Rankin shot dead 18-year-old William Chapman at a Walmart last month, four years after he was barred from patrols for killing another citizen. But he is a good fit for a police force that goes to great lengths to attract military men

Before Officer Stephen Rankin fatally shot 18-year-old William Chapman, when an autopsy found the first unarmed man he killed was shot 11 times, residents of this city in southern Virginia voiced their dismay on the website of a local newspaper.

“Talk to the men and women in our armed forces who face people with weapons every day,” wrote one. “You don’t use deadly force against unarmed citizens – ever.”

One commenter, however, stood out for his combative endorsement of Rankin’s actions during the April 2011 encounter with Kirill Denyakin, a 26-year-old Kazakhstani cook.

“What’s the difference if it was one round or 11 rounds or 111 rounds?” he wrote, using the screen name ‘yourealythinkthat’. “When I was in Iraq, that would have been a good shoot,” he said later. “In fact, nobody would have really given it a second thought.”

Speaking under oath six months and 246 supportive comments later, Rankin, a US navy veteran, admitted that ‘yourealythinkthat’ was him.

The jury in a $22m civil lawsuit brought by Denyakin’s family nonetheless found in Rankin’s favour. By then, a grand jury had declined to indict him for killing Denyakin while responding to a 911 call about the 26-year-old banging drunkenly and aggressively on the door of a building where he had been staying with friends.

Rankin alleged that when confronted, Denyakin charged at him and reached into his waistband. The officer said he feared the cook would pull out a weapon.

William Chapman and Kiril Denyakin. Composite: Family photos

Rankin’s use of a pseudonym online was understandable. He was chided by police chiefs when he publicly referred on Facebook to his firearms case as “Rankin’s box of vengeance” and said it “would be better if i was dirtying them instead of cleaning them!”

For a while, his Facebook avatar was a screen print of a photograph depicting a Serb left hanging from a lamp post by invading Nazi forces in 1943.

Despite being cleared in the courts, Rankin was barred by chiefs from returning to patrols for three years. One day short of the four-year anniversary of Denyakin’s shooting, he would shoot dead Chapman, an unarmed black teenager suspected of shoplifting, following a struggle in the parking lot of a Walmart superstore. He has now been returned to administrative leave.

‘He was afraid of his own shadow’

Rankin was a good fit for the Portsmouth police department, a force that maintains a strong military streak by drawing a large proportion of recruits from troops departing the vast US navy base in neighbouring Norfolk.

Chiefs go to great lengths to catch the eye of active young men looking for their next career after demobilising from the military. A recruitment video used by the department features a team of officers in military-style uniforms staging a Swat raid on the house of a robbery suspect. A sniper in bush camouflage lies in wait ready to take out escapees.

Rankin arrived in Virginia after his own stint in the navy, where he had previously been stationed in Everett, Washington, and worked as a master-at-arms responsible for security. He left in 2007 as a petty-officer second class.

It was in the military that Rankin received his law enforcement training, during an intensive six-week course at the US naval base in Kings Bay, Georgia.

Stephen Rankin. Photograph: Facebook

Rankin told attorneys during questioning in 2012 that he was deployed to Ash Shuaybah, Kuwait, where the US base Camp Spearhead served as a staging post for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. After five years of service, he joined the Portsmouth police department in August 2007.

Rankin hails from San Bernardino, California, where at 20 he was convicted of driving a motorcycle without a full licence, according to court records.

Portsmouth officials said he was given three internal awards in 2009 and 2010 for outstanding performance and handling a crime scene with a large crowd. However, one officer who worked alongside Rankin said he was unsteady. “He was afraid of his own shadow,” said the officer, who has since left the department.

And several complaints were filed about his use of force, according to a police supervisor in the department at the time. The retired supervisor told the Guardian that senior commanders were formally warned by Rankin’s lieutenant weeks before his first fatal shooting that he was “dangerous” and likely to cause someone harm.

Asked twice during a telephone interview why Rankin had been allowed to continue policing the public, Portsmouth police chief Edward Hargis said: “That’s a personnel matter and I can’t comment.”

Hargis later added in a statement provided by a spokeswoman: “All administrative matters are taken very seriously and brought to a logical conclusion.”

