Through the Cracks: A stranger, a police shooting, and a rural town’s silence (Part I)

By Niki Turner and Susan Greene | Special to the Herald Times

Editor’s note: This is part one of a two-part collaboration between The Colorado Independent and The Rio Blanco Herald Times. We will post the second part tomorrow, Nov. 8. This week’s Editor’s Column addresses the pursuit of this story, which is not our usual fare. Give it a read here.

RANGELY | No one seems to know why Daniel Pierce settled in this northwestern Colorado town last year after his wife in Missouri and mother in California kicked him out of their houses. But in the four months he lived here, he came to think of it as heaven.

Not just because he relished the hours he’d spend bumming cigarettes in front of the Kum & Go and watching pickups haul ATVs west toward the Utah desert. But because Pierce, who had paranoid schizophrenia, became convinced he was God and Rangely the place where people long dead or lost from his life would reappear at his whim.

That’s what he told the police officer who checked in on him twice last December after he scared some kids outside a school and alarmed workers at the local bank.

Lt. Roy Kinney had been keeping his eye on Pierce, just as he did the rest of this 2,300-person community with its boom-and-bust economy, don’t-tread-on-me politics and town motto declaring itself “Way outside of ordinary!”

“Do you know who I am? I’m the Creator, Roy,” Pierce, 58, told him. “I’m God. I am Jesus f***ing Christ.”

He tried to prove his point by inviting the lieutenant to “shoot me, I’ll come back to life, shoot me.” If his estranged wife did not return to him that evening, he threatened, “Everybody in this town will disappear.”

Kinney was rattled by those  threats, but decided Pierce was not a danger to himself or others.

That conclusion would prove fatal two days later when Pierce drew all three of Rangely’s officers–the town’s whole police force–and a sheriff’s deputy into a lengthy car chase. In the adrenaline blur of its final 20 seconds, Kinney shot Pierce in the head.

Pierce’s Dec. 10, 2018 killing marked Rangely’s first officer-involved homicide in nearly four decades. Everybody in town heard about it. Yet, in the aftermath, there has been silence.

In that silence, town officials refused to turn over key documents to internal affairs investigators. In that silence, a longstanding rivalry between the police department and the larger sheriff’s office and a soured relationship between two friends raised questions about how the case and the investigation were handled. And in that silence, the police chief and Kinney were forced from their jobs.

Town officials released no information about the shooting, and later urged the Rio Blanco Herald Times not to report the story. The newspaper partnered with The Colorado Independent to investigate what happened. Our outlets combed through hundreds of pages of public documents, reviewed hours of video and audio recordings, and interviewed more than 50 people, including Pierce’s family members, Kinney and other law enforcement officers, mental health providers, legal experts, and state, county and local government officials.

The death of Daniel Pierce was, in many people’s minds, further evidence of recklessness in a police force town residents had come to distrust. We found his killing may have been legally justified, but it was not unavoidable. It underscored the extent to which many in law enforcement are ill-equipped to handle mental health crises and the degree to which the kind of intervention Pierce needed is lacking in rural Colorado.

There was a shooting and its aftermath. This is the story of both.

The stranger

Daniel Pierce did not have an easy childhood. His mother, Rose Nuttbrock, was 16 when she had him. His father, never around, died of a heroin overdose. His younger brother, David, was murdered by a schoolmate when he was 14 and Pierce 18.

Pierce’s family says he went through Army basic training in the 1980s but did not go on to serve because he

married and had kids. Their account of his short-lived military record contradicts what he told people in Rangely, where he flashed the “Combat Engineer” tattoo on his arm and talked about serving in the special forces during Operation Desert Storm. He actually had been working at a farm store in Northern California at that time.

He and his first wife had two girls, the eldest of whom, Heather, died from sepsis at age five. In 1990, he severely injured his back in a car accident. Pain kept him from working after an unsuccessful surgery. His first marriage ended, as did his contact with his younger, surviving daughter–yet another in his long string of losses.

Pierce started dating a former coworker whom he eventually married. Debra Pierce says he had reconstructive surgery on his lower back in the late 1990s and relied on a port to infuse him with a steady cocktail of drugs to ease his constant pain. He stayed home, living on Social Security disability, and spent his time fixing things around the house and helping raise her daughter, Kayla.

“Red pushed her a little hard, but he was a good dad, a good guy,” Debra says of the husband she nicknamed for his hair color. “There was a time when I loved him.”

