William Toon III spent his final days alive running from police.

Over several days in January 2024, officers in two counties tried to pull him over. Each time — including during one early-morning chase through a snowstorm — Toon took off.

So when a group of armed officers burst into a Riverdale convenience store and swarmed him on Jan. 14, 2024, Toon’s parents said they believe the unarmed 28-year-old man did what he had always done: he tried to run.

They think Toon was reaching for a potential exit, a drive-through window near where two clerks had ducked for safety, when officers opened fire, shooting at him at least 31 times.

Before the barrage of gunshots, one Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force officer yelled, “He’s going to take a hostage — shoot him!” Then, he and three other officers opened fire. Toon was hit 17 times.

Now, Toon’s parents are suing the officers, the strike force and police departments in Ogden and Pleasant Grove, alleging the multiagency team “chose escalation over containment, gunfire over time, and a manufactured ‘hostage’ narrative over the objective reality visible on video and audible on radio traffic.”

“He really should be alive,” his father, Bill Toon, said in a recent interview. “There is no reason for him not to be here right now.”

Weber County Attorney Chris Allred later ruled that the officers were legally justified in shooting and killing Toon.

In a letter explaining the decision, Allred wrote to the Ogden and Pleasant Grove police chiefs that the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force officer who shouted that Toon was taking a hostage thought Toon had a gun, pointing to a bulge in his hoodie pocket. That turned out to be an envelope filled with cash, Allred acknowledged.

Allred wrote that it did not occur to the officer that Toon might have been trying to climb out of the drive-through window. The county attorney concluded the officer reasonably believed Toon was armed and actively resisting arrest.

That’s why Allred determined it was reasonable for the officer to think Toon might use a weapon to take one of the clerks hostage, though video footage shows he did not lunge toward them or otherwise gesture in their direction.

An attorney listed in court records for the police agencies and its officers did not respond to a request for comment.

Chased by police

Before the shooting, Pleasant Grove police had been looking for Toon for about a month.

Officers had suspected he stabbed someone with a pair of scissors during a house party in December 2023, according to police reports obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune. No criminal charges had been filed and there was no warrant for Toon’s arrest, his parent’s federal lawsuit says.

But court records show Detective Benjamin Knopf obtained a warrant allowing authorities to track Toon’s phone after identifying him to a judge as an attempted murder suspect.

Toon’s parents dispute that explanation in their lawsuit. They allege Knopf and his department became “hyper-focused” on Toon because of his suspected involvement in drug sales, not because of the party fight. The lawsuit also alleges Toon used the scissors in self-defense because the victim intended to rob him.

Partygoers were reluctant to speak with officers, according to Pleasant Grove police records. Those who did were cagey or deceptive, the records note, but they told police the fight started after Toon had called the victim’s friend a racial slur.

Toon was driving in Utah County when he called his parents in a panic in early January 2024. A Pleasant Grove police officer was tailing him, and he wanted to tell his parents he loved them, Bill Toon recalled.

“I’m in a high-speed chase right now,” the father remembered his son saying. “And I think they want to kill me.”

The officer later wrote in a report that he intentionally rammed Toon’s car to try to stop him — but Toon was able to get away. The officer, meanwhile, lost control of his patrol car in a slush pile on the road and slid into a tree, breaking his rear axle.

The next morning, an officer in South Ogden tried to pull Toon over during a snowstorm. Dashcam video shows they were also stymied by slushy roads, fishtailing on the freeway as Toon drove away.

Toon’s parents don’t think their son knew why the police were chasing him, in part because there was no warrant for his arrest and it had been weeks since the party.

‘He’s going to take a hostage’

On the day Toon was killed, Pleasant Grove police asked the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force for help after learning Toon might be in Ogden.

In his letter, Allred noted authorities had spotted Toon riding in another person’s car, which they followed until it pulled into a gas station, just off a busy intersection on Riverdale Road.

Surveillance video from the gas station shows Toon enter the convenience store and walk toward the back, where he seemed to try to use the restroom. He then returned to the front of the store to get a restroom key, attached to a squeegee handle.

As Toon turned back toward the bathroom, the video shows agents Timothy Scott and Andrew Daughetee walk into the store with their guns drawn. They order Toon to get his hands out of his pocket, get on the ground, and say that he is under arrest.

As agent Tyler O’Doherty entered with a rifle, along with other officers who had their guns drawn, Toon moved toward the back of the store. Officers continued yelling commands, but Toon didn’t comply and continued moving, avoiding them.

