The quiet, sunny afternoon of June 26, 2021, was pierced by “what sounded like an earthquake” on Shirley Street in Winthrop, according to one witness. Minutes later, gunfire erupted.
“I saw boom-boom-boom-boom! And I got low behind a car,” the witness said. “There was a girl in the middle of the street on her stomach, and I ran over to her, and asked her if she was okay... and she didn’t move. It looked like she wasn’t with us anymore.”
After commandeering a box truck, colliding into oncoming traffic, and then careening into a nearby home, 28-year old Nathan R. Allen opened fire on Ramona Cooper, killing the 60-year old Air Force veteran. Allen then took the life of one more resident, David L. Green, 68, a Vietnam War veteran and retired state trooper, before he was confronted by Winthrop Police Sergeant Nicholas Bettano. The officer urged Allen to drop his weapon and, when he refused, shot and killed him.
Cooper and Green, victims unknown to Allen, were both Black. During his rampage, Allen chose not to shoot multiple white residents as he walked past them with a loaded gun, according to officials and witnesses.
The vivid accounts of eyewitnesses and Bettano are detailed in investigative files released Tuesday by Suffolk District Attorney Kevin R. Hayden as he announced his finding that the fatal shooting of Allen was legally justified.
“Under the circumstances, Sgt. Bettano fired his weapon in a lawful and proper exercise of self-defense and defense of others as he tried to stop Mr. Allen’s armed assault,” Hayden wrote in a 15-page report outlining the deadly force investigation his office conducted. “Indeed, Sergeant Bettano’s heroic actions that day likely saved the lives of other civilians in the immediate area of the killings.”
Ray Green, the brother of David Green, said Wednesday that news of the report brought him “some comfort,” and that he planned to read the full document later that evening.
“I’ve been asking for this report since it happened, and we’re going into the third year now,” he said. “I guess it took them that long to finish the investigation, and so I do want to finally look at that report and see exactly what happened.”
Cooper’s son, Gary Cooper Jr., said he also had not yet read the report Wednesday, but planned to.
Along with the report, the office released redacted versions of dozens of documents, interviews, photos, and videos that outline in graphic detail the horror that unfolded in the span of less than 20 minutes that summer afternoon.
One woman, interviewed by police the day after the shooting, was getting dressed to run to the corner store when she heard the gunfire, a sound that “normally I don’t hear around here” but was nevertheless unmistakable. Looking out her doorway, the woman saw people sprinting down the street, except for one person, Cooper, who lay motionless facedown on the ground. Still half-dressed, the witness sprang into action.
“One sneaker on, one sneaker off, one short leg on, one short leg off, I ran to try and help,” she told police, but the crack of another round of gunfire feet away sent her stumbling down the street alongside other panicked residents.
Witnesses described to police how, after plowing the stolen Rapid Flow, Inc. box truck directly into the side of a squat brick house, Allen crawled barefoot out of the wreckage and attempted to hijack another car. When that failed, Allen jogged in the direction of a nearby laundromat where he spotted Cooper and then Green, killing them both.
At the urging of police, residents who were in the line of fire dropped to the pavement, or plastered themselves to the sides of buildings on Shirley Street, including the woman who had run outside to help.
“Sergeant Bettano, who thankfully saved my life along with my friend, told us to hit the ground, and we both just clung onto each other and shoved ourselves into the wall,” she said. As Allen approached police, she said, he paused almost imperceptibly to stare her in the face.
“The guy looked at us and he could have killed us,” she told police shakily. “This kid could have been like, boom boom, and then continued with the sergeant. But he didn’t... he walked right past us.”
Largely absent from the district attorney’s documents are additional details about Allen, a Winthrop resident with a graduate degree in physical therapy who had never been charged with a crime. In 2021, then-district attorney Rachael Rollins announced the office was investigating the shootings as a potential hate crime after discovering expletive-laced white supremacist and anti-Semitic messages in his notebooks, which he called “The Allen Diaries.”
Hayden’s office redacted most pages of Allen’s notebooks, as well as details about his medical history and prescriptions, citing the exemption for personal privacy information under state records law. The office provided to the Globe five of what appear to be dozens of pages of racist writings, which include a few details that were not originally released by Rollins, and give a taste of the hate-fueled mentality that drove Allen to act.