***

Pierce’s back pain worsened, leading a doctor in 2012 to prescribe a painkiller called Prialt. The drug comes with an FDA warning: “Severe psychiatric symptoms and neurological impairment may occur during treatment.”

He started hearing voices after about six weeks on the medication. There were people living under their house, he told Debra. He was sure they had installed cameras in their shower.

“He pretty much destroyed the house drilling holes in the walls trying to find them,” she says.

The doctor did not pull him off the painkiller until a few months later, she recalls, and he warned her then that her husband’s delusions might not go away. “This is who he is now,” she remembers the doctor saying.

The voices grew louder and Pierce’s paranoia more fierce until he agreed later that year to be hospitalized near their home in Missouri. He spent three weeks in the psychiatric ward, where doctors diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia. The pills they had given him helped quiet the voices. When he would not take them, doctors injected the medication. But Pierce eventually stopped showing up for the monthly shots until delusions, along with constant threats lurking in all corners, became his new normal in his early 50s.

“There was a time when I loved him.” ~Debra Pierce, widow of Daniel Pierce

Debra realized over time he had been lying to her about his military experience. She started wondering what else he was lying about and which of his tales stemmed from mental illness and which from deception. She would move out during his bad spells and Pierce would threaten her as he sensed her slipping away. She came home one day to find that he had shot and killed two of her cats. If it would have been legal to hunt humans, he told her, that would be his sport.

Pierce would say things like, “You’re still my wife, and if I can’t have you, nobody will,” and Debra came to suspect that if she ever left him, “nobody would find my body.” Police would show up for welfare checks because he had reported she had been taken hostage. Their 21-year relationship came down to two terrifying options: “He would either kill me or he would kill somebody else and then (everybody) would look at me and ask, why didn’t you get him help?”

And so she cut off all contact in 2016 and hid from the man to whom she remained legally married. Without treatment, she says, the voices in his head drowned out her own, and no amount of her patience or love could silence them.

***

Pierce hid his diagnosis from his mother, who did not learn of it until he moved back to California to live with her in 2017. Nuttbrock was alarmed by how he had changed.

“He would talk like he was talking to someone, but there was nobody there.”

Once, Pierce called police in California to say he had killed Debra in Missouri and needed them to check on her. A SWAT team surrounded her home 1,600 miles away. When they confirmed she was safe, Nuttbrock asked police to put her son on an involuntary mental health hold. He persuaded doctors to release him after one night.

Wherever there was a crack in his mental health care, he found a way to slip through it.

“The sik meds only make me sick I don’t need them. An they change me for the worst,” he wrote Debra from California in a letter blaming their problems on former neighbors whom he believed had connected military radio equipment to his brain, emitting frequencies he could hear 24/7.

“I’m so upset about all this stuff. I’m ready to kill them all. The pain of worrying about you an missing you is getting more than I can handle! And I don’t care anymore about going to jail for killing them,” his letter reads. “I wise thing could be different but someday sone I’ll bring you there bodys to prove it to you.”

Nuttbrock agreed to let him stay under one condition: “I didn’t want to hear any more about those voices.” But they kept speaking to him and he to them until Pierce scared his teenage nephew. When she gave Pierce one last warning, he, at six feet tall, lunged at her. She told him then he needed to move out.

“He wasn’t my son” by that point, she says, crying into the phone. “He was a stranger. I didn’t even know him. And I was afraid.”

***

Pierce headed east in the blue Chevy van his mother bought him, stopping in New Mexico and then back in Missouri to find Debra. She recalls the Memorial Day weekend in 2018 when he showed up at the home supply store where she works.

“I said ‘There’s nothing left,’ and he said, ‘You’re still my wife,’ (and) I said, ‘Leave me the f*** alone.’

“He had tears in his eyes and drove off,” she says, teary, too. “That was the last time I seen him.”

Untreated paranoid schizophrenia often breeds alienation for those with the condition. The delusions, the paranoia can subsume their former selves so that people who were close to them tend to push them away out of self-protection. So it was that nobody in Pierce’s family spoke with him during the six months that followed.

“The sik meds only make me sick I don’t need them.” ~ Daniel Pierce in a letter to his wife

Nuttbrock was tracking her son’s whereabouts from the bank statements and blood pressure prescription mailed to her home. She could see that he headed from Missouri to Wyoming, then down to Colorado in August 2018. He had no ties in Rangely that she or her daughter-in-law knew of.

