The Maine Attorney General ruled that a Waldo County sheriff’s deputy was justified when he shot and killed a Belfast man who was swinging a burning gas can toward police.

Daniel Ryan, 65, was killed by Sgt. Nicholas Oettinger in June 2024 after calling Waldo County dispatch and threatening to burn down a six-unit apartment building, according to the results of the investigation released Friday by the Office of the Maine Attorney General.

“When Sgt. Oettinger shot Mr. Ryan, he reasonably believed that Mr. Ryan was posing an imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death, not only to Sgt. Oettinger, but also to the other two officers accompanying him, as well as other individuals occupying units in the apartment building,” Attorney General Aaron Frey wrote in his report.

The attorney general’s office investigates all police uses of deadly force in Maine. It has never found a police shooting unjustified.

Arriving officers from the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office and Belfast Police Department could hear Ryan breaking glass and threatening to set the building on fire. After police had knocked the door down with a sledgehammer, Oettinger, armed with a rifle, entered the apartment, the report reads.

Ryan then came out of a room holding a five-gallon gas can with “flames shooting out of the top” and was swinging it in the direction of the officers, according to investigators who reviewed the body camera footage.

Oettinger then told Ryan to put his hands up and drop the can. When Ryan did not comply, he shot him out of concern that the flaming gas can would explode and hurt him and the other officers, he told investigators.

Ryan was declared dead at the scene with gunshot wounds to his chest and abdomen when firefighters went into the apartment to extinguish the flames.