A harassment call in Denver ended with an officer putting six rounds into the man who wouldn’t stop coming at him with a knife.
Denver Police were called to the area of 50th Avenue and Washington Street on July 5, just before noon. This wasn’t the first time. Officers had responded to that same address seven times over the two weeks prior, every one of them involving the same man — Wilson Guerra-Bravo, 26.
Officers find him with a kitchen knife in his hand. They give him commands. Drop the knife. He doesn’t. He runs instead.
They chase him, giving commands the entire way. He stops once. Then he’s off again. He stops a second time — at the corner of 50th and Washington — and this time he doesn’t run. He turns and comes at the officer, knife still in hand.
The officer tells him to drop it one more time. Guerra-Bravo doesn’t stop. The officer fires six rounds. Guerra-Bravo goes down, hit multiple times. Officers render aid on scene until paramedics arrive and take him to Denver Health Medical Center, where he remains hospitalized. He survived.
He’s now facing a charge of criminal attempt to commit homicide.
Here’s what people who’ve never done this job don’t understand: distance is time, and time is the only thing that keeps a foot pursuit from turning fatal for the officer. A man with a knife closing ground on you isn’t a hypothetical threat. He’s a countdown. Officers train on exactly this — the reactionary gap between a suspect raising a blade and an officer’s ability to respond isn’t measured in feelings, it’s measured in feet and fractions of a second.
Guerra-Bravo had every opportunity to end this without getting shot. Drop the knife. Stop running. Don’t turn back toward the officer holding it. He did none of that. Instead he closed the distance on a police officer while armed with a weapon capable of killing him in under two seconds.
Under Graham v. Connor, the question isn’t whether there was a “better” option in hindsight. It’s whether the officer’s response was objectively reasonable given what he knew, in that moment, facing an armed man advancing on him after refusing repeated commands. This case checks every box for that standard. Weapon in hand. Repeated warnings. Distance closing. No compliance.
Denver Police say Guerra-Bravo was known to the residents at that address — he’d helped a former tenant move out at some point and kept coming back afterward, despite being told to stay away. Why he escalated to pulling a knife on responding officers is still unclear, and investigators haven’t offered a motive.
What’s not unclear is what happened once that knife came out and he turned toward the officer instead of dropping it.
He’s alive. That’s more than his decision-making earned him.
