The Portland police officer who shot and killed a man in a stairwell above the Pearl District Safeway in June told grand jurors the man was holding a woman hostage with a knife and had defied orders to drop his weapon.

The woman was bloody and naked from the waist down and David Wayne Downs held the knife to her throat, according to 383 pages of grand jury transcripts made public Tuesday by the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office.

Officer Nathan Kirby-Glatkowski said he didn’t want to shoot the man, but he thought Downs could kill the woman within seconds by moving the knife just an inch.

“I didn’t take this job to kill anyone,” he said.

But Kirby-Glatkowski said: “I had this very stark instant where I realized that I was playing with her life, and if I waited another moment and he stabbed her and killed her, then that was on me. And it’s my job to save her life. So I pulled the trigger slowly, deliberately.”

The grand jury found Kirby-Glatkowski justified in fatally shooting Downs, 38, with a single bullet to the head on June 9. Jurors determined Kirby-Glatkowski was acting in self-defense or defense of others. The officer had nearly three years of experience in law enforcement.

The woman, 36, told the grand jury that she was homeless and had just met Downs that day in Old Town when she asked him if he had a cigarette, marijuana or methamphetamines to smoke. The pair then headed toward a stairwell above the Safeway at Northwest 13th Avenue and Lovejoy Street to smoke, the woman said.

A lawyer who worked in the offices above the grocery store called 911 at 9:43 a.m. The lawyer, Michael Connors, told police he heard people yelling or fighting in the stairwell. Connors called back a short while later to say that when he told the people that police were on their way, a man yelled back that he had a knife, a bomb and a hostage.

The report of a bomb prompted the evacuation of the Safeway store.

Kirby-Glatkowski told the grand jury that he arrived at the building and waited for more back-up officers to arrive. He said he rode the elevator to the ninth-floor stairwell -- and he and four other officers then made their way down toward the sixth-floor stairwell, where they could hear Downs yelling and see the woman.

The officers stopped on a landing above Downs’ landing.

“He’s screaming at us,” Kirby-Glatkowski said. “... It’s all vitriol and anger. ... And his face is red. And he seems just ready to go.”

Kirby-Glatkowski continued: “Behind him, I can see the woman. She’s making herself as small as possible in the corner. She’s crying. She’s whimpering.”

Kirby-Glatkowski said the woman wasn’t wearing any clothes on her lower half and there was blood on her legs. He said although it didn’t look as if she was “bleeding out,” it did appear “she’s had a lot of trauma.”

The officer said police ordered Downs to drop the knife, but he was defiant -- swearing at the officers and declaring: “I’m not going to do that. ... This is going my way. ... I’ll kill you.” One of the officers fired less-than-lethal rounds at Downs, but they had no effect, Kirby-Glatkowski said.

Kirby-Glatkowski said he lay on the landing next to Officer Cassandra Wells and pointed his gun downward toward Downs. Kirby-Glatkowski said Downs grabbed the woman, pulled her up to her feet, held her to his chest with one arm like “a human shield," moved the knife to her throat and yelled “I’m going to kill her.”

Kirby-Glatkowski said Wells also was pointing her gun at Downs but said she didn’t have a good angle to take a shot.

“I was confident I could take that shot and accurately hit him and not her,” Kirby-Glatkowski said.

But Kirby-Glatkowski said he wanted to give the man one more chance, so he yelled down to him: “Just don’t do this. My name’s Nate. What’s your name?”

According to Kirby-Glatkowski, Downs responded: “Your (expletive) games aren’t ... going to work.”

Kirby-Glatkowski said that’s when he knew he had to shoot. He said he heard a loud pop, Downs “went down like the proverbial rag doll” and “there was blood everywhere.”

The woman told the grand jury that when she and Downs arrived at the building’s stairwell and parking garage earlier that morning, Downs falsely accused her of stealing his meth. She said she also thought Downs was mad at her because she refused to perform a sex act on him after he exposed his penis to her. She said he briefly forced her to perform the sex act.

The woman said when she tried to leave, Downs kept pushing her into a wall and a corner, injuring her head. She said she screamed. She said Downs also punched her head and she began to bleed from her forehead.

During her testimony, the woman appeared forgetful and confused. She said she has schizoaffective disorder and hears voices and hadn’t been taking medications because they make her feel sick.

The woman said she thought she had been wearing pants while she was being held hostage and that she might have taken them off earlier because Downs wanted to have sex with her. She said she thought she had put them back on when the two didn’t have sex.

The woman also said she hadn’t realized that Downs had been shot until a prosecutor informed her of that during her testimony. She said she thought Downs had let her go because police had arrived.

Read the grand jury testimony of Officer Nathan Kirby-Glatkowski here, starting on page 94.

-- Aimee Green

agreen@oregonian.com

o_aimee

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