12 June 2024
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The fatal shooting of a Belfast man by police this week, after he allegedly threatened to burn his building down and then charged at officers with a flaming gas canister, came as a surprise to some — but not all — of his neighbors.
Daniel Ryan, 65, mostly kept to himself in the years that his neighbors knew him, exchanging small talk and friendly gestures with them, and not creating any disturbances. But some of them said they did observe him acting erratically in the week before his death.
Whatever its origins, Ryan appears to have reached some sort of breaking point on Monday afternoon. At around 1:30 p.m., he allegedly called police to report that he was going to burn down his apartment building at 63 Cedar St. if officers didn’t respond, and then ran at officers with the gas tank that was on fire when they arrived, according to a statement from the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office and Belfast Police Department.
In response, Sgt. Nicholas Oettinger of the sheriff’s office shot and killed Ryan. Oettinger is now on leave as the state attorney general’s office investigates the case, as is standard in police shootings.
The attorney general’s office declined to provide more information about the shooting on Wednesday.
It’s not clear whether Ryan had any family, but some of his closest neighbors said that they had recently noticed a shift in his behavior.
Two tenants who lived next door to Ryan declined to give their names, but said that he had been acting strangely for at least a week leading up to his death.
When a yard sale was happening in the neighborhood on June 2, they said they could hear Ryan yelling in his apartment, mostly unintelligibly, and he also removed the screen from a window and threw pieces of paper onto the lawn below. At one point, he shouted out commands for someone to get the police to come and get him, they said. He then appeared to have left town for a couple days.
“We could tell that he was struggling. I don’t know what sprung it on, but his mental health just declined,” said one of the tenants. “It was pretty recent, seemed to escalate very fast.”
Aside from some brief encounters, Ryan was mostly a stranger to the other residents of his quiet neighborhood, which is just outside downtown Belfast at the intersection of Pearl and Cedar streets.
“I saw him, I would nod to him, but I didn’t know him,” David Leach, 64, a neighbor who lived diagonally across the street from Ryan, said. In the seven years that Leach and his wife have lived in Belfast, they had never had an extended or in-depth conversation, let alone relationship, with Ryan.
Sasha Kutsy, who lives on Pearl Street but often walks past Cedar, would bid Ryan good morning when their paths crossed. Ryan would usually be smoking a cigarette, she recalled.
“We didn’t really have contact, just pleasant exchanges,” Kutsy said. “I don’t know if anybody actually knew him well. That’s the only contact [with him] I had.”
Arielle and Mike Simone lived roughly four houses down from Ryan for the last 12 years. Although they walk up and down Cedar Street with their dogs three times a day, the pair had never seen him before.
Neither Kutsy nor the Simones knew Ryan’s name.