When Pennsylvania State Police were dispatched to a Washington County trailer park on Oct. 1, 2017, they were told a man appeared to be in a mental health crisis.
He had a knife and was out of control, according to the frantic 911 call summoning them.
But when police arrived at the Mark Avenue trailer park in Canton Township, Trooper Matthew Shaffer testified on Tuesday, the man was not running wild.
Instead, Anthony Gallo was standing at the bottom of a set of trailer steps. He still held a paring knife at his side. But he wasn’t yelling, slashing or lunging at anyone.
What happened next is the subject of a civil jury trial that began Tuesday in federal court in Pittsburgh.
Both Shaffer and Trooper Chad Weaver, with their AR-15 rifles trained on Gallo, began screaming commands at him, according to testimony.
“‘Drop the knife! State police. Drop the knife!’”
But Gallo didn’t. Within a few seconds, he ran up the trailer steps and entered a neighbor’s home.
Weaver immediately followed a few feet behind Gallo, with Shaffer directly behind him.
As they pursued Gallo, Shaffer said, he told the officers “‘Shoot me. Shoot me.’”
Within 25 seconds, Gallo was dead, shot 10 times by Weaver at close range with his assault rifle.
“It happened so fast,” Shaffer said.
Gallo’s father, Louis Gallo, who is the administrator of his son’s estate, sued Weaver and four state police supervisors in 2019, alleging excessive force and supervisory liability.
The defendants deny wrongdoing and said that Weaver had the right to use deadly force that day.
Louis Gallo is seeking money damages.
The case, before U.S. District Judge Robert J. Colville, is expected to last into next week.
A particularly bad day
Attorney Noah Geary, who represents the Gallo family, told the jury that Gallo, 34, had been involved in a head-on collision with a tractor trailer a few months earlier and suffered a head injury.
Though Gallo never before had problems, he began showing symptoms of mental illness, including paranoia, Geary said.
Gallo believed neighbors were spying on him through nail holes in the wall of his home. He believed incorrectly that he was in the Navy and leading troops.
That morning, Gallo’s grandmother, with whom he’d been staying in the mobile home park, texted her daughter to report he was having a particularly bad day.
When Betty Gray arrived a couple of hours later, her son was going in and out of neighbors’ trailers to tell them he needed to protect them, she said.
He kept taking knives out of the kitchen drawer, she said. Each time, Gray asked for him to give the knife back to her, and he did.
She didn’t know he still had the paring knife.
“I talked to him about finally getting some help, and he finally agreed,” Gray testified, her voice wracked by sobs. “I wanted him to still be here.
“He should be.”
Gray said she asked her sister to call 911. In the beginning of the call, there was screaming and shouting.
“My nephew’s been out of control,” his aunt, Harriet Southall, told the call-taker. “He has some kind of kitchen knife. He’s going in and out of people’s trailers.”
Because of Gallo’s behavior in the trailer park, a neighbor had threatened to shoot him with a gun, Southall said.
The dispatcher told the responding troopers that the man was armed with a knife — which they verified repeatedly as they rushed to the scene.
Southall was still on with 911 when Weaver and Shaffer arrived in their patrol cars. Both men immediately retrieved their AR-15 rifles and walked briskly to the trailer where Gallo was, their dashboard cameras showed.
As Weaver approached, Gray told the jury that she tried to stop him.
“I told him I was Anthony’s mother. ‘Let me explain what’s going on,’” she said.
He didn’t let her, she said.
“‘Get the [expletive] out of the way,’” Weaver responded, according to Gray’s testimony.
Gray said Shaffer asked if anyone else was in the trailer, and she told him no.
That’s when the troopers followed her son inside.
She thought they would go in and see he was having a mental health crisis and get him help.
“Let the ambulance take him away,” she told the jury, “not the coroner.”
Then she heard two volleys of shots.
“My son just got shot,” Gray told the jury. “And I heard it.”
No threatening motion
Shaffer, who spent more than two hours on the witness stand Tuesday afternoon, said that Gallo would not have been shot if he had complied with the troopers’ commands.
But, he also testified that the state police are trained to de-escalate situations like the one that day.
