When Attorney General Aaron Frey pulled her aside at the State House one afternoon in 2019, Natalie Jackson felt like she might finally get justice for her son.
Jackson had gone to Augusta that day to testify in support of legislation to mandate a deeper, more critical review of police killings. It had been more than a decade since 2007, when an officer had shot and killed her son, Gregori, in what was described as a hand-to-hand struggle over the officer’s gun.
Natalie Jackson had always doubted the story told by reserve officer Zachary Curtis, who shot the 18-year-old after Curtis chased him without backup into the woods over an alleged probation violation. Curtis said he was blindsided and overpowered by the teen and had no choice but to shoot. There were no other witnesses, and Curtis was cleared of wrongdoing a few months later.
Gregori Jackson
Since at least 1990, every single police shooting in Maine has been found to be justified, about 170 cases in all.
Holding Jackson’s hand that day, Frey promised the state’s first-ever reinvestigation of a police killing. A few weeks later, he listened to a presentation by a team of advocates for Jackson, including a local district attorney who wanted to prosecute Curtis.
More than two years later, the Jackson family is frustrated. Frey’s office is close to completing the review, but a second meeting with the family, where the Jacksons and their advocates wanted to ask questions about Frey’s work, was canceled over a disagreement about who could attend.
Frey said he will deliver his opinion in writing, and has already given the Jacksons more than 1,300 pages of records painting the most complete picture yet of the original shooting investigation and of the re-examination that started in 2019.
The records, shared by the family with the Maine Sunday Telegram, suggest that her doubt about Curtis’s story was not misplaced. One expert said that while it is likely the officer has inaccurate memories of how the fight with Jackson occurred, his justification for shooting was valid.
“This is a perfect case that looks bad, but when you break it down and you go in depth, I’ve seen very few cases that the officer was as justified and did everything right than this one,” Dr. Michael Sanchez, a Texas-based firearms expert, said during a meeting with Frey in 2020. “But it looks bad.”
Jackson wants the opportunity to ask questions and is skeptical of the entirely new narrative that Sanchez offered. She wants to bring about a dozen people, including lawmakers, who have helped her advocate for the review. Frey said his offer was to meet with the family, and he balked at Jackson’s insistence a reporter be in the room. They were at an impasse.
“I should be able to have who I want at the meeting,” Jackson said in an interview. “I just don’t think I’m being unreasonable. Not in the least. My child is dead, and this is important to me. Maybe it’s not as important to him, but it’s important to me, it’s important to my family.”
In an interview Saturday, Frey said he is still open to a discussion with Jackson and her attorney when his review is complete. He wants the family to have a clear view of every step his office took, and said he will provide as much information to the public as possible.
“We took very seriously the Jacksons’ concerns and hired an outside expert to evaluate the crime scene against Mr. Curtis’ statements,” Frey wrote earlier, in responses to questions.
“We also conducted additional interviews and lab testing. There is no basis in fact or theory in the assertion that the (Office of the Attorney General) is protecting Zachary Curtis. We engaged in an objective process that I am confident will stand up to the scrutiny it will be subjected to. There is nothing my office can do about the fact that Mrs. Jackson will not accept the findings of the neutral experts.”
ALONE IN THE WOODS
The confrontation between Gregori Jackson and Zachary Curtis began after 2 a.m. on Friendship Road in Waldoboro, when Curtis stopped the driver of a red Pontiac sedan for allegedly running a stop sign and veering toward the centerline.
The driver and a backseat passenger, both 17 at the time, cooperated with Curtis. Jackson, seated up front, at first resisted identifying himself, giving Curtis a false date of birth. Curtis said he smelled alcohol on Jackson. When Jackson gave him his real date of birth, the officer learned that Jackson was on bail conditions that forbade him from drinking.
Curtis asked Jackson to step out of the car. Jackson resisted being handcuffed and the two scuffled on the roadside. Curtis used pepper spray on Jackson, and may have sprayed himself in the process. For a moment, Jackson seemed to give up. But as Curtis moved to handcuff him, Jackson ran into the woods.
