have done once Williams raised his gun and started walking toward the officers: He should have shot him.

"Mr. Williams was pointing a gun at me. I can't attest to what Mr. Mader had with him prior to me arriving, but I can say very confidently that once Mr. Williams left Officer Mader and focused on me and started pointing the gun at me, I think the realm of decision making for Mr. Mader changes rapidly, and that he would have a duty to protect me."

Mader's lawyers sensed an opening, and, question by careful question, made the most of it.

"The only real bone of contention that you have with Mr. Mader is that he did not use deadly force at the first instant that you believe it should have been used, correct?"

"Correct."

"And the first instant when it should have been used by him is at the moment when Mr. Williams raised the gun from his side and started going back and forth?"

"Yes."

The lawyer persisted.

Wasn't the requirement the same for Kuzma? O'Brien asked the officer. He had a gun. He recognized the threat. He had a duty to protect - himself and Baker.

"And we can agree that in that particular instance, however much time elapsed in what you have described here, you didn't use deadly force even though it should have been used?"

"Yes."

"And one of the reasons that you didn't use deadly force instantaneously is because that was the first time in your entire career that you had ever been confronted with that situation?"

"Yes, sir."

"You then yelled for the male to 'drop it.'"

"Yes."

"Instead of using deadly force at that instant when it should have been used, you chose the option to issue another command."

"Yes."

"And that is the exact same thing that Officer Mader was doing?"

"Yes."

The lawyer then presented Kuzma with his statement from the night of the shooting. In it, Kuzma noted that when he saw Williams pointing the gun at Mader, he did not fire.

"That is another instance where, based upon your statement of when deadly force was required to be used, that you should have used deadly force?

"Yes."

O'Brien then asked Kuzma to explain himself. Why hadn't he fired?

"Shock."

O'Brien seized on the admission.

"So you recognized that an officer, even one with 12 years of experience, when confronted for the first time with somebody pointing a weapon at them, may not act in accordance with what should be done because of the shock of being confronted with that situation?"

"Yes."

"And that same analysis did apply to Officer Mader under the circumstances because he was confronted with the exact same situation. True?

"Yes."

Well, if Mader was a coward for not using lethal force when required, the lawyer asked Kuzma, wasn't he one as well?

"In that second, you could say I was."

"Has anyone called you a coward on account of that?"

"No."

"Have you ever said to anyone, 'I believe myself to be just as much a coward as I believe Mr. Mader to be?'"

"No."

Did anyone in the chain of command tell you that they believe that they would have responded differently than either you or Officer Mader responded under the circumstances?"

"Did anyone in the chain of command tell you that they believe that they would have responded differently than either you or Officer Mader responded under the circumstances?"

"No, not that I recall."

Weirton's police chief, Rob Alexander, was deposed the very next day.

Alexander said Mader hadn't been fired for not shooting Williams, and denied that he had let him go to protect Kuzma and the department. But Alexander admitted that he had never talked with Mader about the incident before terminating him. He also said he had he never talked to the captain who had written a memo recommending Mader's firing.

As for what Mader might have done differently, Alexander said he, too, thought Mader might have tackled Williams, but then conceded that it would have been unwise to try tackling someone with a gun.

He suggested that Mader might have used a Taser, then acknowledged he didn't even know if Mader had one.

He said he thought Mader might have shouted, "Hey, this is suicide by cop," but then admitted it was unlikely that would have been heard over the screaming of the officers for Williams to drop his gun.

Coleman took great care with the next set of questions.

She pointed out that if Mader did not regard Williams as a threat, he was explicitly prohibited from shooting him, according to the Weirton Police Department's own use of force policy.

"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?"

"Correct."

It was now midafternoon on Oct. 10, 2017, roughly six hours into what became more than eight hours of questioning for Alexander. He had conceded much: that he had never run an investigation of a fatal police shooting; that he had never spoken with Mader about the conduct he had fired him for; that he didn't really have an answer for what Mader might have done differently; that he had produced no evidence that what he had made clear to the public - he had been preparing to fire Mader even before the shooting - was, in fact, true.

And now, almost a year and a half after the death of Williams, he seemed to concede the point at the center of Mader's suit for wrongful termination.

The lawyer then made sure of that.

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?"

"OK. 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?"

Alexander took his time. In the video of the deposition, he seems resigned, even defeated. He waits before answering with a single word.

"Yes," he said.

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What Happened When A White Cop Decided Not to Shoot a Black Man

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At 9:06 a.m. on Oct. 10, 2017, Rob Alexander, the chief of police in Weirton, took a seat in an office in downtown Wheeling. He was about to take part in a first for him: giving sworn testimony about his decision to fire one of the three officers involved in the death of Williams. Alexander stated his name, swore to tell the truth and got the basics out of the way.

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This is a video of David Clarke the sheriff of Milwaukee County in Wisconsin addressed the RNC Monday night. Clarke addressed the importance of making the streets safe again after numerous troubling incidents, including the tragedy in Baton Rouge

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Sheriff Clarke at RNC: "Blue Lives Matter"

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This is a video about how Walmart is caked with criticism after it reportedly refused three times to decorate a dessert with an American flag with a thin blue line to represent "blue lives matter." The cake was supposed to be in celebration of a police officer retiring from law enforcement.  According to Facebook poster, Taylor.

