Stephen Mader was alone in his squad car in Weirton, West Virginia, in the early morning of May 6, 2016, when dispatch sent him to a domestic disturbance. He was twenty-five years old, a rookie who had grown up in the town and been on its police force for less than a year, the nearest officer to the address.
Mader had enlisted in the United States Marines in 2009 and served a tour in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as a dog handler trained to detect improvised explosive devices. He received an honorable discharge in 2013 and was still serving in the West Virginia Army National Guard when he joined the Weirton Police Department in July 2015 and completed the state police academy in Dunbar that December, graduating.
The call had started with two 911 calls from the girlfriend of a man named R.J. Williams. In the first she reported that Williams, twenty-three years old, was threatening to kill himself with a knife, and in the second she said he had a gun but that it was unloaded.
The dispatcher relayed to Mader that Williams had a weapon. The dispatcher did not pass along that the girlfriend had said the gun was unloaded.
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Mader arrived first and found Williams standing outside the house with his hands behind his back. When Mader ordered him to show his hands, Williams brought them forward, holding a silver handgun, and Mader drew his service weapon and told him to put it down.
"I can't do that," Williams said. "Just shoot me."
Williams was not aiming the weapon at Mader or at anyone else. Mader later said that Williams appeared choked up and depressed, not angry or aggressive, and that all his training in the Marines and the National Guard told him the man standing in front of him was not a threat to him or to anyone else on the street.
Mader did not fire. He told Williams, "I'm not going to shoot you, brother," and kept trying to talk him into putting the weapon down.
Two more Weirton officers arrived while Mader was still talking to Williams. Williams raised the handgun, and one of the arriving officers shot him in the head, killing him.
The gun was unloaded. On June 7, 2016, one month after the shooting, the Weirton Police Department terminated Mader, citing "failure to meet probationary standards of an officer" and "apparent difficulties in critical incident reasoning."
The officer who fired the shot texted Mader after a press conference and called him a "coward" and said he "didn't have the balls to save his own life." A state investigation found that officer's use of lethal force justified.
Before that night, Mader had planned to serve in both the Weirton Police Department and the National Guard until retirement, collecting two pensions from a career in public service. The ACLU filed a wrongful termination lawsuit on his behalf in May 2017; Weirton settled for $175,000 the following February, and Mader went back to work as a truck driver.
If every part of your training told you not to fire, and the man standing in front of you was begging you to shoot, would you hold?