Police release videos of fatal shooting Raw Leak
Published on Sep 26, 2015
Grafton County, NH - Redacted police body camera videos of a fatal police shooting in Grafton County that were released Friday show a knife-wielding 41-year-old New Hampshire man running away from officers in July before turning back toward them when he saw that they were in pursuit.
Three videos taken from body cameras worn by the Haverhill officers — the two worn by Ryan Jarvis and Greg Collins, who confronted and shot Hagen Esty-Lennon, and a third worn by Sgt.
Wallace Trott, who arrived at the scene a short time later — and a video captured by a dashboard camera in a parked police cruiser were released by the Attorney General’s Office Friday following a judge’s order.
The portions of the body camera videos that showed the shots being fired and the moments immediately afterward were redacted, but the entire encounter was shown in the video from the
dashcam of the cruiser, which was parked a significant distance from the confrontation.
The Haverhill officers were responding to reports of a man who had crashed his car into an abandoned bridge and was walking away.
Prior to the shooting, the videos show Jarvis and Collins coming upon Esty-Lennon walking toward where they parked their cruisers on Route 302 in Bath, N.H. He had a large red blood stain
on his shirt and appeared to have suffered a self-inflicted knife wound.
In the videos, Esty-Lennon ignores the commands that the officers shout at him for about 60 seconds, starting with asking him to stop and put his hands up, then escalating to repeatedly
shouting at him to “drop the knife.”
About 30 seconds into the encounter, Esty-Lennon stops walking toward the officers, turns and jogs in the opposite direction, at which point the officers pursue him on foot. As Esty-Lennon looks over his shoulder and see the officers, he turns around and runs toward them.
He appears to lunge or stumble in close proximity to the officers, and then the redacted body camera videos cut away. It is unclear whether shots had been fired at that point.