He chose to talk rather than shoot — and was fired

West Virginia city settles with a former police officer who thought he could calm an armed man.

When West Virginia Police Officer Stephen Mader responded to a domestic disturbance call at the Weirton home of Ronald Williams in May 2016, he found Williams standing distraught in his driveway.

Williams, 23, gripped a handgun and pleaded with the officer to open fire on him.

“Just shoot me, just shoot me,” Williams told Mader, according to a police report.

Mader, a Marine who served in Afghanistan, paused. He urged Williams to put the gun down, but Williams did not.

The officer, nevertheless, did not consider deadly force necessary, seeing Williams as a danger only to himself.

Within minutes, two other police officers arrived. Williams raised his gun and one of the officers — not Mader — fired four times.

Williams was fatally struck in the head.

The shooting occurred amid a national debate about deadly use of force by police officers and a number of cases involving officers fatally shooting black men. Williams was black.

Mader, who had been a member of the Weirton Police Department for less than a year when the Williams shooting happened, was placed on probation and eventually fired.

The officer who shot Williams was not disciplined.

Months later, Mader filed a lawsuit in federal court against the city, saying he lost his job for declining to discharge his weapon during the encounter with Williams.

On Monday, Mader’s lawyers announced he had reached a settlement with the city in the wrongful-termination lawsuit. Under the terms of the settlement, Weirton, near the Pennsylvania border about 35 miles west of Pittsburgh, agreed to pay the former officer $175,000.

“No police officer should ever lose their job … for choosing to talk to, rather than shoot, a fellow citizen,” said Timothy O’Brien, who represented Mader along with the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia. “His decision to attempt to de-escalate the situation should have been praised, not punished. Simply put, no police officer should ever feel forced to take a life unnecessarily to save his career.”

At the time of his firing, officials from Weirton said Mader’s actions in his encounter with Williams, along with a pair of incidents in which he allegedly searched vehicles without a warrant, led to his dismissal.

Weirton officials did not respond to a request for comment about the settlement.

Mader, who since being fired from the Weirton Police Department has worked as a truck driver, said he was relieved that the case was over.

“At the end of the day, I’m happy to put this chapter of my life to bed,” he said in a statement through his attorneys. “My hope is that no other person on either end of a police call has to go through this again.”