Less than a month after being shot multiple times while responding to a disturbance at America’s Car Mart, a hospitalized Bowling Green Police Department Officer Matt Davis told two Kentucky State Police detectives that the person who accompanied him to the incident as a civilian ride-along saved his life.

Davis made the disclosure during a police interview with members of the KSP Critical Incident Response Team, who investigated the July 6, 2023, incident, in which Esteban Lowery fired several shots that struck Davis in the legs, arms and torso.

“I would’ve got killed,” Davis told KSP detectives Matt Wise and Ezra Stout during an Aug. 2, 2023, interview at TriStar Skyline Medical Center in Nashville. “There’s no doubt that (my ride-along) saved my life because had he not engaged Mr. Lowery when my legs went down I was at the mercy of Mr. Lowery …  if he’d have walked up to me to execute me, I couldn’t have got away.”

Davis’ ride-along, at the time a U.S. Army specialist stationed at Fort Campbell, told investigators that he emerged from hiding behind an office desk with an America’s Car Mart employee during a lull in gunfire to stop the 41-year-old Lowery, subduing him with a choke hold.

BGPD officers who responded in the minutes after Davis was wounded heard the ride-along yell out that Lowery was dead and that he had strangled him.

After filing an open records request, the Daily News this week received hundreds of pages of police reports and interview transcripts, along with several hours of recorded interviews with multiple BGPD officers, Davis, his ride along, footage from body cameras worn by Davis and other BGPD officers, security camera footage from the business and police radio traffic.

The documents chronicle the actions taken after Lowery brandished a 9-millimeter pistol in an office of the Russellville Road building barely a minute after Davis encountered him.

KSP, which has statewide jurisdiction to investigate incidents involving local police departments in which a person dies, interviewed several people and analyzed the video footage to determine whether Lowery’s death was criminal.

The findings of KSP’s investigation were turned over in August to Warren County Commonwealth’s Attorney Kori Beck Bumgarner, and a grand jury that met in October declined to return an indictment, with Bumgarner later issuing a statement that the grand jury “concluded that there was not a sufficient factual or legal basis to levy criminal charges regarding” Lowery’s death.

A state medical examiner’s report determined that Lowery died from manual strangulation and noted two wounds on his body consistent with being struck by prongs from a Taser.

A gunshot wound to Lowery’s left foot, and a fracture to that foot, were noted, and the medical examiner’s report documented a bullet entering and exiting his left shoe near the toe.

A toxicology report noted the presence of methamphetamine, amphetamine and THC in Lowery’s system.

KSP analysis of body camera footage determined Lowery fired 16 shots in slightly more than six seconds, with further analysis determining that all shots fired at the scene came from Lowery’s gun.

Footage from Davis’ body camera showed that the officer did not draw his agency-issued firearm as he scrambled to get away from Lowery and attempted frantically to take cover while warning everyone in the business that Lowery had a gun.

Footage reveals dramatic escalation

Davis was the first officer to respond to America’s Car Mart, where an employee contacted police to report a disturbance involving Lowery.

Security camera footage from the lobby of the business shows Lowery entering the frame for the first time from a side entrance at 4:53 p.m., July 6, 2023, carrying a binder filled with papers and wearing a backpack.

An employee directs him to an office.

The same security camera shows Davis entering the business at 5:22 p.m., greeted by four employees just inside the front entrance.

Davis’ ride-along follows the officer a few feet behind, just out of arm’s reach.

In between that time, dealership employees spoke with Lowery, who claimed to have access to a car on the lot through an irrevocable trust.

One employee told KSP detectives that Lowery claimed that vehicle titles and U.S. money meant nothing to him, and that Lowery became loud and angry during the conversation and refused to leave the business, which prompted employees to call the police.

Davis’ body camera shows him being directed to an office at the far end of the main hallway, and the officer stops in the doorway and sees Lowery seated in a chair and talking on a cellphone.

“Come get me because I’m about to go off on the f***** police,” Lowery said while on the phone.

Davis attempts to talk to Lowery, who responds that the officer has no authority and tells him to leave.

Davis says he’s going to wait for another officer to arrive, but an irate Lowery gathers his backpack and gets up.

“I ain’t going nowhere, I promise you that,” Lowery said. “If you put handcuffs on me, I promise you, I’ll make you stand down.”

Davis tells Lowery to stay in the office, and Lowery tells the officer to move out of the way and that Davis doesn’t get to tell him what to do.

The body camera shows Lowery walking toward the office as if to leave, and Davis puts out a hand and tells Lowery to sit down and remain in the office.

At that point, Lowery pulls back and tells Davis not to touch him, then pulls out a handgun from the area of his waistband and chambers a round.

Davis sees the gun and runs from the office, gets on his police radio to alert BGPD headquarters that Lowery has a gun, runs into some of the offices along the hallway and alerts other employees that Lowery is armed.

Lowery appears to follow Davis, pointing his gun at the officer and yelling at him.

Davis pulls out his Taser and yells out “Taser, Taser,” and the gun can be heard being deployed and then four shots from Lowery’s gun are heard, at which point, less than three minutes into Davis’ 49-minute body camera footage, the sound cuts out and the screen is blurred.

KSP said that Davis fired his Taser about 0.185 seconds before Lowery fired his first shot, and that Lowery fired 16 shots in slightly more than 6 seconds.

On the office lobby security camera, Davis reemerges at 5:24 p.m., scrambling to a position near the front desk, unholsters his Taser, turns and fires it.

The area of the screen containing Davis is blurred, but the Taser is seen flying out of his hand toward the front door, and Davis collapses to the floor.

Less than a minute later, a handgun is seen flying into frame, landing over Davis’ shoulder. An employee then kicks the gun further down the hallway.

