Video shows SWAT team slaying man holding mother hostage

Body camera footage released this week showed the moment a SWAT team breached a trailer home and killed Joshua Squires, ending a hostage situation that had been developing throughout the morning of Aug. 10.

The footage was played Monday during a fact-finding review of Squires’ death at the Clark County Government Center.

Metropolitan Police Department Detective Blake Penny answered questions from a representative of the district attorney’s office and an ombudsman representing Squires’ family and the public.

Had he survived, Squires, 32, would have been charged with assault with a deadly weapon on a protected person, kidnapping with a deadly weapon and resisting with a deadly weapon, Penny said.

Early in the morning on the day of Squires’ death, police were called after reports that a subject, later identified as Squires, had lit a sock on fire and put it in a vehicle gas tank. Police arrived at the scene and attempted to locate Squires, but he was not at his home in the Storeyville Manufactured Home Community, 3755 N. Nellis Blvd.

Body-cam footage showed an officer encountering Squires in a nearby desert area. The footage showed Squires holding what looked like a gun but was later revealed to be an Airsoft pellet gun that had been manipulated to look like a firearm. After the officer yelled for Squires to drop the gun, he continued to run away, and the officer fired a single shot that missed the target.

Later, Squires’ sister called police to notify them that he had returned to the mobile home he shared with her and their mother. At 8:55 a.m., SWAT was asked for a hostage negotiator when it was reported that Squires was inside and was not allowing his mother, Toni, to leave. The hostage negotiator spoke to Squires’ mother, who said her son was very angry.

At 9:40 a.m., a breach order was given, and officers entered the residence. Body-cam footage showed officers entering and firing at Squires, who fell to the ground in the kitchen as his mother screamed. He was pronounced dead at the scene from multiple gunshot wounds, and his death was ruled a homicide, the Clark County coroner’s office said.

Officer Allyn Goodrich, who fired the shots that killed Squires, has returned to active duty, a police department spokesman said Monday.

Toni Squires told the Review-Journal in August that her son was a paranoid schizophrenic who struggled with substance abuse for years. A toxicology report revealed methamphetamine in his system when he died, and a bag of methamphetamine was found in the trailer.

Squires’ mother, sister and brother-in-law said in August that the police shooting ended a devastating journey in which the family tried for years to get him mental health help, only to see him steadfastly refuse it.

“We tried and tried and tried to help him,” Toni Squires said. “He just didn’t want it.”

Required by a Clark County ordinance, fact-finding reviews were adopted in 2013 and are held when the Clark County district attorney’s office makes a preliminary decision not to pursue criminal charges after a deadly police shooting or in-custody death.

In the time that the procedure has been in place, a preliminary determination has not been overturned after a fact-finding review, and one police officer has been charged in connection with a death.

Contact Jonah Dylan at jdylan@reviewjournal.com. Follow @TheJonahDylan on Twitter.