Hartford Police confirm that the officer who fatally shot 55-year-old Steven Jones during a mental health crisis in February was 23 years old and had been out of the academy for less than a year at the time of the incident. Officer Joseph Magnano graduated from the academy on March 28, 2025, and was hired on Oct. 14, 2024.
Mike Lawlor, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven who helped shape Connecticut policing standards, said experience can matter in high-pressure situations.
“If you're dealing with a situation for the very first time, you're going to react. Sometimes it takes experience and prior encounters of this type to get a sense of what's the best way to handle it,” Lawlor said.
Hartford Police Union President Sgt. James Rutkauski said in an interview with Connecticut Public’s “All Things Considered” that Magnano acted appropriately.
“He did what he was trained to do in a lethal situation,” Sgt. Rutkauski said.
Magnano’s actions at the scene
After viewing footage of the incident, Lawlor noted that Magnano’s approach differed sharply from the other three officers already on the scene.
“I think what you saw in that video is the first three officers who were on the scene trying to maintain eye contact with this individual, trying to engage him in a conversation, keeping what for them is a safe distance,” Lawlor said. “This all changes when the fourth police officer arrives suddenly on the scene, the one who ultimately does the shooting.”
In the video, approximately 32 seconds elapse between the time Officer Magnano exits his patrol car and the time he fires the first shot at Steven Jones, who at the time was advancing towards Magnano with knife in hand by his right hip.
Lawlor said Magnano’s rapid engagement with Jones highlights the challenges that can arise when a relatively inexperienced officer confronts a volatile scenario alone.
Hartford Police Union President Sgt.Rutkauski disputed the characterization that the situation could have been handled differently.
“What’s missing when you say that is all of those other officers had their guns out. They all realized that it was a lethal encounter,” Rutkauski said. “It wasn't a less than lethal situation, it was a lethal situation.”
Heightened potential for consequences
Hartford Police confirm the shooting occurred while Officer Magnano was still in his one-year probationary period, a time when officers typically have fewer protections if they are disciplined or dismissed.
Lawlor says officers still within their first year generally have limited rights to appeal disciplinary actions. In addition, Connecticut has strengthened police accountability since the 2020 George Floyd killing, including creating a civilian review structure with its own inspector general in Hartford. Lawlor says these changes, combined with statewide reforms, have expanded circumstances under which officers can be decertified.
“So there's a lot of changes taking place,” Lawlor said, “and a lot of it fueled by videos of police encounters.”
Rutkauski rejected the idea that Magnano’s actions with Mr. Jones put him in any jeopardy of testing his probationary status.
“The probationary period comes in the context when there is a performance issue,” Rutkauski said. “There isn't a performance issue here.”
Training for mental health crisis encounters
Lawlor said officers are trained to assess whether a situation involves a mental health crisis and determine the level of threat to themselves, other officers or civilians nearby.
“There is training for officers in the academy about dealing with persons with mental illness,” Lawlor said.
He said additional training, including Crisis-Intervention-Team (C.I.T.) programs, can help officers better manage these encounters, though not every officer receives that training. Both Lawlor and Rutkauski agreed staffing constraints can make it difficult to pull officers off the street for multi-day sessions.
“It’s about 40 hours of training,” Rutkauski said.
Hartford officers do receive both crisis intervention and de-escalation training, according to Rutkauski, but he argued those approaches depend on cooperation from the person in crisis. And in this instance, he said Mr. Jones did not co-operate.
“So de-escalation is not applicable, and the situation was again forced into that corner as a lethal encounter,” Rutkauski said.
He added that even trained mental health professionals would not have been able to safely intervene under those conditions.
“That wasn’t a situation for us to call a mental health specialist,” Rutkauski said. “They’re not going to go on scene because we can’t keep them safe. And they would not have engaged in that situation. They would have literally called the police department to respond.”
That mirrors the fatal shooting of Everard Walker in Hartford Mental health workers responded first but called police after the situation escalated to the point they felt threatened.
Why officers shoot to kill
Lawlor explained that the law requires officers to act on reasonable perceptions of danger, and the state inspector general evaluates whether those perceptions meet statutory standards in fatal incidents.
Connecticut law allows deadly force only when officers reasonably believe they are at imminent risk of death or serious bodily injury. Training emphasizes aiming for center mass to neutralize a threat efficiently.
“Police officers, and anyone else, are only allowed to use deadly force in self-defense if-and only if-they reasonably believe that they are about to be killed or receive serious bodily injury,” Lawlor said. “So if you really think you're about to be killed, you're not shooting anybody in the leg.”
Rutkauski said the union will continue to publicly defend the officer’s actions while acknowledging the pain of Mr. Jones’ loved ones.
“I know that the optics of this are difficult, and it's heart wrenching for me to think that the Jones family … are listening to this and having them go through those tragic events again,” Rutkauski said.
“I'm here to talk to the community. I'm here to talk to the families … and [explain] why these were justified actions.”
