At 4:42 pm on December 29, 2024, Spokane Police Department (SPD) officers stationed themselves on a hill that gave them a clear view of Joshua Musselman through the open front door of his third-floor apartment.
They were there because a neighbor complained Musselman had been shooting a rifle into that same hill, just north of the Northcliff Terrace apartment complex, earlier in the day.
As they watched him, Musselman, 29, walked onto the landing to “roll a joint,” according to a newly-released investigation of the killing. Minutes later, at 4:46 pm, the police opened fire from the hill, and Musselman was dying in a hallway just inside the door.
The investigative report from the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office says Musselman was not armed when the police arrived, despite the neighbor’s complaint.
The police were about 100 feet away from Musselman: “a little too far for verbal” commands, SPD Officer Garth Craigen, one of the men on the hill that day, said, according to the report’s narrative of body camera footage. Craigen’s story is contained in the report, which was issued by the Sheriff’s office as part of a mechanism called the “Spokane Independent Investigative Response Team” (SIIR). It’s a local group of law enforcement agencies set up so when officers in one agency kill someone, a different agency in the group steps in to investigate to avoid conflicts of interest.
The report said a communications team in the apartment complex parking area had not yet established contact with Musselman when the officers took their position on the hill. It describes no attempt by police to “deescalate,” or make the situation less likely to result in physical violence. The officers tried to stay out of Musselman’s view, the report says.
The officers — Craigen, Will Mitchell, Matthew Stewart, Daniel Valencia — said Musselman’s rifle was leaning against the wall near his apartment door when they arrived. They say in the report that Musselman saw them and picked the weapon up, but the sheriff’s investigators could not corroborate this.
“I am unable to determine if the subject seen moving [at the time Musselman walked outside] is holding anything in his hands,” wrote detective Marc Melville, who used the officers’ body camera footage to author much of the SIIR report.
After the shooting, the officers cleared neighboring apartments and performed CPR on Musselman. At 5:17, medics pronounced Musselman dead, according to the documents, and Spokane County Medical Examiner Veena Singh ruled his killing a homicide.
Previous police run-ins lead to killing
It was not the first time in the prior month — or even that day — that Musselman had run-ins with the police. The sheriff’s report describes a series of incidents indicating that Musselman’s mental health was deteriorating.
Earlier in the afternoon, his downstairs neighbor had called police because Musselman was “screaming at people walking through the parking lot,” she told RANGE in March.
Mitchell, one of the officers posted on the hill that day, had responded to that earlier call but “chose to engage in deescalation tactics,” the report said, meaning he’d left the earlier scene without confronting Musselman.
The four officers who shot Musselman had fired a total of 15 .223 rounds from AR-15 patrol rifles at Musselman, a deadly caliber known for its ability to penetrate more than one target. They came in rapid succession just before Valencia called, “Hold fire,” the report says.
“It should also be noted that when the first shot rings out, other shots are heard almost simultaneously,” Melville’s report says.
The rifle Musselman had turned out to be a Gamo airsoft rifle, a type of BB gun, which can cause harm and in some cases death, but is generally not considered to be lethal. According to the report, the rifle was found leaning neatly against the railing before the officers entered the apartment to render first aid.
Spokane County Sheriff spokesperson Mark Gregory declined to comment on the SIIR report because, he said, once it’s sent to the prosecutor, the sheriff’s office no longer has access to it.
Jim Leighty, a police accountability activist and the person who obtained the report this story is based on, said the officers did several things wrong during the response.
“Instead of using less-than-lethal or perhaps using something that would be less likely to penetrate a wall, all of them chose to go with an AR 15 platform with .223 rounds,” Leighty said in an interview. The bullets have “jacketed tips that will, when they’re shot, go through a person. They’ll penetrate a wall.”
At least three of the rounds went through the exterior of Musselman’s apartment, through the opposite wall and into the next door apartment of Alexis Stojsic, who is the mother of a toddler. Months later, the bullet holes are patched up but still visible near a mirror mounted on the east wall. Before the shooting, Stojsic said her son liked to stand on the couch and look at himself in the mirror, placing himself exactly in the bullets’ path.
“The bottom one lines right up with the head,” she told RANGE, referring to the bullet holes. “It gives me goosebumps.”
Her son was not home when the shooting happened, but Stojsic said she has rearranged her furniture to make him safer from bullets.
A friend who was in Stosjsic’s apartment during the shooting reported hearing a bullet whizz by his ears, she said.
“They didn’t even slow down and take into consideration they were shooting into an occupied apartment building with rounds that they knew could go through walls and kill people in other apartments,” Leighty said.
Leighty, the police accountability activist, said the officers who returned to the complex did not follow state-mandated training for police, which requires them to understand the situation, establish communication with suspects and give them time to understand and follow commands when safe and feasible.
Musselman “didn’t know they were out there,” Leighty said.
A deadly history
Three of the four officers who shot Musselman have shot at civilians before.
Craigen fired at but missed Branden Dozier in the Logan neighborhood in May 2023. Valencia was among a group of seven officers who in 2022 shot Israel Garcia, who they said shot at them. Garcia survived. In April 2024, Mitchell was one of three officers who shot a person who had reportedly been in a dispute with a tow truck driver. That person also survived.
Then-Spokane County Prosecuting Attorney Larry Haskell declined to prosecute any of these cases, saying the shootings were justified. This is the same stance Haskell took every time police killed a civilian during his decade-long tenure, which ended last week.
As RANGE and other publications have reported, the police watchdog Mapping Police Violence (MPV) says SPD ranks fourth in the nation for civilian killings. Last year, that ranking was third, and SPD has been among the 10 most deadly departments per capita since MVP was founded in 2013.
Musselman’s killing was the sixth SPD caused in 2024 and the first that took place under the tenure of Police Chief Kevin Hall, who has signalled he’s open to police accountability reforms.
The Sheriff sent the SIIR report on the Musselman killing to Haskell in April. Acting prosecutor Preston McCollam told RANGE he could not confirm whether his office had received the document and didn’t know how long it would take to determine whether he would prosecute the involved officers.
After Musselman’s killing, his sister retained the high-profile lawyer Rondi Thorp, who has won large settlements from the City of Spokane on behalf of families of police shooting victims, including a $4 million settlement with Debbie Novak in 2022 after police killed her son David in 2019. Thorp also represented the family of Robert Bradley, who was killed in 2022 by Spokane police. Just this month, the city agreed to a $3.7 million settlement with Bradley’s family.
In all those killings, Haskel had found the officers justified.
The officers who killed Musselman are currently on full-duty status, SPD spokesperson Daniel Strassenberg told RANGE. Strassenberg declined to answer specific questions about the killing because SPD is conducting its own probe into the case.
