Former Louisville police officer charged with manslaughter in fatal shooting of naked man

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — A former Louisville police officer who resigned last week was charged by a grand jury Monday with manslaughter for fatally shooting a naked man while responding to an alleged assault.

The grand jury in Louisville also indicted Nathan A. Stotts on a charge of reckless homicide for the May 30 fatal shooting of 27-year-old Martin Nitzken Jr.

Stotts encountered Nitzken after being called to a neighborhood on a report that three women had been assaulted, Louisville police said. Officers were told the suspect had no clothes on and was running down the street.

On Stotts’ body camera footage released by Louisville police, the officer can be seen with his gun drawn walking toward a nude man sitting in the street. The man gets up and starts moving toward Stotts, who orders him to stop. The man continues to advance and the officer fires one shot. The man drops to his knees and doesn’t move as the video ends.

Nitzken was pronounced dead at the scene.

Police Chief Paul Humphrey said at a news conference earlier this month that Nitzken was “naked, stumbling and unarmed.”

“Sometimes we have to make decisions to take people’s lives, and this was not one of them,” Humphrey said. He said he would have rather seen the officer use nonlethal force as the victim advanced toward him.

Humphrey signaled that he would fire Stotts after the body camera footage was released earlier this month, but Stotts resigned. He joined the force in 2024.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Gerina Whethers said in a media release Monday that the grand jury declined to charge Stotts with murder.

The second-degree manslaughter charge carries a maximum prison sentence of five to 10 years and the reckless homicide charge has a maximum penalty of one to five years in prison.

An attorney for Stotts could not be located in court records Monday. Louisville police said Monday in a statement that they “remain committed to transparency, accountability, and cooperation with all reviewing agencies.”

“Because this matter is the focus of criminal and internal investigations, it is inappropriate to comment further,” the statement said.

Louisville’s police department has worked to repair its image with the public in recent years after the controversies that followed the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor in her apartment in 2020.

Earlier this year, a federal judge agreed to dismiss all charges against two former Louisville officers who helped craft the warrant that was used to enter Taylor’s home before she was shot.