As he so often did, Ronald Troyke began his day swiping through YouTube, fixated on videos from the same genre: police officers caught doing something wrong.<\/p>\n
Mr. Troyke, 59, watched the clips alone, surrounded by his sparse belongings \u2014 a folded paper about concealed firearms, greeting cards from a sister worried about his mental health, a tote bin that was labeled \u201cgun stuff.\u201d At 9:30 a.m. that morning in June 2021, he watched a last video about a police officer in Ohio who had driven over a man lying in the street. He could bear it no longer.<\/p>\n
On the wall of his apartment bedroom in Arvada, Colo., he taped a handwritten message \u2014 some words scribbled in ALL CAPS, others underlined \u2014 raging about police corruption and a lack of accountability. \u201cThe people have had enough,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
He folded another note into his wallet that included a vow: \u201cToday I will kill as many Arvada officers as I possibly can.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jumping into his Ford pickup, which was stocked with a handgun, a semiautomatic shotgun, an AR-15-style rifle and a stack of high-capacity magazines, Mr. Troyke drove a mile to Olde Town Square. It was a gathering place for the community, home to a children\u2019s spray park and, on weekends, a farmer\u2019s market. Mr. Troyke also knew it was a place where police officers patrolled; he had confronted three of them there just a couple of weeks before.<\/p>\n
For more than an hour, he surveyed the area from his truck, sipping ice water from a stainless steel tumbler. Then he saw Officer Gordon Beesley come into view, on foot, responding to a call about a suspicious person.<\/p>\n
Mr. Beesley did not normally work the streets. He was on summer break from his work as a resource officer at a local middle school, where he was known as the guitar-playing cop who befriended kids on the fringes, leaving home early many mornings to help a special-needs student bike to school. That summer day, while Mr. Troyke eyed him, Mr. Beesley was counting down the minutes to the end of his shift, when he could join his family to celebrate his son\u2019s 14th birthday.<\/p>\n
As Mr. Beesley strolled down an alleyway toward the square, Mr. Troyke steered into a nearby parking spot, flung open the door of his truck, jogged toward Mr. Beesley and, without a second\u2019s hesitation, opened fire. The lanky officer, his gun holstered, was struck in the head and torso. He collapsed face first onto the bricks \u2014 the first member of the Arvada department ever to be fatally shot in the line of duty.<\/p>\n
More gunshots ricocheted off the facades of buildings around the square. Diners at neighboring restaurants dove under tables. Shoppers ran. Three police officers who had been eating lunch in an inconspicuous office nearby rushed to a window to see Mr. Troyke in a black sweatshirt, carrying a long gun. \u201cThere\u2019s an active shooter,\u201d one of the officers said. They drew their own firearms.<\/p>\n
Across the street from the town square, Johnny Hurley was shopping in a military surplus store when he heard the shots. He peered out the window and pointed. \u201cThere\u2019s a guy with a gun,\u201d he told the other patrons.<\/p>\n
As many of them scattered for refuge, Mr. Hurley crept out the store\u2019s front door, reached to his hip and pulled out his own handgun.<\/p>\n
A history of mass violence<\/p>\n
Working in a bedroom community known for its arts scene, craft breweries and a small-town charm that some locals liken to Mayberry, the officers in Arvada had unusual expertise in active shooters.<\/p>\n
A.J. DeAndrea, the deputy chief who led the department\u2019s training, had been a SWAT officer who responded at Columbine High School, just down the road from Arvada, when 13 students<\/a> and a teacher were killed there in 1999<\/a>.<\/p>\n Seven years after Columbine, he was at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colo., when a gunman took students hostage<\/a>, killing one just a few feet away from Mr. DeAndrea. The following year, he was one of the first officers to respond to a mass shooting at a youth missionary center<\/a> in Arvada. He helped carry two dying victims away from the scene.<\/p>\n Each new experience had convinced Mr. DeAndrea of the need to train officers in how to better respond to what was becoming a distressing new norm. With his sonorous voice sometimes giving way to earnest whispers, he confided the failures of the response at Columbine and the lessons since learned, preaching the urgent need for patrol officers to confront such killers if they hoped to avert mass bloodshed.