The ambush killings of two Connecticut police officers was likely fueled by an angry interaction the gunman had with police earlier, along with building pressures in his personal life and his abuse of alcohol and drugs, according to a report released Wednesday by the state’s Inspector General.

The report detailing how Bristol police Sgt. Dustin DeMonte and Officer Alex Hamzy were gunned down in the driveway of a home also found that a third officer who survived the 2022 attack was justified in fatally shooting the gunman, identified by police as Nicholas Brutcher.

Inspector General Robert Devlin’s investigation — required by law in cases of deadly force — describe Brutcher in a downward spiral in the face of mounting debt, his ex-wife’s pregnancy with a former friend, and a scolding by his mother following a traffic stop that evening.

Nevertheless, “It must be emphasized that Nicholas Brutcher is the murderer here,” it said. “It would be wrong to place any blame for the attack on the traffic stop officers or others in Nicholas Brutcher’s life.”

Brutcher made a false call to 911 on the night of Oct. 12, 2022, asking for help with his brother, who he claimed had been acting aggressively since the two were pulled over in a traffic stop after a bar fight earlier that night, the report said.

As DeMonte, Hamzy and Officer Alec Iurato approached Brutcher’s home in response to the call, Brutcher opened fire with an AR-15 style rifle from a hiding spot in some bushes in front of his parents’ house next door, striking all three officers, according to the report. Wearing a camouflage shirt, pants and vest, he then stood over DeMonte and Hamzy where they had fallen and fired dozens more shots at them in front of his horrified parents, Joseph and Catrina Brutcher, who had come outside.

“How proud are you of me? How proud?” Brutcher said as he fired, possibly addressing his parents, according to the report.

His mother’s nonstop screams were caught on police body camera video.

“I don’t think I ever screamed like that before in my life,” Catrina Brutcher told investigators. “My son walked over to one of the officers that was down and just shot him point blank in his head. I was just screaming at him to stop.”

Joseph Brutcher said his son was “in a trance-type thing.”

Iurato, struck in the leg, was able to get away. Bracing himself against a police cruiser, he fired a single shot, striking Brutcher and killing him, the report said.

Friends and relatives said Brutcher had in recent months talked about suicide, describing a morbid side that found its way into a stand-up comedy act that one friend called “dark and tasteless.”

“He told jokes about dead babies, suicide, and disabled persons,” the report said.

The evening had begun at a bar where Brutcher had planned to perform during an open-mic forum, but instead got into a drunken fight with a patron, leading a bartender to call police, according to the report.

After Brutcher and his brother, Nathan, left the bar, officers pulled over their truck and had it towed, saying Nicholas Brutcher was too drunk to drive and Nathan Brutcher had an expired driver’s license. Their mother was called to pick them up. At the scene, she scolded a belligerent Nicholas, an interaction that likely left him feeling humiliated, the report said.

“I was embarrassed and I told him that,” Catrina Brutcher said. “I said, `Nick you’re embarrassing your family; you’re embarrassing our name.’”

Authorities concluded there was not enough evidence to charge Nathan Brutcher, who was struck in the initial round of gunfire.

Nicholas Brutcher fired a total of 83 rounds: 59 from the assault rifle and 24 from a 9 mm handgun, the report said.

“Twenty-four shots landed on Officer Hamzy. Six shots landed on Sergeant DeMonte,” it said.

Brutcher had 14 registered firearms, according to the report, including the assault weapon, now banned in Connecticut. He had purchased the weapon in 2010 and was grandfathered in under the law, but there is no record that he applied for a required certificate of possession or the large capacity magazines in his possession.

His blood alcohol level at .234 was about three times the legal limit to drive, toxicology results showed.

An analysis of his phone suggested that Brutcher was in a “toxic” relationship with a woman, who on the day of the attack told him she may have been pregnant. Information on the phone also indicated he had gotten another woman pregnant, whose due date was in October 2022, around the time of the shooting, the report said.

“The analysis of Nicholas Brutcher’s phone, interviews of family/friends, and a comprehensive review of all collected evidence provided insight into the stressors of Nicholas Brutcher’s life that likely contributed to the ambush attack on officers,” the report said.

DeMonte, 35, was a 10-year veteran officer and co-recipient of his department’s 2019 Officer of the Year award. His wife was expecting their third child at the time of his death.