The video then shows Toon stride toward the clerk’s counter and set the restroom key down. As he approaches the drive-through window — next to where two clerks had crouched for safety — Scott shouts, “He’s going to take a hostage — shoot him!”

Instantly, four officers — Scott, Daughetee, O’Doherty and Pleasant Grove police Officer Christopher Petersen — open fire.

Outside the gas station, another officer was detaining the driver of the car that Toon pulled up in. That officer threw the driver to the ground to avoid stray bullets, according to the Toons’ lawsuit.

Stray rounds struck gas pumps and the exterior of a Buffalo Wild Wings across the street, the lawsuit notes.

Officers with the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force generally don’t wear body cameras because of the “undercover nature” of their role, a Weber County investigator wrote in his report about the shooting.

They also don’t wear traditional police uniforms: Photos taken after the shooting show the officers wearing jeans, black hoodies and T-shirts, as well as tactical vests with “POLICE” marked across the front.

Trying to escape

In the parents’ lawsuit, attorney Brook Millard contends Toon never made any threats during the encounter — alleging that officers instead rushed to speculate about his intent when no evidence supports he was trying to take a hostage.

“His intention was to leave the store, not confront the officers,” Millard wrote.

Scott yelling that Toon was going to take a hostage and ordering fellow officers to “shoot him,” the lawsuit alleges, “constituted a reckless and unfounded escalation that precipitated the use of deadly force when the totality of the circumstances would have dictated multiple other less lethal options available to the officers.”

In a report, Weber County investigator Steve Zaccardi considered the possibility that Toon had been trying to escape. He pointed to a statement Scott made to investigators after the shooting, where Scott acknowledged that “he never perceived a window was there” and said it never occurred to him that Toon was trying to run.

Zaccardi reasoned that in stressful situations like police shootings, officers can often experience peripheral vision loss or “tunnel vision.” He concluded there was a “high likelihood’ that none of the shooting officers saw Toon reaching for the window as they fired.

“This was a tense, rapidly evolving, stress-filled situation where officers had to make a split-second decision,” he wrote. “With that said, William Toon had plenty of opportunity to comply with the officer’s orders but he did not.”

A ‘rogue’ strike force?

The lawsuit also alleges that the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force was ”known in the community as a rogue Strike force” long before Toon’s death.

Its officers “bullied citizens and acted above the law on multiple occasions,” the lawsuit reads.

Millard, the family’s attorney, pointed to a history of what he identified as questionable police shootings, like in 2010, when agents with a no-knock warrant burst into Todd Blair’s home — and quickly fatally shot the man.

Blair was killed just as he appeared in a door frame, holding a golf club in the stance of a right-handed batter. The officer who opened fire later said he thought Blair had a sword.

Then, in 2012, task force officers served a knock-and-announce warrant at Matthew Stewart’s Ogden home, expecting to find an empty grow house. The officers were met with gunfire, and in the ensuing shootout, one officer was killed and five others were injured.

Stewart was also wounded, and later died by suicide in a jail cell after he was charged with aggravated murder and other crimes.

After his death, Stewart’s defense attorney questioned whether he had readily understood that the men who had broken into his home were police officers. The attorney pointed to photos that crime scene investigators took, which showed several of the uninjured officers wearing no police identifiers; one was wearing a Cheech and Chong shirt.

Prosecutors pushed back on that assertion, arguing that most agents were wearing tactical vests marked with “POLICE” when they served the warrant. But Ogden police later determined that some officers, including slain officer Jared Francom, weren’t wearing bulletproof vests at all.

His parents’ grief

It’s been two years since Toon died, and his parents still haven’t changed his bedroom. The sneakers he loved to collect remain on display, stacked in clear plastic boxes in the corner, just as he left them. On a bulletin board, photos of Toon smiling with family and friends still hang.

Toon’s parents said their son struggled with his mental health, noting he had been diagnosed with both ADHD and an impulse control disorder.

He had stretches of stability, Jennifer Toon said, like when he lived in sober living — where he seemed like the “old Will” again. But then he would start to self-medicate, she said, which led to bad choices and legal trouble.

“My kid was loving, but he made wrong decisions,” Bill Toon said, adding that Toon understood he needed to “pay the price” when he broke the law and had done so in the past.

Toon’s parents said they decided to bring the lawsuit against authorities in the hope that something will change. While the father recognized that police are often trained in de-escalation tactics or less-lethal force, he didn’t see any of that, he feels.

“We wanted our son to be accountable for the choices that he was making,” Jennifer Toon said. “But did that mean that his life needed to end?”