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The shooting occurred after police were called to a Mesa La Quinta Inn & Suites on a report of a person pointing a gun out a fifth-floor window. A couple in a hotel hot tub told staff they saw a silhouette with a gun pointed toward a nearby highway.

. . . .

Police later learned Shaver had been showing his pellet gun to Monique Portillo and Luis Nuñez, two hotel guests Shaver had met earlier that night. Both testified Shaver had been playing with the pellet gun near his hotel room window.

Shaver turned out to be unarmed when he was shot, but police did find the pellet gun inside the room.

.....
One police officer who didn’t shoot because he did not perceive an imminent threat said as much in the trial:

Mesa Police officer Brian Elmore testified Tuesday in a former colleague’s murder trial that he didn’t shoot at an unarmed Texas man because he didn’t see an imminent threat.

. . . .

At a time when active shooters situations have become more common, such tragedies were in Elmore’s mind when he responded to the call, the officer testified.

“I did think about some high-profile situations going on around the country,” he told the jury.

And in a devastating answer for the prosecution, he said he might have fired had he been in Brailsford’s position:

Still, he said, he didn’t shoot because he didn’t see the same threat as Brailsford, who was standing on the left side of Shaver several feet away when officers encountered him.

Piccarreta asked Elmore if he had been standing where Brailsford was standing, would he have shot Shaver.

“It’s possible,” Elmore responded.

In summary, the tactics here were terrible. The instructions were absurd and confusing. The sergeant who barked out the instructions probably created the atmosphere that made the tragedy possible.

But Shaver should never, ever have reached for his waistband. That action probably caused a genuine fear on the part of the police officer who shot him. Might a jury find that fear, and his actions in response, reasonable? Apparently they did. Was that verdict necessarily irrational? I can’t say for sure that it was.

One final thought: thank God Shaver was white, huh? Had he been black, there would be marches and riots. People might die as a result. If this is truly the worst police shooting people have ever seen, let’s remember that it happened to a white guy, and not assume that every police shooting is motivated by race.

UPDATE: Corrected the post to note that the “you’re f*cked” phrase was etched into the dust cover of the rifle, not “carved” as I had read. It appears to be an after-market product, not something done by the officer.

Excerpted from: The Shooting of Daniel Shaver: A Law Enforcement Perspective. Link: https://www.redstate.com/patterico/2017/12/09/shooting-daniel-shaver-law-enforcement-perspective/