Fort Collins Police release bodycam footage of Clayton Pierce after fatal shooting at cemetery

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Fort Collins Police released video Wednesday of a deadly shooting from July, where an officer was also shot and wounded.

The video was released after the Larimer County District Attorney's Office said that no officers would be charged in connection with the shooting, which resulted in the death of 42-year-old Clayton Pierce.

Around noon, July 21, officers were dispatched to a single-vehicle rollover crash in the area of West Mountain and South Bryan avenues.

While on the phone with 911, a witness reported that when she checked on the driver, she saw he had a large gun. She said she lived nearby but was no longer on scene due to safety concerns.

She said in her call that she did not see him pointing the gun at anyone.

When officers arrived, they noticed there was no one in the crashed vehicle but spotted a man in a grassy median with a rifle slung across his chest, the decision letter says.

A short time later, the officers said they saw the man point the gun toward them. They took cover behind their vehicle. One of the officers said he believed the man was going to shoot him or the other officer and fired a single shot.

After that shot, multiple shots were fired by the man, and one of the officers was struck in his right arm, the district attorney's letter says. Body camera footage indicates the man fired his rifle seven times.

The injured officer noticed he started losing feeling in his right arm and said it "stopped working," according to the district attorney's decision letter. He said blood was dripping down his arm.

Based on evidence at the scene, the man was about 209 feet away from the officer when he shot him, the DA's letter says.

When other officers arrived on scene, the injured officer was taken away for treatment.

The other officers continued to engage with the man, who had moved into Grandview Cemetery. The man was shot in the cemetery after he raised the gun at officers, the DA's letter says. Two officers discharged their weapons. One fired four times and the other fired once, the letter says.

Pierce died as a result of the shooting. If Pierce had survived the shooting, prosecutors said in their letter, he would faced charges including two counts of attempted murder and DUI.

He was also a suspect in a 2019 homicide. In 2019, Fort Collins Police received a call for service saying there was a man, 63-year-old Joseph "Sonny" Brigman, who was lying unresponsive in his home. The Larimer County Coroner's Office determined that he had died from blood loss caused by a gunshot wound and ruled his death a homicide. Police said detectives exhausted all of their leads at the time and could not establish probable cause for criminal charges.

Detectives revisited the case in 2023 in hopes of generating new leads and further examining evidence. They determined that there was enough evidence to prove Pierce was responsible for Brigman's death.