Final report on the NH hospital shooting with John Madore – NBC Boston

A New Hampshire state police officer who shot and killed a man at a psychiatric hospital in November shortly after the man killed a security guard was justified in using deadly force, the state attorney general said in a report Thursday.

Police officer Nathan Sleight shot and killed John Madore on November 17 after he fatally shot Bradley Haas, a State Department of Safety security guard working at the main entrance to New Hampshire Hospital. Madore was a former patient at Concord Hospital.

The report said Madore entered the hospital and “immediately and without warning” fired a handgun at the unarmed Haas, who was standing near the entrance. He then fired several shots at the lobby wall, a switchboard window, a secured door leading from the foyer into the hospital, and back at Haas.

He was about to reload his pistol when Sleight drew his own service pistol, opened a door leading from his office to the lobby, and ordered Madore to drop his weapon.

At a press conference on Saturday, officials said it was 33-year-old John Madore who shot security guard Bradley Haas in the lobby of New Hampshire Hospital on Friday before a state police trooper shot and killed him.

“Madore turned around, looked at Trooper Sleight, ignored his commands and continued to attempt to reload his pistol,” Attorney General John Formella's report states. “Sleight fired at him and Madore fell to the ground.”

“While lying on the ground, Madore again attempted to reload his pistol, at which point Trooper Sleight fired the remaining ammunition from his service pistol at Madore in an attempt to prevent Madore from reloading,” the report states.

At about that time, a patient who was unaware of what was happening entered the lobby and heard Madore say something along the lines of “I hate this place,” the report said. Sleight escorted the man back to the parking lot.

Video cameras showed that all these events occurred in less than a minute.

The report said Sleight's conclusion that Madore posed an imminent lethal threat was “objective and reasonably well-founded.”

Sleight has approximately 11 years of experience in law enforcement.

The report noted that Madore had suffered from mental health problems in the past and had been hospitalised for 13 days in February 2016 and again for approximately nine months between May 2016 and March 2017.

His father told investigators that Madore had previously expressed paranoid fears that hospital staff would try to remove his organs, and that he continued to talk about it even after his release.