Pierce wrote her in October 2018 that he had been led here by his “extended family” of Native American relatives – a distant branch of her family tree she doubts he could have tracked down. Maybe out of loneliness, she wonders, he was searching for some lost tribe.

Tim Webber, who heads the Western Rio Blanco Metropolitan Recreation and Park District in Rangely, first encountered Pierce at the district-run RV park in town where Pierce was living out of his van. When Pierce told him he was a veteran, Webber loaned him a tent and sleeping bag, stopped charging him rent for his RV park space, and hired him to mow the greens at the local golf course. “He was always on time and he did a good job,” he says. “He was a different fellow, but a nice guy.”

As temperatures dropped last fall, Pierce used the money he earned at the golf course and a job working maintenance at the community college to rent a duplex on South Grand Street. His landlord, Chris Wills, describes him as neatly dressed, well spoken and chatty about what he said was his career in the Army’s elite special forces.

Something about Rangely resonated with Pierce.

“I love this part of the country it’s where I belong,” he wrote Nuttbrock last October. “I even found my Heather here Mom. She is a butieful girl,” he went on about his young daughter who died decades earlier. “I know this a sounds so crazy, but please beliveae me. So much has happen in my life.”

Pierce’s last letter to her, dated Nov. 15, described the way Rangely takes such good care of its children, the friends he was making here, and the park near his townhome.

“It’s a special life here,” the letter reads. “My health is great here. No more pain or headaches. Thank God.”

Rangely America

Petroglyphs and paint pictographs have graced the sandstone canyons south of Rangely for about 13 centuries. But a town that now has one church for every 230 residents is also known for an often-photographed bluff on its eastern outskirts spray painted with the misspelled message “Jesus is Comming.”

This patch of high desert 25 miles east of the Colorado-Utah border has always been a place through which people pass, whether the native guides who led Spanish missionaries through the area in 1776 or oil and gas workers who migrate with shifts in their industry.

Rangely hit the map in 1931, when the California Company – now Chevron – spudded an oil well. It incorporated as a town 15 years later. The Chamber of Commerce touts that Rangely has “the largest field in the Rocky Mountain region.” In 1956, the field yielded 49%  of Colorado’s total oil production. That percentage since has dropped to single digits.

During boom cycles, the industry afforded Rangely the ability to build schools, a hospital and a tricked-out recreation center. When energy prices drop, reduced tax revenue strains agencies like the fire department and police force, even as the population has stayed relatively static.

The town has worked hard to diversify its economy. It founded Colorado Northwestern Community College more than 50 years ago. It sponsors annual motor sports events like rock-crawling and rally races. And it promotes its Tank Center for Sonic Arts, an abandoned water tank reconfigured as a music venue whose eerie acoustics have drawn international attention.

Despite those efforts, there is a sense among locals that Rangely is under siege — be it by new state oil and gas regulations, by federal Obamacare guidelines blamed for the hospital’s financial woes, and even by its own county government, which some say favors the town of Meeker on the east side of this two-town county.

***

Kinney, a 53-year-old Marlboro-smoking, Mountain Dew-drinking former police lieutenant, grew up partly in Rangely, where his granddad worked the oil fields for Chevron. Being a cop, he says, is “all I ever wanted to do.” He enlisted in the Air Force as a law enforcement specialist and worked for the Rio Blanco Sheriff’s Office for 15 years before he went to work as Rangely Police Department’s No. 2 in 2010.

Locals saw him as a throwback – one of those small-town cops who knew your parents and probably your grandparents, and who would take the time to show up in person rather than phone. Smart, some describe him. A bit tightly wound, others say. A guy who’ll talk with you and hear what you’re saying.

“Like that sheriff on TV. You know, Opie’s dad,” one of his neighbors says.

“Yeah,” agrees her husband, “but with balls.”

Kinney reported to longtime Rangely Police Chief Vincent Wilczek, known as Vinny, who refused multiple requests to be interviewed for this story.

Wilczek has a reputation as rough around the edges – short-tempered, long-winded, and sometimes gruff. He had a stroke in 2016. Kinney ran the department in his long absence.

To the extent that a 73-year-old town like Rangely has old, established families, Wilczek’s is one of them. The police department and the town administration are linked through blood and marriage. Wilczek’s cousin, Lisa Piering, became town manager the day after Pierce’s death after years serving as town clerk. And his wife, Karen, serves not only as Rangely’s county court clerk, but also the primary judge in its municipal court, where cases stemming from police citations are heard.

