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Six Chattanooga police officers fired 59 rounds at Alonzo Heyward, 32, on the front porch of the house he rented in Chattanooga, and a medical examiner counted 43 gunshot entry and exit wounds on his body, according to police and autopsy findings reported by The Associated Press.

Heyward, a moving company employee, had carried a .44 Magnum rifle around his neighborhood for hours before dawn on July 18, 2009, ranting about suicide and at times holding the barrel under his chin, his family told the AP. Police spokeswoman Jerri Weary said officers responded just after 4 a.m. to a report of three men wrestling over a gun in the street. Heyward's father, James Marine, said there was no struggle over the weapon, and that his son told the officers, "I'm not out here to hurt anybody."

Police said officers tried and failed to subdue Heyward with a stun gun, then fired when he ignored repeated commands to drop the rifle and moved it in their direction. Weary said the shooting came in three volleys inside about 30 seconds, that each officer fired a .45-caliber pistol, and that some emptied their magazines, reloaded and fired again. Weary described the case as "suicide by cop." Police files later reported by the Chattanooga Times Free Press put the officers 12 to 15 feet away and Heyward's blood alcohol content at 0.147. Marine said he did not believe his son wanted to die. "He just needed somebody to talk to," Marine said.

Heyward's girlfriend, Amanda Counts, and a neighbor, Darrell Turner, told the AP that Heyward was lying on the porch on top of the rifle when the shooting started, and that they heard him ask, "Why are you shooting me?" during a break in the gunfire. "Before the first shot was fired he was down," Counts said. "Not one time did he threaten anyone." Police declined to describe his position, citing the open investigation. Then-Police Chief Freeman Cooper told radio station WGOW that the officers "did what we trained them to do." Heyward was black and the six officers were white, according to the AP, and the number of shots drew objections from local civil rights leaders. "We have a large concern about the amount of shots fired," said Valoria Armstrong, then president of the Chattanooga branch of the NAACP.

The officers were placed on paid leave under department policy and later returned to duty. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation cleared the officers in 2009. Heyward's family sued the city and the officers in federal court, arguing they had not been adequately trained in use-of-force policy. On July 14, 2011, days before the case was set for trial, Chief U.S. District Judge Curtis Collier granted summary judgment to the city and to officers Deborah Dennison, Lauren Bacha, Zachery Moody, George Romero, William Salyers and Bryan Wood, ending the suit.

Collier wrote that the officers had "manifest probable cause to believe Heyward posed an immediate serious threat of physical harm to themselves and others" as he began to step into the house with the rifle, and that whether the barrel had been lowered toward them was "immaterial to the question of whether it was reasonable for the officers to use deadly force at this moment." The officers said Heyward pointed the rifle down in their direction. Other witnesses said he never did. Bryan Hoss, an attorney for the officers, said they had been "finally vindicated." Allen Johnson, the grandfather of Heyward's daughter, said the dismissal was disappointing.

The attached recording carries 911 calls from passersby and police radio traffic from the response.