Incident: August 10, 2026, Findlay, Ohio. Footage released by the City of Findlay: August 17, 2026.
Just after one in the afternoon on August 10, Findlay police were called to the Rodeway Inn on Broad Avenue.
There are two accounts of that call and they should stay separate rather than get blended. Findlay PD’s written release says a hotel guest called about a man threatening self-harm who said he had a gun, then hung up. Coverage of the department’s August 17 briefing describes a call from his wife, saying he had a gun, that he was threatening to shoot himself in front of their children, and that he said he would shoot at officers when they arrived.
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Officers found 37-year-old Holden Smith outside in the parking lot with a handgun in his hand. He was waving it and pointing it, including toward passing cars.
What followed was roughly forty-nine minutes of officers trying to talk him into putting it down. The department went back and counted: ninety-two separate commands. He kept telling them to shoot him. An officer told him this could be figured out, that nobody wanted to shoot him.
Then he raised the gun toward officers. One officer fired a single round and hit him. Smith was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Now the footage.
The shot is the thing. Long distance, outdoors, a moving subject, and a gun coming up — and one round put him down. That is a hell of a piece of shooting, and stopping at one round after forty-nine minutes of that kind of pressure is its own kind of discipline. The movement and the communication around it are clean too: get behind me, get back, shots fired, two on that left side. Nobody freelanced.
One equipment note that officers will notice: the patrol rifle comes out of a bag unsecured on the floor, not a rack.
Forty-nine minutes and ninety-two commands cuts both ways and both arguments are honest. That is extraordinary patience, and most agencies do not have it in them. It is also, viewed differently, forty-nine minutes of a plan that visibly was not working, in a motel lot in the middle of the afternoon with traffic going by and no apparent exit strategy. The entire justification rests on one motion at the very end.
Here is what has not been released, and it is a lot: the distance, whether any less-lethal option was on scene or deployed, whether a negotiator or a tactical team was ever requested during those forty-nine minutes, and any evidence inventory at all. Whether that handgun was real, loaded or operable has never been addressed publicly.
He said “shoot me,” but Findlay has not characterized it that way and the chief declined to discuss motive. The department did use that term for a different case, the October 2025 shooting of a 90-year-old man.
What gets lost in the argument is what a call like this costs the people who handle it. Nobody becomes a police officer hoping to shoot a man who spent forty-nine minutes begging for it. That officer now goes through a state investigation, an internal review, and likely a lawsuit, and carries the rest of it for a lot longer than that.
Ohio BCI is investigating. The officer is on critical incident leave. There are no findings yet.
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