Though in the end, that’s how the 49-year-old died.

Schumacher fatally shot himself in the head after a SWAT team sniper spotted him through a window and shot him twice in the arm, according to a report from Cass County State’s Attorney Birch Burdick.

Renner said the SWAT negotiators decided not to employ the tactic because they had not trained to use it. “If it had been a tactic they were familiar with and a tactic they had trained on with, I would imagine that that might have been employed. I don’t know,” Renner said.

Ahlfeldt acknowledged that he had not heard of the tactic until his negotiators asked him about it. And he couldn’t describe what it would have entailed.

Still, Ahlfeldt went along with it because he felt the threat Schumacher posed to police and to the unevacuated residential neighborhood needed to be eliminated. At that point in the night, police were at a loss as to how to stop Schumacher from shooting, Renner said.

“Every time a bullet left his gun, we didn’t know who it was going to hit, who it was going to kill,” Ahlfeldt said. “We’d already lost one person.”