A state review has determined an Anchorage officer who fatally shot a man waving and pointing a gun in Tudor Road traffic will not face criminal charges.
The review also found the man — 33-year-old Francis Rochon — did not fire his weapon at the officer before he was shot, contradicting initial police reports that indicated he might have.
The state Office of Special Prosecutions found the shooting by Officer Isaac Kimball to be legally justified to defend himself and others, according to a review letter released by the state Department of Law last week.
The shooting occurred the afternoon of Feb. 4 in heavy traffic on Tudor near Piper Street.
Sixteen people called 911 to report a man wearing black clothes and walking in traffic with a black pistol, according to the state’s review letter. Several said he pointed the gun directly at them, including a “shocked” Anchorage School District mechanic taking an empty school bus for a test drive.
Police converged on the area. Three officers parked and one commanded Rochon to stop moving and take his hands out of his pockets, according to the review and video footage released by the Anchorage Police Department.
Kimball pulled up in a different location and saw Rochon was holding the grip of a Glock-style handgun in his right jacket pocket, according to the review letter, which described the gun as a P80 9mm semi-automatic loaded with 12 rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber.
Body-worn and dashboard camera footage shows the officer getting out of his patrol car.
“Hey, police! Put your hands up! Put your hands up!” Kimball can be heard saying. He tells Rochon to take his hand off the gun twice as the other man continues across the road.
The footage shows Rochon starting to pull the weapon out of his pocket, with the barrel angled down, before Kimball fires his rifle and Rochon drops.
Kimball later told investigators “he remembered thinking, ‘I hope this guy takes his hand off the gun,’” the Office of Special Prosecutions letter states.
The officer, a member of the department’s SWAT Team, had been with APD for roughly eight years at the time.
Rochon’s sister, EJ Rochon, said her brother was “wrong doing what he did” but questioned the officer’s choice to fatally shoot him.
“Why do animals get the leisure of being tranquilized and removed from situations but with humans it is automatically shoot to kill?” she wrote in a message Monday.
Francis Rochon, who lived in Nome before coming to Anchorage, was the oldest brother in the family following the deaths of two other brothers, she said. He had two children and had signed up to get into mental health and addiction treatment within days of his death.
“He was really trying to do better,” EJ Rochon said.
Initial reports from police in February incorrectly indicated Rochon might have fired his weapon before he was shot.
A police department online statement said video footage showed “muzzle smoke appearing as the weapon was raised.” That information is no longer posted on the department’s website.
A police spokesman on Monday said the preliminary information was in error.
Detectives “indicated there was muzzle smoke” but further review indicated that was not the case and the department updated the online statement, spokesman Chris Barraza said in an email.
“As you can imagine, during incidents like this, our priority is to push out information as quickly and accurately as possible,” Barraza wrote. “In high-pressure situations, while our intent is always to be timely and accurate, occasional errors can occur. That said, we were able to quickly correct the information and update the public with the most accurate details available.”
Last year, the department took the unusual step of responding after a widely viewed video cast doubt on initial police descriptions of a May 2024 fatal shooting in West Anchorage.
Rochon’s shooting was the 11th involving Anchorage police since that May incident and the sixth fatal incident in that time period.
An additional officer-involved incident occurred on Feb. 21 when a police said officers shot and killed a man who had barricaded himself in a Midtown hotel room that contained several people, including children. Police earlier this month announced a delay in the footage release at the state’s request.
The Office of Special Prosecutions is charged with investigating every use of deadly force by law enforcement officers statewide. The agency has said no officer involved in a shooting has been determined to have committed a crime since reviews began in 2009.
This story has been republished with permission from the original at the Anchorage Daily News.