After a nearly yearlong review, Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. announced Friday he will not charge the South Hills police officers who in January fatally shot an Upper St. Clair man wielding a knife while in the throes of a mental health crisis.

The DA, however, criticized the police response as flawed, sidestepped the issue of whether deadly force was necessary and left some questions unanswered.

Among the most glaring: why 16 police officers at the scene, some of them members of a SWAT team, were unable to incapacitate a man armed with a knife without killing him after an hourslong standoff.

“There’s things that probably could have and should have been done differently,” Zappala said in his first public remarks about the death of Christopher Shepherd. “That doesn’t make it a criminal matter.”

Zappala determined that the shooting was justified.

“I don’t see a crime being committed by the police,” Zappala said, speaking to an audience that included Shepherd’s sister and mother, who cried during his presentation.

After months of silence, Zappala abruptly announced Friday morning that he would be briefing the media on the shooting and what his office called the “Upper St. Clair mental health crisis.”

With reporters gathered in a conference room at the Allegheny County Courthouse, Zappala began walking the media through the events that led to Shepherd’s death, unaware until late in his remarks that the Shepherd family was present. When he realized who they were, Zappala expressed sympathy.

How things unfolded

Shepherd, 48, was armed with a kitchen knife when he left his Lamar Road home on January 7 after barricading himself inside for about four hours. Police were responding to a request from Shepherd’s mother for her son to be involuntarily committed for psychiatric treatment.

When Upper St. Clair police arrived, Shepherd refused to let them in the house. Things began to escalate after he slid a kitchen knife through plywood boards covering a broken window near the front door. The window had been shattered when police were last called to his home the prior month.

Police determined Shepherd — who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder — was a threat to others. They obtained an arrest warrant for aggravated assault based on being menaced with the knife, Zappala said, and called in reinforcements from the South Hills Area Council of Government’s Critical Incident Response Team, including officers from Baldwin Borough, Bethel Park and Brentwood.

Officers tried to negotiate with Shepherd, Zappala said, but he refused to come out. Eventually, police resorted to firing flash-bang grenades and pepper balls into the home.

Shepherd, holding a butcher knife, began running toward unarmed first responders, Zappala said.

A clip from a police dashboard camera provided by the district attorney shows Shepherd raising the knife over his head as he ran down the driveway toward medics and negotiators.

A police dog took Shepherd to the ground, but when the dog’s handler came to remove the canine, Shepherd slashed at the handler, the district attorney said.

That’s when four officers from various municipalities fired 21 shots at Shepherd in a five-second span.

Eighteen of those shot hit Shepherd as he sat in the driveway, Zappala said.

‘We needed help’

Zappala acknowledged it was difficult to say whether lethal force was needed in such a situation, but he pointed out that Shepherd was running toward unarmed negotiators and medics with a knife before the police dog intervened. Then, Zappala said, he slashed at an officer.

“That’s a close call — was lethal force necessary?” Zappala said.

Shepherd’s family says it wasn’t.

Shepherd’s sister, Michelle Kippelen, said she felt her brother needed mental health help, not a deadly police response.

“He was severely ill,” she said. “We needed help.”

Shepherd’s mother, Susan Shepherd, with whom he lived, has a pending federal lawsuit against the officers who shot her son.

She cried as Zappala laid out for reporters how the police response unfolded after the mother had called police seeking help for her son.

“He was having a psychiatric incident at the time,” Susan Shepherd said. “He was scared, very scared, trying to protect what he thought was an invasion.”

She claimed her son was terrified and didn’t realize the people trying to get into the house were police.

Susan Shepherd and Kippelen pushed back on Zappala’s assertion that the shooting was justified. They questioned why lethal force was necessary when Shepherd was already on the ground.

Zappala, however, defended the officers. He said they tried repeatedly to breach the house with non-lethal options. In a clip from a body-worn camera showing officers first entering the home, Zappala pointed out that an officer was armed with less-than-lethal rounds.