Hamzy, 34, worked eight years for his hometown police force. Like DeMonte, he was an adviser to a police cadet program.

Iurato joined the Bristol department in 2018.

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Thompson reported from Buffalo, New York.

MILFORD, Conn. (WTNH) — For the seventh consecutive day, car dealerships, parts suppliers and repair shops are dealing with a nationwide outage of a widely used software that was caused by a cyberattack.

CDK, a software used by 15,000 retail dealerships nationwide, experienced back-to-back cyberattacks last week. It caused the company to shut down all of its systems as an abundance of caution, but the issue has still not been resolved.

For dealerships like Napoli Nissan in Milford, the last seven days have been a time warp. 

“We’re going 65-70 years back in time,” said Brendan Camilleri, the general sales manager. “Everything is all hand-written. Invoices are hand-written…everything from service to sales.”

Camilleri said the software is used for everything from purchasing to repairs. He added while business continues while the system down, the work is piling up.

“Over the last several years, we’ve automated everything to make a buyer’s experience much more smoother, and without having software to back us up makes it incredibly difficult,” he said, adding it has also caused delays for customers purchasing cars. 

Service shops like Turnpike Motors in Newington said it is also affected by the cyberattack, which is causing delays in getting parts from its suppliers.

“If we call up and ask them if there’s a part they may have showed it in the inventory at one point, and they have to get out of the chair and go to the shelf to see if they actually have it,” Doug Fernandez, who owns Turnpike Motors, said. “All their inventory is frozen. They can’t keep count of it. They don’t know if they have one or 10 of anything right now.”

Fernandez and Camilleri both said they’ve received no indication as to when the software could be back online, but added the implications could have a ripple effect for months.  

“It’s just messy,” Fernandez said. “The worst part about it is there’s a financial hit because you’re going to have to quote stuff out to deliver things and you’re going to have the wrong information and as the businesses we’re going to have to pay for those differences. And there’s just going to be a bunch of invoices and things that get lost.” 

CDK Global did not respond to News 8’s request for comment.

Connecticut abolished capital punishment in April 2012. That made Connecticut the 17^th state in this country to do so and the fifth state to end the death penalty after 2010.

Soon, the state will have a chance to do what no other abolitionist state has done. In its next legislative session, Connecticut will consider a bill that would ban the sale of drugs or materials for use in an execution by any business in the state.

Two state legislators, Sen. Saud Anwar and Rep. Joshua Elliott, are leading this effort. As they argue: “This legislation is the logical and moral extension of our commitment to end capital punishment in our state. We do not believe in the death penalty for us here in Connecticut, and we will not support it anywhere else.”

This is not the first time the Nutmeg State has tried to lead the way in the campaign to end America’s death penalty.

At the time it abolished capital punishment, its new law only prevented any new death sentences from being imposed. It left 11 men on the state’s death row awaiting execution.

Three years later, in 2015, the state Supreme Court decided by a 4–3 vote that applying the death penalty only for past cases was unconstitutional. Writing for the majority, Justice Richard Palmer wrote, “We are persuaded that, following its prospective abolition, this state’s death penalty no longer comports with contemporary standards of decency and no longer serves any legitimate penological purpose.”

The court found that it would be “cruel and unusual” to keep anyone on death row in a state that had “determined that the machinery of death is irreparable or, at the least, unbecoming to a civilized modern state.”

With this decision, not only did Connecticut get out of the execution business, but it also appeared at the time that the court’s decision would, as the New York Times put it, “influence high courts in other states … where capital punishment has recently been challenged under the theory that society’s mores have evolved, transforming what was once an acceptable step into an unconstitutional punishment.”

In fact, courts in Colorado and Washington soon followed the Connecticut example. At that point, it seemed that Connecticut’s involvement with the death penalty had come to an end.

Now, Anwar and Elliott are asking the state to again take the lead in trying to stop executions in states where the death penalty has not yet been abolished. The legislation they plan to introduce would, if passed, “prevent any Connecticut-based corporation from supplying drugs or other tools for executions.”

Before examining the rationale for this novel idea, let’s examine why it would be so significant. The recent history of lethal injection offers important clues.

From 1982, when the first execution by lethal injection was carried out, until 2009, every one of those executions proceeded using the same three-drug protocol. It involved a sedative, a paralytic, and a drug to stop the heart.