“I think that’s a conflict of interest,” says Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola.

Karen Wilczek was reappointed as municipal judge by the town council after assuring members she recuses herself “when any potential or perceived conflicts of interest arise.”  Town Attorney Dan Wilson backed her up.

***

The Rio Blanco Sheriff’s Office and the Rangely Police Department cooperate with one another, but the relationship can be strained. The small police force long has grumbled that the larger Sheriff’s Office lures away Rangely police with its slightly higher salaries.

It hasn’t helped that the police chief had a history of butting heads with the sheriff whose election bid he opposed in 2014. When Mazzola won the seat, he reached out to Wilczek and deputized him and all Rangely police officers in what he calls a gesture of trust and reconciliation.

Their truce was short-lived.

At first, Wilczek and Mazzola bickered over minor jurisdictional issues – what Kinney called “pissing matches.” Those turned into all-out war in 2016 when Kinney, unable to pursue a robbery suspect on foot because of an injury, yelled at him to stop and fired two warning shots into the air with people and a sheriff’s deputy nearby.

Mazzola calls Kinney’s warning gunfire “boneheaded” and “reckless,” especially for a veteran officer. He was furious when Wilczek refused to seek an outside investigation, as is required for officer-involved shootings. Wilczek said it was not an officer-involved shooting because nobody was hit and his department’s policies did not prohibit officers from firing warning shots.

The Ninth Judicial District Attorney’s office and agents from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation sided with the police. But Mazzola had lost trust in Rangely’s police force and its ability to work safely with his deputies. He told the town manager “your town is out of control” and declared all of Rangely’s officers undeputized because, he says, he did not want the legal liability for their missteps.

“I touted Roy as the best cop in the county. (But) when he went to work for Rangely PD, something changed,” Mazzola says of Kinney.

Kinney took Mazzola’s condemnation as a personal attack from a man he had considered a close friend since Dec. 10, 2004.

It was on that date – 14 years to the day before Kinney would kill Pierce – that Mazzola killed a suspect in a reported domestic dispute after a car chase. Kinney, who also responded to that call, remembers Mazzola asking him immediately after, “Did I f*** up? Did I f*** it up?”

“I told him no, because in my eyes he hadn’t, even though in other people’s eyes he may have,” he says.

For many years, the two men would meet for dinner each Dec. 10 to, as Kinney puts it, “celebrate our survival.” But in recent years, they stopped getting together. “I guess our relationship changed,” he says.

Mazzola agrees that the 2004 shooting “bonded us,” and says, “I’m not sure how things fell apart.”

The demise of their friendship would later cause Kinney to wonder if Mazzola tried to influence the investigation into Pierce’s death to make him look bad.

***

Criticism of the Rangely PD intensified in 2017 when prominent residents were being pulled over in what they complained were overly aggressive traffic stops. Officers would snare drivers on pretexts such as turning on their blinkers too soon or having muddy license plates or objects dangling from their rear-view mirrors. Locals were angry to learn officers had a running contest to see who could make the most drunk driving arrests.

“We didn’t encourage competition, I’ll tell you that,” says Kinney, who also does not deny such a contest took place. “It’s human nature to be competitive. It has been going on among officers here for a long, long time.”

In January 2018, the town council held a three-hour public hearing on the police department, which Kinney refers to as “the evisceration.”

Residents complained they felt picked on by over-amped cops abusing their power. Jeff Rector, a  Rio Blanco County commissioner who had been pulled over twice, said their “heavy-handedness” was out of touch with “Rangely America.” “Everybody’s not a bad guy,” added Paul Fortunato, a former sheriff’s deputy.

Sheriff Mazzola, in the meantime, became increasingly outspoken against the police force. “We’re public servants,” he says of law enforcement. “We’re not at war with the public.”

The five-person department lost two of its officers in 2018. One of them, Max Becker, left for the sheriff’s office because he felt his views about law enforcement didn’t line up with the police force. He later filed a complaint against the Rangely department alleging it was misrepresenting the length of time recorded for its traffic stops to justify the use of a drug-sniffing dog. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the DA’s office found discrepancies, but did not pursue the issue.

A confidential informant, meanwhile, lodged a complaint through the sheriff’s office, claiming Kinney and Wilczek were throwing drug-tainted tennis balls into people’s cars to trigger canine drug searches. Both denied the allegation, and no action arose from that complaint, either.

