A San Diego foot pursuit ends at the Pacific Highway overpass. Why “no firearm recovered” doesn’t make this a bad shooting.
On June 30, San Diego PD contacted a man at his makeshift camp near Sea World Drive. Standard work — offering resources, moving people along.
He gave them a fake name. Called himself Bob McCarthy.
Problem is, they knew him. The name came back, and so did the truth: a parolee at large, an outstanding no-bail warrant, and a documented history of forcibly resisting officers. The second that hit the radio, he was already walking away. Then he was running.
The suspect — 44-year-old Judah McBreairty — took off southeast, down through the riverbeds toward Friars Road and the San Diego River. Officers stayed with him. Somebody tried to put a Taser on him, and it didn’t take. Too far, no connection.
Then, near the Pacific Highway overpass, he stopped running.
He turned around. He squared up on the officer chasing him. And he brought his hands up like he was pointing a gun.
The officer fired. Roughly a dozen rounds.
Here’s where people who have never been in it get lost. They want to know if it was a real gun. They want the freeze-frame, the enhancement, the confirmation. And afterward, no firearm was recovered. McBreairty kept running, got away for a bit, and was taken into custody later with the help of a K9. He was booked on resisting arrest, illegal camping, and a parole violation.
No gun in his hand afterward. So let me tell you why that doesn’t make this a bad shooting.
You are running full speed after a parolee with a no-bail warrant. He knows exactly what’s waiting for him if he’s caught. He stops, spins, squares up, and thrusts his hands out at you in a shooting posture. That is the picture. That is all of it. That is what you get to work with.
You do not get to slow the tape down in that moment. You don’t get to stand there and study the object — weigh it, identify it, decide it’s a Glock versus a phone versus an air gun versus a closed fist — before you’re allowed to protect yourself. That is not how human reaction time works, and it is not what the law requires. The standard is what a reasonable officer perceives in that instant, not what a review board finds in a riverbed a day later.
Could he have tossed a gun during a foot chase through a riverbed? Absolutely. Could he have been dumb enough to point an empty hand or a fake at an officer? Also yes. Neither one changes the officer’s decision by an inch. The threat was the movement, not the metal.
The good news is simple. Nobody got hit — not the officer, not the suspect, not a bystander. And every choice that led to that overpass was McBreairty’s: the fake name, the run, the stop, the turn, the hands. The officer read what he was shown and made the call that let him go home.
That is the whole thing. When a fleeing felon turns and points, you respond to the threat you are given, in the fraction of a second you are given to read it.