Curtis followed him, calling for assistance as he gave chase, and got close enough to hit Jackson in the thighs with an expandable baton before Jackson hurried away. Curtis said he then heard Jackson stop moving and spotted him on the ground – but as he approached, Jackson hit Curtis in the face with a branch.
The impact knocked off his glasses and disoriented him.
Curtis said Jackson charged at him and that he landed on his back with the teenager lying facedown on top of him. He said they began to wrestle for control of Curtis’s gun. He said Jackson was pressing down on his throat with his forearm and hitting him in the head and he feared he was going to lose consciousness.
Curtis told investigators that Jackson kept saying “give me your gun, give me your (expletive) gun,” and that he felt Jackson was determined not to go back to jail and “didn’t care what it took,” according to the attorney general’s report that cleared Curtis of wrongdoing.
As the two fought over his .40-caliber Glock pistol, Curtis said, the pistol’s slide was racked back and forth, ejecting unfired cartridges onto the ground as Curtis sought to keep the gun from being able to fire.
When Curtis regained control of the gun, he shot Jackson once under the left armpit, three times in his lower back and once in the side of the head, the report said. Jackson died at the scene. Other officers arrived moments after the shooting.
Curtis was 24 at the time, a part-time officer whose right to work beyond a statutory limitation of 1,024 hours had been extended because of vacancies at Waldoboro. He was a couple weeks away from having to stop working when he killed Jackson.
From the start, Natalie Jackson has focused on the inconsistencies in the young officer’s story: Curtis said he fired three shots, but he really fired five, and he offered differing recollections of whether Jackson was still on top of him when he fired the final, fatal round.
His details about the chase into the woods and the sequence of events shifted every time he was interviewed.
There were breaches of protocol that ate at her, too. The body bag used to transport her son’s remains for autopsy was never properly sealed shut, and his hands were not bagged to preserve evidence.
At autopsy, her son’s hands were neatly manicured and showed no signs that he had been in a fight, Jackson said. In photos from the scene, his pants were pulled down around his thighs, and she said he never wore his pants like that.
Curtis said that during the struggle, he was lying on the ground with Jackson on top of him – but after the shooting, while Jackson’s clothes were soaked in blood, Curtis’s uniform was flecked with only a few drops. His uniform shirt was not heavily soiled, and there were only a few dirt marks on his duty belt.
Natalie and Millard Jackson stand outside the Cross Building in Augusta, home to the Maine Attorney General’s Office. Their 18-year-old son Gregori was fatally shot by a reserve police officer in Waldoboro in September 2007. Attorney General Aaron Frey agreed in 2019 to review the case, but a second meeting with the Jackson family was canceled over a disagreement about who could attend. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
Most troubling to Natalie Jackson was the the trajectory of the bullets. One passed under Jackson’s left armpit and out the front of his chest, puncturing a lung. Three more entered his back, with one severing his spine. The fifth bullet hit Jackson behind the left ear and lodged in his skull, killing him. All of the bullets had an upward angle. To fire the gun at that pitch from Curtis’s position, as she understood it, Curtis would have had to contort his body to get the weapon around her son.
Jackson and her advocates tried to draw attention to Curtis’s credibility, and pointed to his actions after the shooting that they say proved he was untrustworthy.
Curtis surrendered his law enforcement certificate in 2009 after being accused of theft, ending his police career, according to records provided by the Maine Criminal Justice Academy. Three years later, when he was a police dispatcher in Knox County, Curtis was convicted of one count of tampering with public records and resigned from his job a short time later after he improperly accessed the Rockland police records system to change a police report that contained an accusation that he cheated on his wife.
He also served five days in jail in 2018 for a trespassing conviction.
The doubt about the bullet trajectories intensified in 2019 when advocates for Jackson contacted Dr. Marguerite DeWitt, the forensic pathologist who had performed the original autopsy. She agreed that the angles did not make sense if Curtis and Jackson had been lying on the ground, chest to chest.
