On the morning of Sunday, July 17, 2016, three law enforcement officers died in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and three more were wounded. The man identified as responsible was Gavin Eugene Long of Kansas City, Missouri, a former Marine sergeant who turned 29 that day. Police officers killed him within minutes, and he was never charged with anything. Nearly a year later, the East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney released a final report on the case, the product of an investigation carried out with the assistance of the Louisiana State Police. It attributed the deaths and the wounding to Long and found that the officers who ended his life had been justified.
The two Baton Rouge Police Department officers and the sheriff's deputy who died that morning had served, between them, for more than three decades. No court ever heard the case, because the only person accused of it died in the hour it began.
Long was born on July 17, 1987. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2005 and served until 2010, reaching the rank of sergeant. He deployed to Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009, and he left the Corps with an honorable discharge.
While still in uniform he took online classes through Central Texas College, which offered courses at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, and between 2007 and 2011 he earned an associate of arts degree in general studies. The college knew of no disciplinary problems. After his discharge he spent a single semester at the University of Alabama, in the spring of 2012, and was briefly enrolled at Clark Atlanta University during the 2012 to 2013 academic year. Campus police at Alabama had no dealings with him.
His last known address was in Kansas City, Missouri. In May 2015 he filed a document with the Jackson County Recorder of Deeds stating that he intended to change his name to Cosmo Setepenra. The county described the filing as non-binding: a legal change of name required a petition in court, and he never filed one. He remained Gavin Eugene Long in law, and that is the name under which officials identified him.
Corporal Montrell Jackson had served ten years with the Baton Rouge Police Department and was assigned to its uniform patrol bureau.
Matthew Gerald had come to policing after service in the Marine Corps and the Army, and he had been a Baton Rouge police officer for less than a year.
Deputy Brad Garafola had spent more than 24 years with the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office. His assignment was civil processing, including foreclosures.
The three wounded officers were a Baton Rouge police corporal and two sheriff's deputies. By September 2016 two of them had recovered and returned home.
The killings came during a tense month in Baton Rouge. On July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling, a Black resident of the city, died after a confrontation with two white Baton Rouge police officers outside a convenience store. A bystander's cellphone video of the encounter spread widely, protests followed, and police arrested more than 200 demonstrators in the days that came after.
On the morning of Sunday, July 17, officers of the Baton Rouge Police Department and the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office answered a call in the city. Within a short time three of them were dead and three wounded, and Long himself had been killed by Baton Rouge police officers.
The Louisiana State Police led the public briefings in the first days. On July 18 they were not yet prepared to say that he had acted alone, and they were working to establish whether anyone had helped him. Investigators interviewed people he had been in contact with in Baton Rouge, and officials stressed that those interviews did not mean anyone else was involved.
His identity was confirmed within hours of his death. Military, college and county records filled in his background over the following days, and in late August 2016 his records from the Department of Veterans Affairs added a further piece of his history.
The formal inquiry into the morning of July 17 took nearly a year. The East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney's office carried it out with the assistance of the Louisiana State Police, because the office reviews every fatal police shooting in the parish to decide whether it was legally justified. In this case there had never been any suggestion that the officers acted improperly, but the review was required all the same, and its findings would stand as the official account of what Long had done.
The district attorney released the final report on Friday, June 30, 2017, at a news conference in Baton Rouge.
Its legal finding concerned the officers who killed Long: they were justified, and they had acted appropriately. The rest of the report set out what investigators had learned about Long. He had left a suicide note in the car he had rented. Less than an hour before the killings he had sent a three-page letter to an acquaintance in Ohio whom he knew only online, and the letter appeared to match the note. Investigators concluded that he had not taken part in the protests that followed the death of Alton Sterling.
The report also turned to the officers in the Sterling case. Computer records showed that Long had looked online for personal information about the two officers involved in that death, including their addresses and telephone numbers. Investigators found no evidence that he ever acted on what he found.
Because Long died on July 17, 2016, no prosecutor ever filed a charge against him, no grand jury heard evidence, and no court ruled on what he did. The legal subject of the district attorney's report was the conduct of the officers who killed him. Its account of Long's own acts is an attribution by the investigating authorities, made after his death and never tested at trial.
Because there was no trial, nothing in the case has been proved in court, and the attribution of the deaths to Long rests on the investigation and the district attorney's report.
In the first days several outlets described the May 2015 Jackson County filing as a completed legal change of name. The county said otherwise: the document was non-binding, and he never brought the required petition in court.
Long told doctors at the Department of Veterans Affairs that he had post-traumatic stress disorder. Doctors at the VA Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri, concluded in November 2011 that he did not meet the criteria for it and diagnosed an adjustment disorder with depressed mood instead. In Atlanta in December 2012 he denied having mental health symptoms and was told no follow-up was needed, and VA records later found him stable, with no evidence of imminent harm to himself or others. He told VA doctors he had seen casualties in Iraq but had not fought in combat.
July 17, 1987: Gavin Eugene Long is born.
2005: He enlists in the Marine Corps.
June 2008 to January 2009: He serves in Iraq.
2010: He leaves the Marine Corps as a sergeant, with an honorable discharge.
2007 to 2011: He completes an associate of arts degree in general studies through Central Texas College.
November 2011: VA doctors in Kansas City, Missouri, find that he does not meet the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Spring 2012: He attends the University of Alabama for one semester.
2012 to 2013: He is briefly enrolled at Clark Atlanta University.
May 2015: He files a non-binding document in Jackson County, Missouri, stating his intention to change his name.
July 5, 2016: Alton Sterling dies after a confrontation with two Baton Rouge police officers.
July 17, 2016: Three officers of the Baton Rouge Police Department and the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office die in Baton Rouge and three more are wounded; Long, who turns 29 that day, is killed by police officers.
July 18, 2016: The Louisiana State Police say they are working to establish whether he had help.
August 2016: VA records on his history become public.
September 2016: Two of the three wounded officers have returned home.
June 30, 2017: The East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney releases the final report, finding the officers who killed Long justified.