“We’re public servants. We’re not at war with the public.” ~ RBC Sheriff Anthony Mazzola

Distrust stung the police department hardest late last year when it started having trouble getting its cases prosecuted. Jessica King, the deputy DA at the time, says she was “constantly frustrated” by its chronic inability to provide her office with evidence and documentation from its arrests.

She felt she was “stonewalled right and left,” mainly on drug cases, which she stopped prosecuting. But Mazzola says it was more than drug cases and that “She was totally bucking everything from Rangely.”

By the time Pierce was killed in December, Kinney says King’s refusal to prosecute cases had rendered his department essentially powerless.

Jesus talk

Still on the beat despite public scorn and interdepartmental drama, Kinney first met Pierce at an ATV race in September 2018. He would over the next months see the newcomer walking around town. “He always wanted a cigarette, saying his military check hadn’t come yet. I’d give him one and we’d stand on the street and talk.” Over many Marlboros, Pierce told him stories about his exploits in the special forces. “It was just extraordinary stuff that made me think, ‘No way, this guy’s full of crap,’” says the Air Force veteran.

Their exchanges were friendly until Dec. 4 when the school district reported a man who fit Pierce’s description had been lingering around the high school trying to lure students into his blue van. Kinney and Wilczek went to question him outside the Main Street Café, where Pierce told them one of the students was his nephew, Sebastian.

Pierce seemed lucid during that conversation. But he had never mentioned to Kinney he had family in town. And there was no student named Sebastian involved in the school encounter. The lieutenant tracked down Pierce’s mother by phone in California that day. Nuttbrock told him about her son’s paranoid schizophrenia and her decision to kick him out of her house.

“She opened her heart to me and I really thought we made a connection,” he says. “I told her that everything seemed to be fine with him, that he seemed to be fitting in, other than that weird school thing.”

***

Four days later, on Dec. 8,  employees of the Bank of the San Juans on Main Street reported a man fitting Pierce’s description had come by looking for a red-headed teller he thought might be in danger. They told him no redhead worked there. Still, he said he would return for her Monday and would be “coming with God.”

Kinney headed to Pierce’s place, where body camera video shows Pierce waiting for him on his front porch.

“Had a call from the bank. You spooked ‘em,” Kinney told him.

“You can put me where you want. Tonight everybody will be gone,” Pierce said.

He invited the lieutenant into his living room where he kept only a rug, the back seat of a car he used as a sofa, and a radio blaring country music. After some conversation, he proclaimed himself “the Creator.”

“You think you’re the Creator?” Kinney asked. “Is the Creator harmful to people?”

“No. Hell no. I’m not harmful to anybody, Roy.”

Pierce pointed in the direction of the bank, saying the redhead he was looking for that morning was his wife Debra.

“Your Debra doesn’t live here in Rangely,” Kinney told him.

Pierce, still wearing his wedding ring, said she had visited him the day before and that they were trying to get back together. Kinney asked where she went.

“I… She… Roy, you can come and go. This is heaven. You can come and go from this place.”

When Kinney told him to stop scaring people, Pierce got in his face. “You want to shoot me? Shoot me, I’ll come back to life, shoot me.”

Kinney radioed for back-up.

“You don’t need back-up. You want to put me in jail? Put me in jail,” Pierce challenged him. “You’re not going to put me in a hospital, either. You’re not going to f***ing sedate me because medicine doesn’t work on me. You’ve got one choice. … Tonight the world ends if I don’t get my wife back.”

“And if she doesn’t come back, what’s going to happen?” Kinney asked.

“Like I said, the world will disappear tonight. Everybody in this town will disappear. That’s the way it goes.”

Kinney left after about 20 minutes. As he walked out Pierce’s door, the Rio Blanco County sheriff’s deputy who had responded as back-up commented:

“He is off his rocker. Is that an M-1 hold or what?”

***

Police officers have authority under Colorado law to take people into custody for an involuntary, 72-hour treatment evaluation if they are mentally ill and an imminent danger to themselves or others. The decision to put someone on an “M-1 hold” hinges on factors such as whether their thought process is illogical, they are hearing voices or seeing things that are not there, and they are showing signs of anger and aggression.

Kinney says Pierce was the second person in his life to “scare the hell out of me” — the first being an older cousin named Tommy Carl.

“Looked a lot and talked a lot” like Pierce, he says.

