Gilford police shot 17-year-old Mischa Fay less than a minute after entering his family’s home in Gilford on January 1, 2023.

“It happened so fast. It just happened so fast,” his mother said at the hospital where her son died.

The shooting was a legally justified use of force, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office announced Thursday.

Investigators released the findings and evidence collected over the past year that included body camera footage from the two responding officers, interviews with them and with Mischa Fay’s parents.

Gilford police Sgt. Douglas Wall, who shot Fay, “reasonably believed that deadly force was required to defend him and others around him from what he reasonably believed to be the use of deadly force by Mischa,” said Benjamin Agati, chief of the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office Homicide Unit.

Wall and Officer Nathan Ayotte were responding to a 911 call from Fay’s mother, Beth Pataski-Fay, who reported that her son was suffering from a “breakdown” and had become violent inside their Varney Point Road home. He was armed with a large kitchen knife, she said.

When the two officers arrived, she met them in the driveway. Her husband, Merrill Fay, was still inside the home, locked in an office. Beth Pataski-Fay told officers she feared for the safety and lives of her son, her husband and herself.

Wall and Ayotte promptly entered the home using flashlights, body camera footage shows, with Wall drawing a gun and Ayotte a taser. When they located Mischa Fay, he came briskly toward Wall holding the knife, with its roughly eight-inch blade pointed out and down. Wall fired his gun as Fay came within 8 feet of him, according to the report. In the same instant, Ayotte deployed his taser towards Fay from the side.

Agati said that, even with an extensive review of the footage, “it is almost impossible to discern,” which weapon was fired first.

The Taser, only partially striking Fay in the shoulder, did not administer an electric current, according to the report. Wall’s shot struck him in the upper chest near his collarbone, causing him to drop the knife and fall to the ground.

Wall and Ayotte attempted to stem Fay’s bleeding and performed CPR until emergency medical services arrived and brought him to the Laconia campus of Concord Hospital, according to the report. He was pronounced dead less than a half-hour later.

This was not the first time police had been to the home. The family had called Gilford Police six times in the preceding year, department records show, for assistance during Fay’s mental health emergencies. Ayotte and Wall had both separately been part of those responses in the past.

Fay had been experiencing acute struggles with his mental health since the beginning of 2021. After graduating from eighth grade that year, he was not well enough to return to school. The Fays told investigators they had received conflicting messages and no clear diagnosis from doctors of what mental or physical conditions their son was experiencing. They also had concerns about the medication regimen he had been prescribed, noting that his behavior would sometimes suddenly and drastically change, causing him to lash out. He was hospitalized long-term on multiple occasions.

“Each time, they painstakingly explained, how they thought he was getting better,” Agati said. “But then that something would seem to be off. His behaviors or his mannerisms had swung away, they said, from the young man that they had raised.”

Over the month and holiday season preceding Fay’s death, his family, “told by some medical professionals that his medications were too high or that he was overly sedated” had been working with doctors to decrease his dosages safely.

In the words of the Fay family, Agati said, “the young man that was there that night was not the same young man that they had raised prior to him getting sick.”

“They felt very strongly that his behavior that day was due to whatever medical or mental health issues that he was facing and the medications that he was on,” Agati added.

An autopsy and toxicology report determined that the gunshot wound was the cause of death and that the amount of the medications in his system, which included Gabapentin, Diazepam and Citalopram, was “within or below therapeutic levels,” Agati said. “However, no opinion could be had on what effect this combination of medications would have had on his on his person.”

The attorney general’s review was strictly on the legality of the officers’ actions.

“A law enforcement officer is justified in using deadly force only when he reasonably believes such force is necessary to defend himself or a third person from what he reasonably believes is the imminent use of deadly force,” according to state law.

When Wall fired his gun, Agati said, he had backed up into a doorway. Fay’s mother, who had followed officers into the home, stood behind him. Fay had not responded to Wall and Ayotte’s repeated instructions that he stop.

“There was no option for them to advance. There was no option for them to retreat when Mischa came at them. And there was no response from Mischa despite their calls for him to put his hands up,” Agati said. This interaction “constituted an imminent threat of deadly force upon himself and to Mrs. Fay behind him.”

Therefore, he said, no charges would be brought in relation to Fay’s death.

After a brief leave, Wall and Ayotte returned to regular police duty on February 3, 2023. An internal investigation cleared them of any wrongdoing by Gilford’s department standards.

Whether and for how long those officers go on leave after a lethal use of force while the state investigates is a decision made by individual departments, Agati said.

The Attorney General’s office investigates every lethal use of force by police in New Hampshire to determine whether it was legally justified. Its scope, Agati and Attorney General John Formella emphasized, does not extend beyond that determination.

The investigation is “limited to a review and analysis of whether the officers complied with the law,” Formella said.

“Tactically, I will defer to other individuals and other agencies to make decisions [about] if something else could have been done,” Agati said. “But it’s not necessarily this unit’s job to do that.”