An employee told police that he came out of the office after he heard the last of the gunshots, Lowery bumped into him in the hallway, and the ride-along grabbed Lowery.

The employee described kicking the gun out of Lowery’s hand as he and the ride-along struggled, and then kicking the gun down the hall to get it as far away from Lowery as possible.

Ride-along intervenes

KSP documented two interviews with the ride-along about the incident.

The first one, conducted outside the business by KSP Trooper Walker Hogan, lasted five minutes and occurred about a half-hour after the shooting.

The ride-along gave a brief description of the shooting, then said he saw Lowery attempting to leave and that his gun was empty.

“So I tackled him. I threw some punches with him, yes. I got some of my own too and I put him to the ground,” the ride-along told Hogan in video footage of the interview. “(Lowery) went to another office that I was originally in. I had him in a headlock and I kept him there until help arrived.”

Hogan heard from the ride-along that he had been taking cover behind a desk at the time the shots were fired and that Lowery was unconscious by the time other officers arrived.

The second interview, in which the ride-along brought an attorney with him, was conducted with Wise and Stout on July 11, 2023, at the Bowling Green-Warren County Drug Task Force and lasted one hour and 43 minutes.

The ride-along said Davis directed him to stay back during the call at the Car-Mart and that he took cover near a desk in a separate office with an employee when he realized Lowery had pulled a gun.

He told police he lost sight of Lowery and Davis as they went into the hallway, then heard gunfire.

He told police he witnessed through a window in the office as Lowery fired his last round and noticed that his gun was “in the locked position,” meaning it was empty of ammunition.

Diagramming his actions on an aerial diagram of the building, the ride-along described where he met Lowery and fought him.

After exchanging punches, the ride-along said he got Lowery to the ground and, as Lowery was facedown, got his left arm around Lowery’s neck.

“I was half belly on his back,” the ride-along told detectives. “My left leg was … in between his legs and I was to the side.”

The man can be heard screaming for help, both during a 911 call from an employee to report that Davis was down, and in body camera footage from BGPD officer Dale Barbiea, the first officer after Davis to respond.

Barbiea enters the business about two minutes after the shooting, sees Davis struggling to breathe, urges him to stay with him and gets on his police radio to report an officer down and a barricaded subject and request an ambulance.

Another officer arrives within seconds, the ride-along emerges from the office and Barbiea commands him to crawl toward them, the ride-along shouting “he’s dead.”

Asked at that time whether he shot Lowery, the ride-along said he strangled him.

When the officers, with their guns drawn, encounter Lowery in the office, he is on the floor unresponsive.

During the second interview, detectives asked the ride-along what would have happened it he had not acted as he had at the business.

“At this point, I might not even be talking to you,” he said.

The pairing with the ride-along

When Davis was interviewed by KSP, he told the detectives he did not know coming into his shift the day of the shooting that he would be paired with a ride-along, but he welcomed the opportunity.

The ride-along told detectives he was interested in a law enforcement career once his time in the Army was up, and had reached out some months earlier to BGPD.

He signed a waiver form on May 18 enabling him to take part in the ride-along program.

BGPD Sgt. Marc Kaiser told KSP he assigned the ride-along to Davis, sensing the two veterans would connect over their military experience, and Davis “wholeheartedly accepted.”

Davis said he could sense the enthusiasm coming from his ride-along from the outset, and the two went out on calls that involved serving arrest warrants and responding to a report of a mentally ill person, which Davis said was resolved by transporting them to LifeSkills.

While on patrol, Davis said he saw a man in front of the Russellville Road McDonald’s acting aggressively and swearing toward his cruiser, so he radioed headquarters to make them aware.

Soon afterward, he arrived at America’s Car Mart and recognized Lowery, both from moments earlier outside the McDonald’s and a prior incident earlier in the year in which Lowery was ordered to leave Warren County Public Library’s main branch on State Street.

When Lowery brandished the gun, Davis told police that it happened “out of nowhere” and sent the officer into “a moment of fight or flight.”

“I thought I can’t engage this guy in any type of gunbattle because I’ve got a (dealership) employee that is about as close as you and I are, and I thought either way, either me or Mr. Lowery is gonna probably hit the employee inadvertently,” Davis told KSP detectives. “So at that time, I chose to flee from the office area … I didn’t try to disarm him. I didn’t draw my service weapon.”

Davis said he remembered lying wounded on the floor when other officers rushed in with rifles.

“I remember laying back here waiting for everybody to start trying to treat me when I seen my rider go up to Sgt. Kaiser and say something to the effect of I got the suspect,” Davis said in the police interview. “I didn’t get word for word, but basically I saw my rider trying to notify all of our guys that the threat had been neutralized and that he got him back there somewhere.”

Davis said he did not expect the call at America’s Car Mart to veer so dramatically, but he told his ride-along to maintain some distance.

“I didn’t expect any of this to go this way of course because the employees were kinda just like, yeah, some guy drifted in here. We don’t know him. We don’t even wanna ban him. We just want him to go on down the road,” Davis told detectives. “So I didn’t ever get the feeling that I may be walking into the lion’s den, but I still told (my rider) hey, whenever I make contact down here, just stay back here ’cause I don’t know for sure yet.’ ”

At the end of the interview, Wise asked Davis if there was anything else he wanted to provide detectives, and the officer said he was “500 percent grateful” to be alive.

“It was a nightmare situation, it got real bad real quick,” Davis said. “I tried to make the best decisions not only for me and the rider but for the employees. And I am super thankful and full of joy that none of them got hurt … I thought even if I took the rounds for them … in my mind I guess that’s what law enforcement’s supposed to do … be that shield between good and evil.”