He describes his cousin while reviewing the body camera video of what he calls Pierce’s “Jesus talk” in his home office. “Tommy Carl was a vicious, violent bastard. I don’t say that about Dan. But that’s what I see in his eyes when he gets angry here.”

“ …  the world will disappear tonight. Everybody in this town will disappear. That’s the way it goes.” ~ Daniel Pierce to Roy Kinney

His cousin died about 10 years ago: “Killed himself in Oklahoma, confronted by cops and they wouldn’t shoot him, so he shot himself.”

Kinney says the fact that Pierce rattled him that morning was not reason enough to “take away his freedom.” He had encountered several people during his three decades of policing who asked him to shoot them. “It’s not an uncommon thing,” he says. “And, Jesus, this is the second Jesus I’ve dealt with in my career.”

He decided Pierce’s threats were not credible because he did not have the power to literally destroy the town.

Kinney called the hotline at Mind Springs Health – the contractor paid to provide mental health services in Rio Blanco County – and described his conversation with Pierce. He laid out his reasoning for why “he wasn’t M-1-able.” He says the counselor agreed.

Mind Springs President and CEO Sharon Raggio confirms the call was made and says it lasted 58 seconds. She says because her organization has no record of Pierce in its system, it was likely a “curbside consult.”

Still, she says, the call was out of the ordinary.

“Usually when law enforcement calls, it’s for some kind of help. It’s not just ‘Does this person need an M-1 or not?’ but ‘Is this person safe and how can we engage them and get them into treatment?’”

As Raggio tells it, typical protocol would be for Mind Springs to reach out to the subject of the call and “ensure that a safety plan would be made.”

But no such outreach or safety plan was made on Pierce’s behalf. Kinney says he did not discuss those options during his phone call with Mind Springs and that the counselor did not offer them.

“He is off his rocker.” ~ RBC Sheriff’s Deputy Dan Nye

The police incident report about Pierce’s visit to the bank and subsequent “Jesus talk” with Kinney was written in July 2019 – seven months after Pierce’s death – by Officer Ti Hamblin, who had been named Rangely’s interim police chief after Kinney’s and Wilczek’s forced retirements. Kinney hadn’t gotten around to writing it before he was put on leave after the shooting.

The report does not mention the lieutenant’s call to Mind Springs or any efforts to seek help for Pierce.

The pursuit

Two days after Kinney had visited Pierce, the officer stopped in the parking lot of Rangely’s Kum & Go and was speaking with Butch McAlister, a former sheriff’s deputy. It was Monday evening, Dec. 10. McAlister had spotted a car broken down outside the convenience store and worried because the methamphetamine user inside was relying on a propane heater to keep warm.

Pierce showed up, walked between Kinney and McAlister, and said the man who had been causing trouble outside the high school had a woman tied up in the basement. Then, he went to smoke with the cashier.

“I told Butch that if there’s somebody dangerous, it’s that guy,” Kinney says.

The lieutenant headed to his office to fill out paperwork. Shortly after, he heard from dispatch that a white pickup truck had been stolen from the Kum & Go. He assumed the thief was the meth user with the broken-down car until he heard the description of the suspect.

“I was just like, ‘Oh, God, it’s him.’”

He was alarmed to hear from dispatch that the truck Pierce had stolen had a rifle on the front seat.

***

Sheriff’s Deputy Max Becker, the former Rangely police officer, spotted the stolen truck on state Hwy. 139 southeast of town. Pierce was driving about 40 miles an hour, well below the speed limit, when Becker radioed that he would follow him and wait for backup from Kinney, who was the only other law enforcement officer on duty and nearby. Becker also asked dispatch to alert law enforcement in neighboring Mesa County, about 50 miles in the direction Pierce was heading. He says he planned to follow Pierce all the way to Mesa County if necessary because he did not want to escalate the situation.

Pierce stopped in the middle of the road and got out of the truck. Becker initiated a “high risk traffic stop,” drawing his gun and telling him to show his hands. “He clearly (saw) who and what I am,” Becker says. Yet, “he seemed surprised.”

Ignoring Becker’s commands, Pierce got back into the stolen truck and continued driving southbound.

Kinney chimed in about Pierce over the radio: “That party, I know who it is. 10-96 on him” – “10-96” being police code for “mental suspect.” “He was very confrontational the other day,” Kinney warned. “The guy is nuts.”