But once Shepherd came out of the house armed, Zappala said, things escalated.

Exit left unguarded

While officers were stationed at the front door and the back of the house, Shepherd left through the garage, an exit that was left unguarded.

Zappala acknowledged things may have ended differently if an officer had been there.

As Shepherd ran down the driveway toward the unarmed responders, he held a desk lamp in one hand and a knife in the other, posing a threat to negotiators and medics, Zappala said.

When a Bethel Park police dog took Shepherd down, he dropped the lamp, but not the knife. When Shepherd slashed at the dog’s handler, Zappala said, other officers didn’t have an opportunity to use other methods to disarm him.

“He’s got a knife,” Zappala said. “He’s a threat to the officer.”

There is no body camera footage that shows the last seconds of Shepherd’s life. Zappala said one recommendation stemming from his investigation was to ensure the Critical Incident Response Team wears cameras in future incidents. That was implemented last month, Zappala said.

Some details remained murky. It was unclear why officers weren’t posted at the garage door exit and why the canine handler was ordered to remove the dog while Shepherd was still wielding a knife. Zappala said the handler had to remove the dog physically rather than with a spoken command.

The district attorney acknowledged the response wasn’t perfect.

No clarity on bullet wounds

Zappala said four officers discharged their weapons, but he declined to name them during Friday’s media announcement.

Previously, involved municipalities identified the officers as Andrew Jacobs and Matthew Poling of Bethel Park; Anthony Williams of Baldwin; and John Skrip of Brentwood.

They revealed the names only after being pressured by subpoenas filed by the Shepherd family’s lawyers in the federal case.

Zappala’s office, the police departments and the municipalities involved have not responded to numerous inquiries from TribLive about the case.

An independent autopsy conducted by Shepherd’s family concluded he was shot repeatedly in the back.

Zappala said the medical examiner’s report provided to his office indicated bullet wounds that perforated Shepherd’s chest, but he could not say whether the bullets had entered from the front or the back.

The district attorney said police followed appropriate protocols for dealing with someone experiencing a mental health crisis. An independent advocate from Resolve Crisis Services was on the scene, and police were trained in how to deal with such crises, Zappala said.

At one point, he said, the Resolve advocate advised police she believed Shepherd to be too delusional to respond to negotiations.

Zappala said officers tried for hours to negotiate, calling and texting dozens of times and calling out to him through a speaker. Shepherd answered only one call, cursed and hung up.

But Kippelen said his family was not allowed to try to talk to him at the scene, and she felt the noise and stress of the situation exacerbated the mental health issues her brother was facing.

“We have the means in this day and age to not kill those who are in a mental health crisis and to get them the help they need,” she said.

But when her brother needed help, Kippelen said, the family couldn’t find it. She said they couldn’t get him admitted long-term to a psychiatric hospital, and when they resorted to calling police that January day, the result was deadly.

Police had responded to Shepherd several times in the past. A presentation Zappala showed Friday outlined more than a dozen such instances, including one that involved concerns from the U.S. Secret Service about conspiracy theories Shepherd had posted on Facebook.

Kippelen said she had been hopeful that January day he would finally get the help he needed.

“I fully expected them to take him in, get him to safety,” she said of police who responded. “That’s why we called them.”

Seeking change

Shepherd’s family is moving ahead with its lawsuit, Kippelen said. The goal, she said, is to raise awareness around the struggles people face when looking for proper care for people having a mental health crisis.

No one else, Kippelen said, should have to spend every Thanksgiving and Christmas missing the person who should be sitting at the empty seat around the table.

“We want change to occur,” she said. “We want to help so that this doesn’t happen to the next mentally ill person.”

Though Kippelen said she feels the officers who killed her brother were wrong to do so, she said she cried for them, too.

“I didn’t know whether to be mad at them or sorry for them, because they also went through the process of shooting and killing a human being, and that can’t be easy,” she said.

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