Based on what DeWitt told them, advocates for the Jacksons, including District Attorney Natasha Irving, held a news conference in which Irving said she would pursue charges against Curtis if Frey would not.
A SECOND CHANCE
The Attorney General’s Office went back to DeWitt about her reversal of opinion.
Now a professor and expert for hire in Texas, DeWitt agreed to take a closer look at the entire case file. According to Frey, she didn’t have all the information she needed when she agreed with Natalie Jackson and her advocates that the trajectories of the bullets did not make sense.
“Since advocates had provided no written report or materials regarding Dr. Dewitt’s revised opinion, the OAG (Office of the Maine Attorney General) reached out to Dr. DeWitt to try and understand how her assessment from 2007 and her assessment from 2019 differed,” Frey wrote in response to questions from the Sunday Telegram. “It was at that time we learned the advocates had failed to provide Dr. Dewitt with complete information necessary to provide a fully informed expert opinion. We provided that information and met with her.”
DeWitt brought along Sanchez, a business partner and an expert on the use of force and firearms, and the two looked at the complete set of case documents more deeply. Both are in the forensics department on the faculty of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and work together as experts for hire who provide testimony in court cases.
Sanchez and DeWitt said reviewing the complete file offered a new perspective. Sanchez provided a new theory to explain Jackson’s wounds.
Sanchez said Jackson was likely straddling Curtis, using the weight of his body to bring blows down on him. Jackson’s hands may not have shown signs of a fight because he could have been using the meat of his closed fist. Curtis’s recollection was unreliable because he was in an intense, stressful situation and his brain had reverted to fight-or-flight mentality.
Sanchez highlighted the unfired rounds found at the scene.
The Glock that Curtis was carrying has a unique design feature, Sanchez said. If the slide of the semi-automatic weapon is pulled back even a fraction of an inch while a round is in the chamber, a pull of the trigger is not likely to make the weapon fire. The firing pin will strike the explosive primer in the back of the casing hard enough to leave a mark but not hard enough to fire the round.
Curtis told investigators he remembered trying to pull the slide back to prevent Jackson from shooting him with his own weapon. Among the unfired rounds found on the ground, one had a dent in its primer.
“This supports the veracity of the officer’s story of what’s going on on the side (of his body) where they’re wrestling for the weapon,” Sanchez said.
When Curtis fired the first shot, Sanchez said, Jackson was probably in a more upright position, rather than flat against Curtis. When he felt the impact of the bullet, Jackson likely recoiled and instinctively turned away from the source of the gunfire, twisting around so that the left side of his back was pointed toward the barrel of the gun.
Sanchez said he believed that at that moment, Curtis fired the next three rounds, tightly spaced and in rapid succession. The bullets passed through Jackson’s lower left back. Sanchez estimated that the five rounds were fired in about two seconds.
“It makes sense to me in going through the sequence of events, that this suspect, who is literally trying to pound the officer into the earth, has reared back when the officer fired,” Sanchez said.
The final shot, Sanchez said, was likely a product of training.
“This is a standard police body armor drill,” said Sanchez, a former police deputy chief who has worked and trained officers around the world. “We’re trained, one-two to the chest, if the suspect doesn’t stop, isn’t incapacitated, then you raise your aim and you shoot to the head.”
In an interview, Frey said he wanted another opinion after hearing from Sanchez and DeWitt. He hired Dr. Marilyn Miller, a former associate professor in the department of forensic science at Virginia Commonwealth University. Frey said he learned of Miller because of her work for the attorney general in New Hampshire re-evaluating a justified police shooting that was overturned, a case highlighted by Jackson’s team.
In general, Miller found the work by investigators at the shooting scene to be sufficiently detailed. Although she noted some inconsistencies between Curtis’s narrative and the evidence, she concluded that the evidence generally aligned with his story. At Miller’s request, a similar vintage Glock pistol was fired at the Maine State Crime Lab to provide comparable gunshot residue analysis.
