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Police account of North Andover shooting contradicts injured officer’s version
After she was shot by a colleague, Kelsey Fitzsimmons said she never pointed her gun at the fellow officer. A new police report tells a different story.
After North Andover Police Officer Kelsey Fitzsimmons was shot by a colleague in an “armed confrontation” in June, she released a statement saying that she was attempting to take her own life and that she never pointed a weapon at a fellow officer.
But a police report filed in court recently paints a different picture of the incident, one where Fitzsimmons tried to shoot the other officer first.
Fitzsimmons survived the encounter and was arraigned in Lawrence District Court last week on one charge of assault to murder and two charges of assault with a deadly weapon. She pleaded not guilty to all the charges and was ordered held without bail after being deemed dangerous, according to court records. She has been suspended by the state’s police watchdog.
What the police report says
State Police Sgt. David Strong, who responded to the initial scene after the shooting, interviewed multiple police officers and compiled a report that was filed in court last week. The NAPD does not use body cameras.
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Fitzsimmons, a 28-year-old officer who joined the North Andover Police Department last year, was on leave at the time of the shooting. She and her fiancé had a baby earlier in the spring, and she says that postpartum depression set in soon afterward. According to her fiancé, Fitzsimmons’s behavior became more concerning and caused him to fear that she could be a danger to him, their child, and herself.
So he filed an abuse prevention order, alleging that Fitzsimmons assaulted him multiple times in the past. Three NAPD officers arrived at a home on Phillips Brook Road on the evening of June 30 to serve Fitzsimmons with the restraining order. The order stipulated that all firearms be removed from the property.
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The court ordered that Fitzsimmons’s fiancé be awarded custody of the young child. When they arrived at the home, the responding officers told Fitzsimmons this and called her fiancé to come gather his belongings and take the child.
Fitzsimmons began to gather items for the baby from around the house. Two officers escorted her around the first floor and then up to the second. Fitzsimmons’s fiancé and her mother arrived at the house during this time, according to the report. When Fitzsimmons learned that her fiancé was at the house, she asked an officer to keep him away from her. That officer went downstairs, leaving only Fitzsimmons and one other officer on the second floor.
Fitzsimmons began packing books and clothing for her child, then kneeled on the ground of a bedroom to fold clothing items. The NAPD officer stood in a doorway watching. Fitzsimmons then suddenly lunged toward an area behind an open door and reappeared pointing a firearm directly at the officer, according to the report.
She pulled the trigger, but the gun did not fire, the report says. Fitzsimmons began to stand up as the officer pulled out his own weapon. She allegedly started to load another round in her gun. The officer told her to drop the gun. At this point, he believed that she was trying to kill him, according to the report.
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The officer fired one round as Fitzsimmons tried to load the gun, the report says. He fired a second shot, striking Fitzsimmons. The responding officers then administered aid to Fitzsimmons and removed the magazine from the gun she was using. A round of ammunition was inside. When authorities searched the house afterward, they seized four semi-automatic weapons, according to the report.
Downstairs, one officer reportedly heard his colleague yell, “Kelsey don’t do it, Kelsey don’t do it,” followed by the sound of two gunshots. The other officer that was in the house at the time reported hearing a scream of “Kelsey” followed by the gunshots, according to the report.
Fitzsimmons’s side
Fitzsimmons’s attorney, Timothy Bradl, did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
In the wake of the shooting, he vowed to fight the charges against Fitzsimmons and decried the “botched response” of the NAPD that led to the violent incident. Bradl said that inadequate training could be partially to blame and promised to obtain records from the department about training procedures and other similar incidents.
“We will demand full transparency, and follow every lead where it takes us. We will call out every contradiction and expose every lie,” he said at the time.
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Bradl said the restraining order against Fitzsimmons was “obtained by surprise, in an ex parte fashion.” He asserted that a probate court affidavit “full of hearsay and self-serving allegations” was “deliberately and widely leaked” in order to denigrate Fitzsimmons’s reputation.
That affidavit was filed by Fitzsimmons’s fiancé in Essex County Probate and Family Court in order to obtain the restraining order. A copy was provided to Boston.com by the court.
In court filings, Fitzsimmons’s lawyers said that she was found to not be dangerous by an expert clinician and was cleared to return to work as an NAPD officer before the shooting. She was scheduled to begin working again on July 4.
In mid-July, Fitzsimmons herself released a lengthy statement detailing the interaction from her point of view. After being told that her son would be taken away and that her career as a police officer was over, she grew determined to take her own life, she said.
“In that horrible moment, I didn’t want to live after my whole world was turned upside down, in the matter of a 10 second conversation due to someone alleging horrible, untrue things,” she wrote.
Fitzsimmons states clearly that she never pointed her weapon at another officer. She describes how she viewed the officer that eventually shot her as a friend. Together, they responded to a murder-suicide involving a mother and her infant child last year. Fitzsimmons described being devastated by this. She was 20 weeks pregnant at the time and said that the crime scene was a “catalyst” for her mental health complications.
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“As a police officer myself, I would never even think to intentionally hurt another police officer. I see everyone in uniform as my brothers and sisters. I especially would never hurt my friend. My friend who has a loving wife and children. I just would NEVER. My firearm was NEVER pointed in any direction other than my temple,” she wrote in the statement.
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