Incident: Monday, August 3, 2026, about 5:30 p.m., Rosamond, in unincorporated Kern County, California. Footage released September 8, 2026 by the Kern County Sheriff’s Office.
THE CALL
Dispatched as a peace disturbance. A noise complaint.
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The man who called 911 is the man this ends with. Joshua Dribin, 22, called it in himself. His complaint was that a neighbor kept revving an engine outside at night while he was trying to sleep in his car. He also told the dispatcher he was going to badly hurt the neighbor.
That is what the deputy had going in.
WHAT HAPPENED
A single deputy contacted him. The first part of the conversation is ordinary — the neighbor, the speed bumps, the engine, a man who says he has already asked him to stop.
Then he says he is going to get his sword and go kill the man. He goes inside and comes back out armed with it.
The deputy called for assistance and started backing away. Dribin climbed his own fence and advanced on him. The deputy kept giving ground and kept ordering him to stop and drop it. Dribin ran at him after trying to enter his patrol vehicle, trying to get the door open. The suspect then started to run toward the deputy, who fired.
The Sheriff’s Office says he would not obey orders to stop and kept yelling “shoot” and “kill me.” On the ground afterward he said, “I wanted you to shoot me.”
He was hit and he lived. Deputies pulled medical supplies out of their vehicles and worked on him until the ambulance came. His injuries were non-life-threatening as of the last reporting. No deputies and no civilians were hurt. A sword was recovered.
THE BREAKDOWN
That call went sideways fast, and patrol does that to you. It is the nothing calls that turn. This one turned the moment he said he was going to get a sword and go kill somebody.
The chit-chat up front is fine. You get a lot of weirdos calling. A guy sleeping in his car, mad about somebody revving an engine — that is a Tuesday. The red flag is not there yet.
It shows up in one sentence. “I’ll be right back.” He has made a decision and he tells you what it is.
Now, do I recommend chasing him back into that yard? No. Did the deputy do the right thing holding his ground? Sure. Could he have kept better eyes on him? Probably. It does not look like he had good visual while the man was out of sight. And I would have called for backup the second he said he was going to get a sword and kill his neighbor, not after he came back out with it.
For the Taser crowd: he is by himself. You do not ditch your lethal option when a man with a long blade is walking at you and acting like this. You do not go to a Taser, and you do not try to run both at once like a gunfighter in a movie.
Watch the ground he gives up. All of that space is space this deputy is allowing this man to occupy, and I do not say that as a criticism — he is creating distance, which is the right instinct. But you know the twenty-one-foot problem with a knife. With a sword you are giving away a couple more feet on top of it. You cannot let him close.
Then he picks it up, sprints, slows, and the deputy knows he is too close and fires. That is the sequence.
Legally he could have fired well before that. The man was ignoring orders, threatening to kill a neighbor, telling the deputy to shoot him, and advancing with a sword.
Two more things. He gets shot and he stays on his feet. I am fairly sure he goes down because he was told to, not because the round put him there. People do not just stop when you shoot them — it depends entirely on where they are hit, and if this man had decided to sprint straight through, maybe he gets there and maybe he does not.
And did the deputy wait too long? No. It worked out. The second the man started sprinting, he did what he had to do.
WHERE IT STANDS
He lived and he is charged — assault with a deadly weapon on a peace officer, resisting a peace officer using force, exhibiting a deadly weapon to resist arrest, and resisting and obstructing.
There is no plea. A judge ordered a competency evaluation and suspended criminal proceedings, the September hearing was postponed, and no new date has been set publicly.
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