The only blood found on Curtis’s uniform was a few drops on an arm patch near his shoulder. Miller concluded that spatter likely came from the first round that exited Jackson’s chest. Jackson was wearing three layers of clothing, which likely prevented more blood spatter from reaching Curtis, she wrote, and Jackson’s clothes likely were soaked through with blood after he was shot and had rolled off of Curtis. In her opinion, dirt found on Curtis’s duty belt and on the elbow of his uniform pointed to some type of struggle on the ground.
The gunshot residue testing at the Maine State Crime Lab also seemed consistent. The first round was fired at very close range. The next three shots were from slightly farther away, with less powder residue on the skin. The final shot, behind Jackson’s left ear, was from farther away than 15 inches, Miller wrote.
DeWitt said despite some breaks in protocol, the outcome of her autopsy would be the same.
A MORE CRITICAL LOOK
The procedure for evaluating whether a police officer is justified in using deadly force follows a strict legal analysis that focuses on an officer’s perception of a threat in the instant the officer chooses to fire a weapon, without the 20/20 benefit of hindsight.
The 1989 Supreme Court case setting the standard makes clear that police must decide about using deadly force in “circumstances that are tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving,” often relying on incomplete facts about a situation before making split-second decisions.
The Attorney General’s Office has the sole power to decide if claims of self-defense are justified. Unlike a criminal trial, there is no opposing counsel to advocate for the injured or the deceased, challenge the officer’s assertions or ask critical questions about police decisions.
At the time Curtis killed Jackson, there was no process to evaluate whether the shooting could have been prevented, or if the officer should have done something different.
In a 2019 interview with an attorney, Curtis was asked if he thought about whether he would have done anything differently.
“I probably would have asked for backup before I chased him, but at the same time, it’s something I had done before,” Curtis told attorney Amy Fairfield, an advocate for the Jackson family.
When Frey first met Jackson in 2019, she had come to Augusta to testify in support of legislation to bring a more nuanced review to police killings.
The legislation was introduced by Rep. Jeffrey Evangelos, a close ally of the Jacksons who has fought for more transparency around police killings and urged Frey to meet Jackson two years ago. Frey offered a rewritten bill that added more law enforcement to the panel. The second version was adopted into law and the panel began evaluating police shootings in 2020.
The members include defense attorneys, civil rights advocates, three members of the public and people with expertise in mental health, domestic violence and police training techniques. They now examine each shooting after the attorney general has determined if it was justified, taking a more critical approach to how each shooting unfolds.
But the process is still opaque. The panel’s discussions, notes and meetings are confidential by law. Its reports are filed quietly with a legislative committee and are difficult to find online. The group has no power to change the determination of the attorney general, and it will not review cases decided before 2020, leaving scores of fatal shootings unexamined, including Jackson’s.
It means no expert panel will ever examine whether Curtis should have chased Jackson into the woods in the first place or whether he was properly trained or if he should have waited a few minutes for more officers to arrive.
Evangelos introduced an emergency bill last year to remove some of the police experts from the panel and replace them with civil rights advocates – and to give the panel power to reverse decisions of justifiability. But that billit died in committee.
Evangelos, who has fought for years through legislation to bring more accountability and transparency, is not running for re-election, partly because of his frustration with systemic injustices and what he sees as the outsized and unchecked power of the Attorney General’s Office. He said he plans to file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Across the country, prosecutors are filing charges against police who kill under questionable circumstances, Evangelos said. How can Maine police be perfect?
“I’ve always said that 95 percent of deadly force incidents are justified,” Evangelos said Friday. “But you can’t have zero (unjustified cases) and expect it’s a fair process. There’s something systemically disturbing going on.”
Natalie Jackson said she still could be surprised by Frey’s final report.
But she is not optimistic that the initial ruling that the shooting was justified will be overturned.
“I think I just fooled myself, which is sad,” Jackson said. “Because you really shouldn’t have to beg and plead to try to get the truth.”
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