<\/p>\n He traveled the nation, training officers in all 50 states. Organizations overseas sought his expertise. The Department of Education recognized him as an expert on active shooters. He earned six medals of valor.<\/p>\n That experience was a big asset in Arvada, his hometown, a community of 125,000 that celebrated its low crime rates. He championed the transformation of an old elementary school into a training center where officers could roam hallways in active shooter simulations, learning when to open fire and how a gun performs when shooting through glass. The mass shootings were not going away, he said, so he wanted to help law enforcement officers learn from their mistakes.<\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s swallow our pride, look at what we did wrong, look at what we did good, and let\u2019s find and create systems, models, ways to deal with this better,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In a state that requires officers to undergo 24 hours of annual training, Arvada officers began receiving three times that much, including sessions on active shooters and how to stop a gunman when an officer is alone. In its literature for potential recruits, the department expressed pride: \u201cOur overall training programs are second to none.\u201d<\/p>\n Intense training was needed to help officers stay in command during high-stress situations, Mr. DeAndrea would say. Without it, he noted, an officer\u2019s forebrain, the part that helps process complex decisions, might shut down in favor of fight-or-flight instincts.<\/p>\n Persistent training, he told his officers, could help an officer address confusing situations without panic: Is lethal force justified? Can I make the shot? Is the person I\u2019m looking at the one committing the bloodshed?<\/p>\n 153 rounds<\/p>\n With one officer down in the square, Mr. Troyke continued shooting, turning his gun on a line of empty police vehicles nearby and shattering their windows. He then hurried back to his vehicle and pulled out an AR-15.<\/p>\n He wore ballistic armor that covered his chest and back. A Glock handgun and an extra magazine were strapped to his right hip, and on his left, he had a bandoleer with three additional 30-round magazines. In total, he carried 153 rounds of ammunition.<\/p>\n The three officers who had been having lunch continued to watch from inside the office, mindful that Mr. Troyke\u2019s rifle could easily pierce the door they were standing behind.<\/p>\n Spying a man in a dark shirt and brimmed hat carrying a rifle with its barrel pointed skyward, one of the officers warned the others. \u201cHe\u2019s coming back, he\u2019s coming back,\u201d he said, according to law enforcement investigative records. But a veil of trees, cars and a dumpster obscured their view from the window, and the man disappeared from their sight.<\/p>\n As two of the officers moved to different parts of the building, Officer Kraig Brownlow stayed near the window, but far enough away to avoid being spotted. In his six years at the department, Mr. Brownlow had done about 40 hours of active shooter training. He knew he was outgunned.<\/p>\n By then, Mr. Hurley had burst out the front of the military surplus store and into the town square. He crouched low to the ground, his gun pointing downward. He paused and then rushed past the building where the officers were staged and ducked behind a brick wall that gave him cover.<\/p>\n He peeked his head out, trying to see where the gunman was, locking eyes with another frightened man hiding amid cars in the alley, then ducked back. Then he looked a second time. Mr. Troyke was nearing the town square again.<\/p>\n Mr. Hurley stepped out from behind the wall. He raised his handgun in a shooting stance and took aim at Mr. Troyke.<\/p>\n A coded message<\/p>\n Three years before the town square shooting, in 2018, a message from Mr. DeAndrea\u2019s daughter Madalena had arrived on his phone just after midnight: \u201cI love you guys.\u201d He recognized immediately that a disaster was unfolding.<\/p>\n The words echoed the last message of the shooting victim at Platte Canyon High School whom Mr. DeAndrea had not been able to save. The DeAndrea family now treated those words as a code that meant they were in dire need of help.<\/p>\n His daughter was alerting him that a gunman was on a killing spree at a bar where she had been line dancing with friends a 2 \u00bd-hour flight away in Thousand Oaks, Calif., near where she was working for a nonprofit. She was now huddled in the attic.