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Danielle Higley was in line at the concessions stand at Roaring Springs Waterpark in Meridian one Thursday afternoon last August when she heard a
loud noise coming from the interstate.

A man behind her suggested that a car had backfired, but then the 34-year- old-mother recalls seeing “a sea of people running.” She realized that “something was really wrong.” Higley began to run against the flow of the
crowd toward the park’s kiddie pool, where her husband and two young
children had been playing. The next 10 minutes or so seemed like an
eternity before they were reunited, Higley told the Idaho Statesman.

She later learned that the noises she had heard were gunshots, coming from across Interstate 84, where deputies had shot and injured Jeremiah
Bainbridge, a 25-year-old Boise man, after he led police on multiple
pursuits.

For nearly nine months, only basic details of Bainbridge’s interactions
with law enforcement have been publicized. The experience of families
inside the park — and the questions they raised — have not.

Now, using interviews with families, newly released investigative reports
and body-camera footage, the Statesman is able to provide a clearer
picture of the chaotic events that began with a report of domestic
violence and ended with four bullets fired by Ada County sheriff’s
deputies ricocheting into Roaring Springs among dozens of bystanders.

Three deputies opened fire on Bainbridge on Aug. 1 after he led them and
other officers through a series of pursuits from Meridian to Kuna and
back. The chase culminated in an encounter on the westbound on-ramp of
Meridian Road and I-84.

Bainbridge was struck with five bullets and was hospitalized for weeks
before being transferred to the Ada County Jail. In February, he was
sentenced for two felonies.

The Sheriff’s Office has released its investigative reports of the
shooting. All three deputies — Sgt. Mike Geisel, Deputy Vincent Alatorre
and Deputy Sean Farwell — were cleared of any criminal wrongdoing after an outside review by the Valley County Prosecutor’s Office.

Brian Naugle, the prosecutor, said he’s mindful of the “incredibly
difficult decisions” officers face, but in a rare move, he criticized the shooting as “poorly executed.” He said innocent water-park users could
have been injured or killed, and he suggested that law enforcement
officers think harder about their quick use of potentially deadly force.

“Frankly, the fact that no other motorists were struck and that no one was injured by stray bullets flying across the freeway and into the water park
is the product of nothing more than good fortune,” Naugle wrote in a six-
page letter to the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office declining to file
criminal charges against the officers.

‘Catastrophic:’ Parents described bullets, chaos at water park Higley
remembers Aug. 1 as a hot day when Roaring Springs was probably the most crowded place you could be in the Boise area — “no place for a bullet,”
she said.

The Boise mother was there with her husband, Tyler; their children, a 3- year-old son and 4-month-old daughter; and their family friends, Blair and
Aly Robertson, with their 3-year-old son. Late that afternoon, while the mothers went to get food, the fathers watched the kids.Tyler Higley said
he and Blair Robertson were sitting on the side of the kiddie pool, near
the park’s fence along the freeway, when he heard the loud “zip” of
“bullets whizzing overhead” — then the unmistakable pop of gunshots.

With his infant daughter already in his arms, Higley raced into the pool
to cover his son. He recalls hearing the “smacking” of what sounded like a bullet hitting a slide next to the pool. It was “instant panic,” he said. Higley struggled to hold his son down: “He thought it was fireworks, and
he kept wanting to get up and see what was going on.”

Once he heard a break in the shooting, Higley said, he and Robertson moved
the children behind a slide, where they hid for a few minutes. “I looked
over through the vents and saw that they seemed to have calmed down, the
scene did,” said Robertson, who previously served in the U.S. Air Force.
He told the Statesman in a phone interview that he reassured his friend
that “it’s over” and that they needed to get out of the pool.

He estimated that there were 20 to 30 other children, plus parents, in
that corner of the kiddie-pool area. “Then chaos ensued,” he said, as
people ran to the other side of the park. Even after the families reunited
and the areas of the park closest to the freeway soon re-opened —
including for a concert later that evening — the couples described the
events of the day as “traumatic.”

“I just cried for a few days,” said Aly Robertson, who was with Danielle
Higley when shots rang out.Aly Robertson told the Statesman that she grew
up in Boise and moved to other cities, but that “We changed our whole
lives to come back here, to be safe … and to not be around crime, and then
we were put in the middle of it.”

“My husband and I were both struggling in the aftermath,” Danielle Higley
said. “I think it was one of those things that the more we kind of thought about it at home, the scarier we realized that it had been.” If a child
had been hit, she said, “It would have been catastrophic.”

Danielle Higley said that in trying to process the experience and reach a
sense of “peace” about the events, she reached out to the Ada County
Sheriff’s Office, detailing her concerns that officers had fired in the direction of a crowded public place. She said she never heard back.