However, the post-2009 period witnessed the unraveling of the original lethal injection paradigm with its three-drug protocol. By 2016, no states were employing it. Instead, they were executing people with a variety of novel drugs or drug combinations.

The shift from one dominant drug protocol to many was made possible by the advent of a new legal doctrine that granted states wide latitude to experiment with their drugs. This doctrine began with a decision that said that legislatures could take whatever “steps they deem appropriate … to ensure humane capital punishment.”

Subsequently, developments in Europe and the United States made it very difficult for death penalty states to get reliable supplies of drugs for lethal injection. This was the result of efforts by groups like the British anti–death penalty group Reprieve, which launched its Stop Lethal Injection Project and targeted pharmaceutical companies and other suppliers of lethal injection drugs.

Companies selling drugs for executions found themselves on the receiving end of a shaming campaign. As a EuroNews report notes, in 2011, the European pharmaceutical company Lundbeck decided to stop distributing the drug pentobarbital “to prisons in U.S. states currently carrying out the death penalty by lethal injection.”

Later that year, the European Union banned the export of drugs that could be used for “capital punishment, torture, or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” EuroNews explains that “among the drugs that the EU banned in 2011 was sodium thiopental, another drug commonly used in US lethal injections as part of a three-drug method of execution.”

Around the same time, Hospira, an American company that produced sodium thiopental, issued a press release announcing that it had “decided to exit the market.” It did so, according to EuroNews, “amidst pressure from Italian authorities as the company’s production plant was based there.”

In 2016, as the New York Times notes, “the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced … that it had imposed sweeping controls on the distribution of its products to ensure that none are used in lethal injections, a step that closes off the last remaining open-market source of drugs used in executions.” That brought to 20 the number of American and European drug companies that have adopted such restrictions, citing either moral or business reasons.

The result was that death penalty states had to improvise to get the execution drugs they needed. As Maya Foa, who tracks drug companies for Reprieve, explained, “Executing states must now go underground if they want to get hold of medicines for use in lethal injection.”

By the end of 2020, states had used at least 10 distinct drug protocols in their executions. Some protocols were used multiple times, and some were used just once. Even so, the traditional three-drug protocol was all but forgotten: Its last use was in 2012.

Other death penalty states, like Alabama, have adopted new methods of execution. A few have revived previously discredited methods. Some, like Ohio, have stopped executing anyone, although the death penalty remains on the books.

This brings us back to Connecticut.

In an op-ed published in April of this year, Anwar and Elliott pointed out that Absolute Standards, a drug manufacturer based in their state, was supplying the execution drug pentobarbital to the federal government and other states. Pentobarbital, either alone or in combination with other drugs, has become a popular alternative to the traditional three-drug cocktail.

“Thanks to Absolute Standards, in his last year in office, Donald Trump was able to end a 17-year hiatus on federal executions and carry out a horrifying spree of 13 executions,” Anwar and Elliott wrote. “The company supplied the Trump administration pentobarbital, a drug that, when used in excess to kill, induces suffering akin to drowning.”

“Absolute Standards,” they explain, “is not a pharmaceutical corporation—it’s a chemical company that makes solution for machines. That’s why it’s flown under the radar since it began producing and supplying lethal injection drugs in 2018.”

Anwar and Elliott’s innovation in the campaign to end capital punishment has already paid dividends. Last week, the Intercept reported that the president of Absolute Standards told the publication that his company had stopped manufacturing pentobarbital.

However, the two legislators are going forward with their plan to introduce their bill during the 2025 legislative session.

As Anwar says, “I think that laws last longer than legislators and issues, and I feel that irrespective of [Absolute Standard’s] commitment, I am interested in having a law in the future … to make sure that we don’t have another similar situation that we learn about indirectly or directly five years, 10 years, 20 years from now.”

Connecticut should adopt the Anwar/Elliott proposal, and legislators in other abolitionist states should follow suit. They should prohibit pharmaceutical corporations, gas suppliers, medical equipment manufacturers, and other businesses in their states from letting their products and services be used in executions. If they do not believe that the death penalty is right for their state, they should not support it anywhere else.

Legislators in abolitionist states should use their power to block businesses from disseminating the instrumentalities of death. They should join Anwar and Elliott in saying, “There is no profit worth a human life.”