Sandy police legally justified in fatal shooting during domestic violence investigation

SALT LAKE CITY — On March 22, Sandy police officers Glenn Ware and Ryan Shaddick responded to a domestic violence/welfare check call. It was the second time in five hours police were called to the home.

Less than two minutes after entering the home, Isaac Jesse Watters, 45, charged at one of the officers with a knife. Both officers responded by firing six times, killing Watters.

On Thursday, the Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office announced the officers were legally justified in fatally shooting Watters. District Attorney Sim Gill said the incident is another reminder of why domestic violence calls are some of the most dangerous for police to respond to, and how quickly the circumstances of such calls can change.

The tragic events unfolded the morning of March 22 when Watters "requested police presence to retrieve money from his residence," according to Gill's final report. Watters said his wife had changed the locks on the home while he was in the Salt Lake County Jail on a recent arrest.

"The officers observed that Mr. Watters' behavior appeared anxious and erratic. The officers verified that there were no active protective orders prohibiting Mr. Watters from being at the residence or contacting (his wife)," Gill stated in his report. "Officers explained (to the wife) that they were very limited on what they could do because it was still legally his house."

Watters eventually left and his estranged wife also went to stay with her mother. But just before 3 p.m., police say Watters returned. He was spotted by his wife on the doorbell camera and she called police.

Ware and Shaddick returned to Watters' residence, near 8800 South just west of Highland Drive, where the estranged wife and her mother were waiting for police to arrive and enter the home first.

"I was scared. I knew he was acting erratic ... I really was scared for our safety. So I didn't dare go in first," she told police, according to the report.

In body camera videos released Thursday, the officers enter the house and see the wife's office is in disarray. The wife can be heard crying in the background. "He trashed all my stuff," she said.

As police call out to Watters to show himself, he appears from the front entryway. "I'm here," he said.

But the interaction with police quickly escalated as Watters made statements such as, "This is my own home," "What did you do?" and "She's taken all of my stuff," he said in the body camera videos. At one point, Watters gets close enough to Ware that he makes contact with him and the officer gently pushes him away.

Watters then tells the officers several times, "I just want you to shoot me."

Ware attempts to deescalate the situation by telling Watters he's not going to shoot him. But that's when Watters is seen kneeling down and pulling out a knife strapped to his shin, the videos show.

Ware attempted to put distance between him and Watters, but Gill said Watters charged at the officer like he was coming off the starting blocks in a race. Watters gets within ten feet of Ware in the narrow entryway before he is fatally shot.

"He is clearly volatile, he is acting erratically… And what is incredible here to watch is the situation the officers find themselves in. They are really trying to keep the peace and they're trying to minimize it turning into something else," Gill said Thursday while reviewing the body camera video and his report.

It was determined that Watters had entered the home by breaking out a basement glass door. He also had purchased a knife shortly before going to the house, Gill said.

Despite the officers' efforts to deescalate the situation, Gill said they were on heightened alert after seeing the trashed office in the home. When asked Thursday if Watters returned to the house because he knew there would be a police conflation, Gill said he could only speculate.

"I think he is very conscious about what he is doing and he's going to attack those officers. And if those officers hadn't been there, I'm genuinely concerned about the safety of the others who would have been there. He wants to invoke that confrontation. Every choice that he makes, every thought process that I can infer through the video that I have, that he was going to take that officer on," Gill said. "I think that was a confrontation he was looking for… My reasonable inference was this was not going to end up good for anyone."

Just ten days before the shooting, Watters was arrested by Sandy police for investigation of two counts of intentional abuse of a vulnerable adult, theft and engaging in a pattern of unlawful activity. According to a police booking affidavit, Watters was a nurse at Sandy Heath and Rehab and had been stealing prescriptions from patients. Police were called after his wife found a garbage bag in the garage "full of blister packs and drug logs."

"I reviewed the photographs and they showed Isaac was taking such prescriptions as Tramadol, Gabapentin, Methadone and Oxycodone," the affidavit states. "Isaac admitted he had been taking different people's medication over the past two months. When asked how he chose who's medication to take, he said he would take it from people with multiple packs, knowing they would not notice they were missing."

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