The lieutenant caught up to Becker and asked if he could safely pass him and Pierce, “get some distance,” and lay out spike strips to disable the truck. Becker did not object, advising that there was a straightaway coming up where Kinney could set the strips safely.

Kinney made the pass, but Pierce then turned the stolen truck around and headed back north on State Highway 139. Kinney caught up immediately behind Pierce, telling him several times by name over a loudspeaker to pull over.

By this point, Pierce’s driving had become erratic, leading Kinney to speculate over the radio that Pierce could be “messing with that rifle.” Meanwhile, Wilczek had joined the pursuit and deployed spike strips further north. Hamblin, too, had responded. Rangely’s entire police force, plus Becker, was now involved.

Kinney decided to pass Pierce after he failed to respond to the loudspeaker. As he did so, Pierce suddenly crossed the centerline, veering toward Kinney’s patrol car and causing the lieutenant to nearly run off the road to avoid being hit. There would be disagreement later as to whether he was trying to ram Kinney’s car, or just driving erratically. Kinney would say Pierce was trying to kill him.

As Becker tells it, Wilczek escalated the situation by driving “right on [Pierce’s] bumper.” “It was an indicator to me that things were getting a little bit ramped up,” he says.

The pursuit took place in the county sheriff’s jurisdiction until Pierce approached the intersection of state highways 139 and 64, within Rangely’s town limits. The spike strips the officers set up deflated the front tires of the stolen truck, limiting Pierce’s ability to control it. Kinney was concerned that if Pierce turned left at the intersection, no officers would be there to protect the town. He directed Becker to “push him off the road” and guard against any oncoming traffic.

Because ramming a vehicle amounts to use of deadly force, Becker refused. Later, opinions would differ on whether that decision affected the outcome.

Officer Hamblin followed Kinney’s order, using the bumper of his patrol car to push the truck as Pierce accelerated, making it spin off the side of the road near the intersection. The truck accelerated forward again, striking Kinney’s patrol car with enough force to significantly damage the car and injure Kinney’s neck in a way that would eventually require surgery and limit his range of motion. Pierce reversed after the first impact, pushing Hamblin’s car sideways. He pulled forward again, bounced off the front of Becker’s patrol car to hit Kinney’s again. The revving of the truck’s engine drowns out almost all other sound in the video. The squad cars had Pierce cornered.

Wilczek, by this point, was out of his car standing alongside the stolen truck. Pierce reversed again. The chief shouted to his colleagues that he would fire at its back tires to disable them, then did so with two shots.

Kinney, still in his patrol car, didn’t hear Wilczek, but he heard the shots and thought Pierce had fired at the chief. He says he could not see whether Pierce was holding a gun, but did see a big smile on his face. He interpreted that grin to mean “I was next.”

It was fast and loud, that moment in the December darkness when Kinney shot through the front windshield, hitting Pierce twice in the head.

Then time stopped.

“Everything, everything in me seemed to freeze,” Kinney says.

He, Becker and Hamblin secured the car, finding that the rifle in it had been left untouched. Pierce, wearing his Army cap, was slumped in the driver’s seat. “He’s dead,” Kinney said, though Pierce was still breathing. Paramedics arrived to transport Pierce to nearby Rangely District Hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly after.

One of those paramedics was Shanna Kinney, the head of Rangely’s emergency services and the lieutenant’s wife. She had been on standby at the hospital, listening to the radio traffic on the police scanner. When she heard Becker defy her husband’s order to push the truck off the road, she says her “heart sank.”

“In my entire career I had never heard or seen that happen before. I knew that [Becker] falling to the rear [of the pursuit] was going to leave our three officers to deal with this and I had a feeling that this was going bad,” she says.

Read part 2 of this story here.

Susan Greene

A recovering newspaper journalist, Susan reported for papers in California and Nevada before her 13 years as a

political reporter, national reporter and metro columnist at The Denver Post. “Trashing the Truth,” a series she reported with Miles Moffeit, helped exonerate five men, prompted reforms on evidence preservation and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative journalism. Her 2012 project, “The Gray Box,” exposed the effects of long-term solitary confinement. The ACLU honored her in 2017 for her years of civil rights coverage, and the Society of Professional Journalists honored her in April with its First Amendment Award. Susan and her two boys live with a puppy named Hymie whom they’re pretty sure is the messiah.

Niki Turner

Niki Turner is the editor and co-owner of the Rio Blanco Herald Times, a 135-year-old weekly newspaper in northwest Colorado.