Rankin was divorced in 2009, later blaming the process for prompting his controversial Facebook picture. He now lives with his longterm girlfriend, Dawn Burrows, an emergency medic, who happened to be in the ambulance that arrived to collect Denyakin after he was shot.

Lawyers for Denyakin’s family said his mother rejected an offer of a settlement of several hundred thousand dollars shortly before the verdict was reached.

By then, Rankin had used his online persona to make his feelings about their legal action perfectly clear.

“22 mil wont buy your boy back,” he wrote. Elsewhere he noted most Americans couldn’t hope to earn such sums in an entire career, “let alone a habitual drunk working as a hotel cook”.

‘I can’t do that to you’: a second fatal encounter

The Walmart superstore in Portsmouth where William Chapman was killed. Photograph: Laurence Mathieu-Léger/Guardian

One morning late this April, Rankin encountered Chapman at the edge of the parking lot of Portsmouth’s Walmart. Store staff had reported a shoplifting, and Rankin suspected Chapman was the culprit. Police still refuse to say whether the 18-year-old was actually found to be carrying any stolen merchandise.

According to two construction workers who were building another store at the same mall that morning, a struggle ensued when Chapman broke free of Rankin, who was trying to handcuff him against a parked car at 7.35am. Rankin’s Taser appeared to be knocked from his hand, the workers said.

During another online discussion of Denyakin’s killing back in 2011, Rankin had in any case dismissed suggestions that he should have used a stun gun to subdue a combative arrestee rather than opt for deadly force.

“Assuming the officer is confident he can hit the target the first time in the less than one second he has to make the choice and fire, the Taser can still fail if one of the probes doesn’t connect, a wire gets broken, or any number of other reasons,” wrote Rankin.

He once again elected to open fire, fatally wounding Chapman. Portsmouth police and state investigators have so far declined to say how many times Rankin pulled the trigger this time. “The cause of death is gunshot wounds of face and chest,” Donna Rice, an official in the chief medical examiner’s office, said in an email.

However, Chapman’s mother, Sallie, claims her son’s hands were so badly wounded in the encounter that funeral workers told her they could not meet her request to lay them across his chest. “As a mother, I can’t do that to you,” she quoted one funeral home staff member as telling her. It is unclear how his hands came to be injured.

The construction workers, Paul Akey and Leroy Woodman, gave slightly different accounts of what happened to local television crews. Akey, 59, said Chapman “went nuts and started whaling” on Rankin during the arrest, and was then shot when he “came at” the officer, who had retreated. Akey said Rankin was “in the right”.

But Woodman, 27, described the encounter as “a tussle” and appeared to suggest Chapman was felled before he could clash with the officer. Both construction workers, who have since been interviewed by police, declined to comment to the Guardian.

“[Rankin] stepped back a couple steps and the guy, he pulled his shirt off and took a couple steps towards the cop like he was ready to fight,” said Woodman. “So the cop opened fire and that was the end of it.” Chapman was pronounced dead at 7.45am.

William Chapman: ‘My son is gone and nobody is trying to help me understand’ Read more

The officer had been back on the beat only for a little over a year. When he returned to work in June 2011 after two months of paid leave following the shooting of Denyakin, he was made to wait another two years and nine months before commanders allowed him to return to frontline policing. He was confined to the office and paperwork.

Rankin told attorneys for Denyakin’s family in 2012 that he had received standard firearms training in the navy, including classes from the National Rifle Association on being a pistol instructor. Less typical, however, was his qualification in the Marine Corps martial arts program.

Rankin’s resume states that in 2005 he received a grey belt in the program, which trains US marines, and other naval officers working alongside them, in hand-to-hand combat. To earn the grey belt, officers must be proficient in a range of fighting techniques intended to “stun the aggressor” and “stop an aggressor’s attack”.

Among these techniques are chokeholds designed to render an aggressor unconscious, hip throws to fell them, along with chin jabs, karate chops, elbow strikes, knee strikes, axe stomps and a series of different kicks.

Through the professional association that represents him and 4,000 other police officers in Virginia, attorneys for Rankin did not respond to a request for comment.