<\/p>\n Helpless to do anything else, Mr. DeAndrea opened an online police scanner, began booking a flight to Los Angeles and called police dispatch in Thousand Oaks to share information about his daughter\u2019s location in the attic. Madalena survived, but 12 others did not \u2014 one of the worst mass shootings in California history.<\/p>\n The victims<\/a> included college students, a Marine Corps veteran and a Navy veteran who had previously survived the nation\u2019s deadliest mass shooting \u2014 the 2017 massacre at a music festival in Las Vegas. Also among the dead was a sheriff\u2019s deputy who had entered the building to confront the gunman.<\/p>\n To Mr. DeAndrea, his daughter\u2019s training had taught her to flee at the right moment. But in the weeks after the shooting, she came to him to say that she also wanted to be able to carry a concealed weapon. As he guided her into training, he was proud that she was empowering herself. On the other hand, he could not help but feel apprehension at the thought that his daughter might one day need to shoot somebody.<\/p>\n He was also continuing to think about how law enforcement officers should respond.<\/p>\n One of the lessons of the Thousand Oaks shooting was the extreme danger officers face rushing into a scene. Mr. DeAndrea had started teaching officers that slowing their pace just a bit could allow them to better assess the scene and make better decisions.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re deploying, and somebody else is deploying: link up,\u201d Mr. DeAndrea was telling his officers. \u201cLet\u2019s work in tandem. Let\u2019s slow it down a half step. Let\u2019s be smart.\u201d<\/p>\n The stakes were reinforced once again only a few months before Mr. Troyke\u2019s attack in the town square, when Arvada had dealt with yet another mass shooting: A gunman from the city traveled to a grocery store in neighboring Boulder and killed 10 people. An officer who was among the first inside the building was one of those killed.<\/p>\n A Simmering Distrust<\/p>\n Long before his resentment of law enforcement had begun to fester, Mr. Troyke had been raised in Illinois, growing up with a plan to one day escape the Midwest humidity. He made his way west in his 20s and built a new life in the mountains of Colorado.<\/p>\n He hauled mail on the roads that connected resort towns like Vail and Aspen. After his brother moved to the area, they would ride ATVs out to remote hillsides and shoot at rocks for target practice.<\/p>\n Initially, Mr. Troyke held the authorities in high regard, even after some dust-ups with the law in the 1990s \u2014 he was arrested for D.U.I. after an officer saw his motorcycle drift toward oncoming lanes, then he and a girlfriend were both charged with assault after a domestic fight. But in more recent years, Mr. Troyke began developing a simmering distrust of law enforcement, consumed with stories of officer misconduct. He would steer conversations to the subject, his brother later told investigators, with rants so vehement that his brother at times paused to warn him: \u201cYou\u2019re the reason why we got this dumb-ass gun control.\u201d<\/p>\n He was outraged by the killing of Elijah McClain<\/a>, who had been unarmed and walking home from a convenience store in Aurora, outside of Denver, when officers confronted him.<\/p>\n In early June 2021, two weeks before the town square shooting, he began recording a group of Arvada officers who were questioning a man near the library, telling a bystander nearby: \u201cYou got to film these sociopaths.\u201d<\/p>\n The video showed what was initially a calm scene. But then Mr. Troyke began loudly berating them. Officer Brownlow, one of the officers there, took out his own phone to record.<\/p>\n \u201cYou guys are terrible people, man,\u201d Mr. Troyke could be heard saying. \u201cNot all of youse are, but there\u2019s too many that are no good, so we have to assume that all of youse are bad.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Hurley, the man who would later emerge to take aim at Mr. Troyke, had his own growing convictions about law enforcement. Long shaped by a distrust of authority, he had joined Indigenous protests against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline and handed out DVDs at the mall that questioned the facts of the Sept. 11 attacks. He celebrated the rights of individuals over the power of government, confronting security personnel at the airport, protesting a speech by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and fighting against mask mandates during the coronavirus pandemic.<\/p>\n