He’s a rookie cop, but an Iraq war veteran — and grace under fire showed through when the Ohio police officer refused to fire his weapon at a charging double murder suspect.

Fortunately, he’s still alive to talk about it.

Officer Jesse Kidder would have been well within his rights to use his weapon when he encountered a murder suspect in New Richmond, Ohio, Thursday night, according to CNN. They include:

Double homicide suspect, check.
Possibly armed, check.
Verbally threatening police, check.
Refusing to remove hands from pockets, check.
Charging at an officer, check.

But he didn’t, and as a result the suspect is alive to face charges and the rookie cop can walk around knowing he did the right thing.

“Law enforcement officers all across the nation deal with split-second decisions that mean life or death,” Kidder told CNN affiliate WLWT. “I wanted to be absolutely sure before I used deadly force.”

CNN reported:

In the incident, caught on Kidder’s body camera, the officer gets out of his car, his gun trained on a suspect who had allegedly killed his fiancee and best friend before leading police on a multicounty chase through Kentucky and Ohio.

The officer’s body camera — which Kidder’s family bought for him after the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri — captured the suspect rushing toward Kidder, unfazed by the officer’s handgun. Dispatchers had told Kidder the suspect might have a gun under his car seat and might attempt to commit “suicide by cop,” WLWT reported.

“I jumped out, and he’s running toward me. I had my firearm already drawn on him, and I tell him to put his hands up in the air, and he was screaming, ‘Shoot me! Shoot me!'” Kidder said.

At that point the one of the man reached into his jacket pocket. A weapon?

“My eyes are watching that hand right now, nothing else,” Kidder told the station,
and then he yelled, “Get your hands out of your pocket now!”

But the man didn’t — instead he continued to swiftly approached Kidder.

“I was trying to open a dialogue with him. ‘I don’t want to shoot you; just get on the ground.’ But he wasn’t having it. He kept repeating, ‘Shoot me!’ At one point, he said, ‘Shoot me, or I’ll shoot you,'” the officer said.

Then the man charged to within a few feet of Kidder, forcing the officer to stumble backwards to the ground. Still he didn’t shoot. At that point backup arrived and the man surrendered.

Kidder’s chief has nothing but praise for the rookie officer.

“For him to make the judgment call that he did shows great restraint and maturity,” Police Chief Randy Harvey told WLWT, which tweeted:

Officer who took down homicide suspect only been on force for 1 year http://t.co/fjUzaYI7vo pic.twitter.com/A8AS3Z6UxX

— WLWT.com (@WLWT) April 18, 2015

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Michael Dorstewitz

Mike has been with BizPac Review almost from the beginning. Follow him on Twitter at @MikeBPR.

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