“I know that our law enforcement … works really hard to ensure that the
people in Idaho are safe, but we were not safe that day,” she told the Statesman. She said she wanted to understand what motivated deputies’
actions and whether there would be any additional training implemented to prevent a similar scenario from happening again. Reports, footage detail miles-long pursuit, shooting Whenever a law enforcement agency in the
Treasure Valley is involved in a police shooting, an outside investigation
by the Critical Incident Task Force is activated.

For Ada County, the task force is made up of the Sheriff’s Office, Idaho
State Police, and the Boise, Meridian and Garden City police departments.
For each incident, a different agency on the task force takes on the investigation.

In this case, Boise police investigated, then forwarded reports to the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office, which selected Naugle to review the
investigation. Those reports, along with body-camera footage, were
released by the Ada County Sheriff’s Office on May 2. They described the
events before, during and after the shooting. Here’s what they said and
showed: Just before 6 p.m., a man reported fighting between Bainbridge and
his fiancée in a vehicle parked in a parking lot off Eagle Road in
Meridian. “They’re arguing pretty good,” the caller told dispatch.

When two Meridian officers responded and tried to speak with the couple, Bainbridge started to drive off. His fiancée, who had scratches on her
face, jumped out of the passenger side of the white Toyota RAV4. Officers
tried to locate Bainbridge but weren’t able to. When they returned to the
area, his fiancée was gone. They weren’t sure if Bainbridge had returned
to pick her up.

Bainbridge’s vehicle was later spotted on Overland Road. Meridian officers pursued him for roughly six miles until they lost sight of him and stopped
the pursuit. Eventually, sheriff’s deputies staffing the Kuna Police
Department located Bainbridge in Kuna and pursued him, “believing the
female victim was potentially in the vehicle,” according to the report.

Bainbridge then called 911 and spoke to a dispatcher for nearly 15
minutes. He told her that he was armed with a Glock 19 handgun and asked
how he could get the police to stop following him. “Can you tell my family
I love them?” Bainbridge said. “‘Cause I’m not going to jail, like I’d
rather kill myself before I do.”

One of the deputies, Robert Koller, placed spike strips at the
intersection of Meridian and Columbia roads, but Bainbridge drove around
them. Koller told investigators that Bainbridge swerved toward him while
he was placing the spike strips and that he had to move out of the way to
avoid getting hit. “Seeing how fast the suspect was approaching me and
knowing I had no cover, I became fearful for my life,” Koller said.

Officers attempted to spike-strip Bainbridge’s vehicle several more times
until a strip punctured one of his tires just before he drove onto the westbound on-ramp to I-84 at Meridian Road. One of the deputies then
performed a pursuit-intervention technique, or PIT maneuver, which is when
an officer uses a vehicle to strike the suspect’s vehicle on the side and
force it sideways to stop it. Bainbridge’s vehicle stopped on the gore,
the grassy triangular area between the on-ramp and the freeway.

Armed deputies approached, yelling at him to get out of the car, according
to the body-cam footage.Within 15 seconds of the deputies getting out of
their patrol cars, they opened fire on Bainbridge after he got out of the Toyota holding a gun, footage showed. Geisel, Alatorre and Farwell fired
shots. Interviewed deputies later described Bainbridge getting out of the
car aggressively and said they were concerned that he would shoot at them.

But footage showed Bainbridge heading toward the interstate with his back
to the deputies when they fired their weapons. The three deputies fired
nearly 20 rounds, with five bullets hitting Bainbridge, records showed. Deputies were shooting at a downward angle, since the gore was sloped, and footage showed bullets striking the roadway.

Four bullets ricocheted into the water park, and at least one struck the
rear passenger-side door of a driver’s vehicle as he drove past the
shooting. Of the four bullets found in the park: Two were found among
beach chairs south and east of the wave pool. One was underneath the blue twisting slide in the kiddie-pool area and appeared to have struck the underside of the slide. One was presented to an officer by a civilian who
said it had struck the water.

Bainbridge told police in an interview after the shooting that he had no intention of shooting the officers and that he was just “being stupid,” according to the report. He described what he did as “a horrible decision.

”Officers should focus on deescalation, prosecutor says Despite clearing
the deputies of any criminal wrongdoing, Naugle expressed concern about
the use of force and dangers posed by ricocheting bullets. Naugle said
that while the three deputies who fired their guns at Bainbridge were
justified in using deadly force, he discouraged rashly using force,
calling this shooting a “stark example” of that.