Because of how quickly the scene unfolded, Shaffer said, there was no time to try to speak calmly with Gallo.
“We had to make an opportunity to gain control of the situation,” he said. “The scene was chaotic.”
Geary, though, questioned whether it truly was. By the time troopers arrived, Shaffer confirmed, Gallo was standing still.
“Based on our knowledge on the way there, we were told he was out of control,” Shaffer said. “He was potentially a threat to other people, himself and us.”
Gallo refused to respond to the officers’ commands, according to Shaffer.
Then, when Gallo ran into the trailer, Shaffer said, the officers didn’t know if there was a way out or anyone inside that could be a hostage.
“We still need to gain compliance and control,” he said.
Geary asked Shaffer if he considered using his Taser or pepper spray that he had with him that day.
Shaffer said initially he did not. In the trailer, as Weaver started firing at Gallo, Shaffer testified he had just moved to take his Taser out of his holster. But it was too late.
The trooper said Gallo never made any threatening motion toward Weaver before the shots went off.
“I didn’t observe any type of movement toward Weaver,” Shaffer said. “We were very close.”
Geary asked Shaffer if Weaver shot Gallo for his failure to comply with their commands.
“Yes, to my knowledge,” he answered.
After the first volley of shots, Shaffer said, Gallo fell on a bed. He then started to rock from side to side as if he was trying to get up. Gallo still had the knife in his hand, so Weaver fired again.
“In the moment, I had no idea how many times Mr. Gallo was shot.”
‘He tried to stab me’
During his opening statement, Pennsylvania Deputy Attorney General Scott Bradley, who is representing the state police at trial, said Weaver shot Gallo in self-defense.
“‘He tried to stab me with a knife,’” he quoted Weaver as saying after the shooting. “‘Because he tried to stab me with his knife, that’s why I shot him.’”
When they were first being dispatched, Bradley told the jury, the troopers believed they were responding to a crime, not a mental health crisis. The situation was rapidly evolving.
“Every action they took that afternoon was to ensure Anthony Gallo did not harm anyone,” Bradley said.
Because Gallo did not follow their commands and refused to drop the knife, the troopers had a duty to act, he continued.
“Fearing for his life, believing he would be stabbed if he didn’t act, Trooper Weaver fired,” Bradley said.
But in his opening, Geary told jurors that there was no threat.
“The law only permits deadly force if the officer has a reasonable belief his life was in danger of death or serious bodily injury,” Geary said. “Everything Weaver did was unreasonable, excessive, reckless.”
Excessive force complaints
The Gallo family alleges that Weaver’s supervisors in the state police knew about the trooper’s history of excessive force allegations but did nothing about it.
Weaver received 36 reports of excessive use of force in his 10 years in the state police prior to Gallo’s shooting, Geary said.
Weaver had been placed seven times in the department’s Early Intervention Program, used to address concerns about anger and mental health, Geary said.
Nine days before Gallo was killed, Geary continued, Weaver had been dispatched to a report of a burglary in progress at a local physical therapy office.
When Weaver arrived that afternoon, two employees were trying to unlock the front door so that they could pick something up for an event, Geary said.
Weaver got out of his patrol car and pointed an AR-15 at the women, shouting, “‘Get the [expletive] down!’” Geary told the jury.
Sobbing, the women responded that they worked there.
He told them to shut up, Geary said.
The women got face-down on the ground. Ultimately, according to Geary, the matter was cleared up.
But that day, one of the women called state police to complain, Geary told the jury.
“‘This guy’s going to kill someone,’” he quoted the woman as saying. “‘He’s out of control.’”
“You know what his supervisor did?” Geary asked the jury. “Zero. Nothing.”
He told the jury that he would ask them to award his client “an extraordinary amount of money.”
“Money is the only thing you folks can do,” Geary said.
“It may sound crass,” he said. “Pennsylvania State Police need a wake-up call.”
Paula Reed Ward is a TribLive reporter covering federal and Allegheny County courts. She joined the Trib in 2019 after spending nearly 17 years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where she was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team. She is the author of “Death by Cyanide.” She can be reached at pward@triblive.com.