In his journals, Allen called racism “healthy and natural,” adding that “holding it in is bad for you.” He frequently invoked a racial slur to express his violent hatred of Black people in additional writings, at one point referring to white people as “apex predators.” He additionally wrote that he had “been doing a lot of drugs. Maybe not a lot, but a fair amount,” and added that “my perception became reality. I am right. Whatever I believe.”
Hayden noted in his report that “Mr. Allen’s journals contained hand-drawn swastikas and writings about anarchy and white supremacy...[that] suggest a motive for the targeted and racist attacks.”
The report does not say whether drugs or alcohol were detected in Allen’s system during the autopsy, nor does it disclose whether he had been diagnosed with a mental illness or other medical issues.
During a search of Allen’s Winthrop apartment, police found three books by Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, books supporting toxic masculinity, the treatment of anxiety, neurotic behavior and The Prince, the famous book by Machiavelli, as well as books by Frederick Nietzsche and The Turner Diaries, a novel authored by neo-Nazi and white nationalist William Luther Pierce, according to evidence seizure documents released by Hayden’s office.
When Bettano ultimately encountered Allen, he knew nothing of the killer’s beliefs or history. All he knew, he later told state police, came from a police dispatcher fielding 911 calls, warning that “I was going into an active shooter situation.”
“The voice at the time called out that there was a vehicle into a building and to send as many first responders as possible. You could hear the horror in his voice,” said Bettano in a 47-page interview conducted by Massachusetts State Police on June 29.
Seconds later, the same voice through the radio yelled: “Oh, my God! Shots fired, shots fired, shots fired! He just killed a person or shot a person in the middle of the road.”
Bettano sped his cruiser down Veterans Road and was on scene in 30 seconds, according to the interview. Alone in the first cruiser to respond, he stopped about 20 feet from Cooper’s motionless body, and jumped out of the car, weapon drawn.
“Active shooter protocol is, even if there is any sign of life, you need to stop the threat, you need to stop the killing,” Bettano recalled. “So I immediately... yelled down the street: ‘Where’s the shooter, where’s the shooter, where’s the shooter?’”
A resident pointed east and Bettano whipped around, making direct eye contact with Allen. In less than a second, Bettano took in the features of the suspect: young face, light skin, dark hair.
Long pants, white shirt, black gun in hand.
Holding the weapon at his side, Allen emerged slowly from an alleyway off Shirley Street.
Bettano realized he needed to take cover, and quickly moved around the corner of a brick building housing a laundromat. Two residents came running down the street, and he grabbed each one, pushed them behind him to shield them from the shooter, and warned them to stay down.
All the while, Allen advanced toward them.
Bettano moved away from the bystanders and ducked behind an SUV parked on the street. Allen kept coming.
“At this point I’m — I’m stating orders to: ‘Stop, stop, drop the weapon, drop the weapon!” Bettano told state police. But Allen “kept advancing, kept advancing, passed by the two civilians, and he was just focused on me and I was focused on him.”
When Allen lifted his weapon, Bettano fired multiple rounds, and saw at least one of the bullets strike Allen, causing him to flinch backwards and drop his gun. Once Allen hit the ground, Bettano holstered his weapon and ran toward him. The officer’s next immediate thought, he said, was to save Allen’s life, so after calling for aid on the radio, he tried to force his hands into latex gloves to apply QuikClot combat gauze to Allen’s wounds.
Cutting Allen’s shirt off with shears, Bettano noticed two gunshot wounds on the suspect’s lower right abdomen and one on his neck.
Allen, however, continued to struggle to get back up.
“At one point he gets up to his feet and I have to pick him up around the waist and I flip him over and slam him down as hard as I could,” Bettano told state police. “He landed on his head and neck.”
Still fighting with Allen, Bettano managed to apply gauze to the wound in Allen’s neck, which was now heavily bleeding. Backup arrived in the form of police, firefighters, and paramedics, and Bettano said it took five people to hold Allen down and strap him to the gurney. Allen died of his injuries shortly thereafter.
Hayden’s finding that Bettano’s actions were justified marks the final legal review by local officials of his actions that day. Bettano, who has remained on the force, received the George L. Hanna Award For Bravery last year, the highest honor for law enforcement in Massachusetts, and a mountain of praise from the bystanders who watched him stop Allen that day.
“Sergeant Bettano must’ve went through good training,” said one witness, “because he took that shot and he saved our lives.”
Ivy Scott can be reached at ivy.scott@globe.com. Follow her @itsivyscott. John R. Ellement can be reached at john.ellement@globe.com. Follow him @JREbosglobe.