He said that if the incident had happened exactly the same way but an
adult or child playing in the water park had been injured or killed by one
of the bullets, Naugle’s decision wouldn’t be about whether the use of
deadly force was justified against Bainbridge. Instead, he would have been tasked with deciding whether the injury or death of an innocent bystander
was “reckless, careless, or negligent,” the letter said. But he also said
that deputies couldn’t let Bainbridge — a “dangerous and decidedly
desperate felon” — fire at them or run into the freeway with a gun.

The decisions officers make, often within seconds, are “life or death,”
Naugle wrote, and they can’t afford to get them wrong. The deputies “had
no good options,” he said. Yet he noted: “It would be no consolation to
the grieving mother who lost her son or daughter to a stray bullet at the
water park that, ‘It was a really hard decision and hey, at least we got
the bad guy.’ ”One of four police shootings involving county deputies This
was one of nine police shootings that occurred in Ada County in 2024,
according to a database maintained by the Statesman.

It was the only shooting the Kuna Police Department was involved in last
year. The Ada County Sheriff’s Office, which operates the Kuna department
under a contract with the city, was involved in three additional
shootings, all of which were fatal. It’s rare for an officer to be
criminally charged after a shooting. In the last 20 years, only two law enforcement officers in Idaho — Idaho Falls Police Officer Elias Cerdas
and Nez Perce Tribal Officer Robert Wall — faced criminal charges.

Both cases were eventually dismissed. Under state law, officers are
allowed to use deadly force to prevent someone suspected of committing a
felony from escaping if the person “poses a threat of death or serious
physical injury” to officers or others. Naugle said in his letter that
officers had a “real and reasonable concern” and acted within the scope of
the law, but noted that he can’t help but notice law enforcement’s
tendency to choose deadly force even when there are alternatives available
or when the force used by police “creates at least as great a danger to
the public as the person being apprehended.” “It is my firm belief that a greater focus on ways to avoid the use of deadly force, rather than
looking for a reason to use deadly force whenever justified, is in order,” Naugle said.

He added that he hoped the Ada County Sheriff’s Office would conduct
future training to ensure all citizens’ safety and promote using cautious tactics for firearms in dynamic situations in public spaces. The Sheriff’s Office declined to answer Statesman questions about its internal
investigation and whether trainings, policies or procedures would be
updated.

The office, led by Sheriff Matt Clifford, also declined to comment further
on the investigative report, directing the Statesman to the information
already publicly released. Bainbridge to be released on probation in May
As part of a plea deal with the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office, Bainbridge pleaded guilty to two felony charges: a domestic-violence related battery charge and eluding a police officer in a motor vehicle. Other charges for
grand theft and robbery were dismissed. Bainbridge is serving a 90-day
sentence in the Ada County Jail.

Fourth District Judge Patrick Miller required him to complete a course
that uses cognitive behavioral therapy to help people change their
behavior. He is expected to be released this month, contingent on the
course, but he will remain on probation until February 2032. He could face prison time if he violates his probation. At his sentencing in February, Bainbridge said he’s been working toward a degree while he’s been jailed
and has a job waiting for him once his sentence is up.

“I want to start by saying how deeply I am sorry to you, to my family and
to the community,” Bainbridge told the judge. “I know my actions I made
were wrong and affected a lot of people.” “Every day I see my scars, and
it reminds me of the pain I’ve caused myself and others,” he said.
Families struggle to ‘forget’ For the parents who were at Roaring Springs,
it’s been difficult to move forward, especially as summer nears and the
water park gets busy. “Anytime I go past the park, I think about it,” Aly Robertson said.

“It definitely deters me from going to big public places, especially with
my kiddo, and now … anytime I go into a space, I’m like, ‘OK, what’s my
exit plan? What’s my backup plan?’ “I wish I didn’t have to think that
way.” Aly Robertson said her son “remembers a fun time and he wants to go back,” which has been difficult for her to grapple with as a parent, even though she wants “to just get over and … just forget.”

She noted that law enforcement officers have difficult and dangerous jobs,
and she thanked them for their service. Still, some form of “training and protocol and spatial awareness would be appropriate,” she said. Tyler and Danielle Higley also say they still get anxious in public places with
their kids and when hearing loud noises like cars backfiring.

Most concerning for Danielle Higley is the fact that her son, now 4,
continues to bring it up. “You wouldn’t think that a 3-year-old would remember,” she said, but “every time my son brings it up and we have to
tell him … we have to think about it all over again.” “We’ve tried to, you know, explain it in a way that would make him more comfortable,” Danielle Higley said.

The mom said she’s explained that “there was a bad guy on the road” but
that police “got him and … everything was OK.” “But the hard part is that
we know in that situation … the guy who they were chasing didn’t fire
toward Roaring Springs. The police officers did.”

https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/crime/article305586611.html

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