Body camera showed victim with hands raised, 17 feet from officer
A Pennsylvania police officer was charged on Tuesday with voluntary manslaughter for last week’s fatal shooting of a 22-year-old college student who went to the wrong house after a night out celebrating a friend’s birthday, Montgomery County officials said.
Cpl Sean Farrell of the Upper Pottsgrove police turned himself in to Montgomery County detectives. Magisterial District Judge Cathleen Rebar set bail at $75,000 and ordered Farrell to turn in all weapons to state police as a condition of his release, a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s office said. Farrell has a preliminary hearing scheduled for September 10.
At a news conference, District Attorney Kevin Steele said Farrell “had less-than-lethal options and did not need to resort to shooting Pysher.” In a subsequent news release, the office detailed the investigation’s findings: “The investigation found that Cpl Farrell had less-than-lethal options on his utility belt that he did not employ, including a taser. At the time of the shooting, the officer was a safe distance from Pysher behind a car, and the victim had his hands in the air and did not possess any type of weapon. Mr Pysher was not a threat. This is not a legal use of deadly force, leading to the charge of Voluntary Manslaughter.”
Body-camera footage reviewed by investigators documented the sequence of events. After a resident called 911 to report someone trying to break into the back door of a home, Farrell was the first officer on the scene. His body-worn camera showed him walking down the driveway with his gun drawn, using its light to illuminate the way, the release said.
Standing behind a car in the driveway, Farrell saw Pysher on the home’s patio near the back door. Farrell yelled: “Police, let me see your hands.” He then yelled: “Hands up, hands up now, drop to the ground.” Pysher is seen on video raising his hands as he began walking toward the officer and continuing to walk in that direction as Farrell repeated the command to drop to the ground, the release said. Farrell yelled again: “Drop to the ground,” then: “Stop or I’ll …” — but before he finished the sentence, he fired two shots, hitting Pysher twice in the chest, the District Attorney’s office said. Pysher was 17 to 20 feet from Farrell when he was shot.
Farrell later told another officer who arrived after the shooting that Pysher had charged him, “screaming and yelling and wouldn’t get down on the ground,” according to an affidavit filed with the criminal complaint. The body-worn camera video does not show that happening, the affidavit said.
The investigation found that Pysher had been out at several bars earlier in the evening to celebrate a friend’s 21st birthday. A designated driver took the group to the home of the birthday celebrant around 11 p.m. Pysher left about half an hour later to walk half a mile to another friend’s house to keep drinking but ended up at the wrong house, the release said.
Glen Pysher, the victim’s father, has said he believes his son tried to enter what he thought was his friend’s house. “He tried to open the doorknob and obviously startled the homeowner,” Glen Pysher told the Associated Press. “From what we understand, he announced: ‘Hey! Open the door!’ because he thought he was at his friend’s house.” His son then sat down on the back porch and contacted his friends, who realized he was in the wrong place and set out to find him, the father said.
An attorney for the Pysher family thanked the prosecutor’s office in a statement. “The family is grateful for the work of the Montgomery county district attorney’s office and they are looking forward to justice in this horribly tragic, preventable and reckless conduct that took the life of their son,” attorney Ken Fulginiti said.
Philip Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University who maintains a nationwide database of roughly 25,000 cases of police officers arrested since 2005, provided context for the charge. According to Stinson’s data, 218 local sworn police officers had been charged with murder or manslaughter in an on-duty fatal police shooting between January 2005 and the end of July 2026. Several cases remain pending. To date, 78 officers have been convicted of a crime in those shootings, while 107 have been acquitted or had their cases dismissed. In Pennsylvania, 10 officers had been charged in that time, six of whom were convicted.
Stinson said there were fluctuations in the number of officers charged over the years, but given there are close to a thousand fatal police encounters every year, those fluctuations seemed statistically insignificant. “These are ugly cases. The facts are never easy,” Stinson said. “Grand juries seem to have a similar issue as criminal jurors. They are very reluctant to second-guess the split-second, often life or death decisions of an on-duty police officer in a potentially violent street encounter.”
According to Stinson’s database, the majority of officers charged in on-duty fatal shootings shot an unarmed person. Among the 78 convictions, only 10 of the victims were armed with a gun at the time of the shootings.