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Walmart Apologizes After Initially Refusing To Make 'Blue Lives Matter' Cake

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This is a video of a on duty police officer saving a suicidal citizen who is just done with life, and the world. The officer is quick acting, and trying to calm the situation down.

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A quick thinking police officer with even quicker reflexes saved the life of a man attempting to jump off of a bridge while police were speaking with him in dramatic newly released video.

The Knox County Sheriff's Department in Tennessee posted a message from Sheriff Tom Spangler on Facebook congratulating the officer for saving the man's life at the last second.

"Sheriff Tom Spangler would like to commend our very own TANGO "Traffic Unit" Officer, Brian Rehg for his efforts in saving the life of a young man that attempted to jump off a bridge on Pleasant Ridge Road On April 8, 2019," the Facebook post began.

Knox County Sheriffs Office

In the video caught on one of the police officer's body camera, the man can be seen darting to the side of the bridge and trying to hurl himself over the edge before the officer is able to grab him by his right leg at the very last second before the jumper plummeted to the ground.

"Officer Rehg along with KPD Lt. Chris McCarter grabbed and held onto the young man just seconds before he went over the bridge. Because of their vigilance and quick actions the young man is alive today," the Sheriff's Office said.

Knox County Sheriffs Office

The incident occurred in April of this year but the video was only just released yesterday,

"Both Lt. McCarter and Officer Rehg are true local heroes, not just because of this one incident but because they continue to risk their lives daily for the safety of others", said Spangler.

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Tennessee police officer grabs bridge jumper at the last second to save his life

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A quick thinking police officer with even quicker reflexes saved the life of a man attempting to jump off of a bridge while police were speaking with him in dramatic newly released video. The Knox County Sheriff's Department in Tennessee posted a message from Sheriff Tom Spangler on Facebook congratulating the officer for saving the man's life at the last second.

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Ami Horowitz asks Brooklyn do police lives matter. He goes around and ask people simple questions that lead towards¨Do blue lives matter?¨. The Community answers with yes in Harlem.

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This is a google slide of what I think about the situation with blue lives matter and how people treat them. I will address the situations blue lives matter have with the community.

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This is a article about Jackson Hole, WYO – and how Emergency services responded to a report of a house fire in the Gill Addition of east Jackson early this morning, safely rescuing one resident who was still asleep when help arrived.

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JACKSON HOLE, WYO - Emergency services responded to a report of a house fire in the Gill Addition of east Jackson early this morning, safely rescuing one resident who was still asleep when help arrived.

An individual reported seeing smoke and flames coming from a home at 460 E. Deloney Ave and called 911 at 3:32am. Jackson Police officer Sgt. Garrett Kellams was first on-scene. He immediately checked to see if there was anyone inside. He pounded on the door but heard nothing. Kellams then entered the home and found a single occupant still sleeping. He woke the man and helped him evacuate through the smoke and out of the burning structure.

Police say the home's smoke detectors failed to function, making Sgt. Kellams' actions a life-saving effort in ensuring that the occupant was awakened with enough time to escape before becoming overcome by smoke and fire. A second occupant who resides in a basement apartment was not home at the time of the fire.

The first arriving Jackson Hole Fire/EMS (JHFEMS) fire unit, Engine 11 out of Station 1 in Jackson, found a single story, residence with smoke and heavy fire consuming the exterior east walls and roof structure. The Engine 11 crew provided initial fire suppression efforts and were able to substantially suppress the fire until additional JHFEMS units from Stations 6 and 7 arrived and assisted with further extinguishment, limiting further property loss.

There were no injuries to members of the public or emergency responders.

Responding emergency responders included 3 JPD officers, 9 Fire/EMS apparatus, 20 firefighters, and Jackson Hole Security.

The structure sustained heavy fire damage to approximately 25% of the structure with accompanying smoke damage throughout the main floor.

Fire Marshal Kathy Clay has investigated the fire's area of origin and gathered information for the investigation report which will be released upon completion.

JHFEMS wants to remind everyone that your ability to get out of your house during a fire depends on advance warning from smoke alarms and advance planning. Ensure your smoke alarms are functional and in every bedroom and connecting hallways. Get everyone in your household together and make a home escape plan. Walk through your home and look for two ways out of every room.

Make sure escape routes are clear of debris and doors and windows open easily.

Plan an outside meeting place where everyone will meet once they have escaped.

If there are infants, older adults, family members with mobility limitations or children who do not wake to the sound of the smoke alarm, make sure that someone is assigned to assist them in the event of an emergency.

If the smoke alarm sounds, get outside and stay outside and go to your outside meeting place with your family.

Test your smoke detectors a minimum of twice a year.

Please contact Battalion Chief Mike Moyer at (307) 733-4732 with questions.

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Quick-thinking cop saves life in early morning house fire - Buckrail - Jackson Hole, news

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JACKSON HOLE, WYO - Emergency services responded to a report of a house fire in the Gill Addition of east Jackson early this morning, safely rescuing one resident who was still asleep when help arrived. An individual reported seeing smoke and flames coming from a home at 460 E.