A former Louisville, Ky., police officer was indicted on Monday on charges of second-degree manslaughter and reckless homicide in the fatal shooting last month of a naked, unarmed man.
The former officer, Nathan A. Stotts, resigned last week after the chief of the Louisville Metro Police Department, Paul Humphrey, said he would move to fire him for his actions in the death of the man, Martin Nitzken Jr., 27.
The grand jury declined to indict Mr. Stotts on a murder charge.Mr. Stotts is scheduled to be arraigned on Monday in Jefferson County Circuit Court. It is unclear if he has a lawyer, and as of Tuesday afternoon he was not listed as being in the custody of Louisville Metro Corrections.
Mr. Stotts was the first to respond to a 911 call by Mr. Nitzken’s girlfriend, who said Mr. Nitzken had attacked her and her two friends as they were watching a basketball game on television. His girlfriend told the police dispatcher that Mr. Nitzken was bipolar but had never been violent before. He had ripped a shutter from a neighboring house and injured a neighbor who had tried to calm him.
As Mr. Stotts got out of his car, he found Mr. Nitzken sitting naked in the street.
On Mr. Stotts’s body-worn camera video, which was released this month by the Louisville police, he approached Mr. Nitzken with his gun drawn. After Mr. Nitzken complied with orders to show his hands, he stood up and walked toward Mr. Stotts. The former officer told Mr. Nitzken to stop. When he did not stop, Mr. Stotts fired one shot. Mr. Nitzken fell to his knees and was pronounced dead at the scene.
At a news conference this month, Chief Humphrey faulted the officer’s conduct. “It is not what we teach and it does not meet our values.”
Mr. Stotts, who was hired in February 2024, had received seven commendations and had not been disciplined, the agency said. A representative for the union representing Louisville officers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Louisville’s police department has been under intense scrutiny in recent years, after the shooting death of Breonna Taylor in her apartment in 2020. The agency entered into a consent decree in 2024 after a Justice Department investigation found that the police had used excessive force, discriminated against Black people and failed to respond appropriately to people with mental health issues.
But the Trump administration pulled back on such oversight and scrapped the consent decree in 2025. The city pledged to carry on with reforms, though those efforts took a hit in March when the police fatally shot Katelyn Hall, a 28-year-old woman who had been threatening to kill herself.
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