A Massachusetts judge found former North Andover police officer Kelsey Fitzsimmons not guilty of assault with a dangerous weapon Thursday, concluding that prosecutors failed to prove she pointed a gun at the fellow officer who shot her during a standoff at her home last summer.
Judge Jeffrey Karp delivered the verdict after nearly four hours of deliberations in a bench trial that Fitzsimmons herself requested, having waived her right to a jury. The 29-year-old had been charged after officers arrived at her home to serve a restraining order and take custody of her 4-month-old child.
What happened next is where the two sides diverge completely.
According to Fox News, prosecutors alleged that on June 25, 2025, Fitzsimmons pointed a gun at Officer Patrick Noonan and attempted to fire it. Noonan shot her. Fitzsimmons was subsequently arrested and arraigned on one count of armed assault with intent to murder and two counts of assault with a dangerous weapon. A grand jury in Essex Superior Court ultimately pared that down to a single count of assault with a dangerous weapon, which is what went to trial.
Fitzsimmons told a very different story. Taking the stand on Wednesday, she testified that she was attempting to take her own life when officers arrived, not threatening anyone.
"I didn't want to involve anybody. I wanted to take my own life."
She was unequivocal about what she did not do.
"I never pointed the gun at a fellow police officer. It never happened."
Prosecuting attorney James Gubitose pushed back hard in closing arguments, holding up Fitzsimmons' empty gun and insisting her account was physically impossible.
"It's impossible to have happened the way she said it. It is scientifically, mechanically impossible for it to happen the way she said."
Defense attorney Tim Bradl painted a starkly different picture of Officer Noonan's actions, suggesting he walked into a suicide in progress, reacted too quickly, and then needed to justify the shooting. Bradl pointed out that Noonan's version stood alone among the witnesses.
"He's the only one with the Rambo story. Everyone else has what Kelsey says. He walks into a suicide in progress. He sees it. He reacts. 'Kelsey no, Kelsey no.' Bam. Bam. Brain freeze. Mistake. He has to cover it up."
Judge Karp did not split the difference. He came down clearly on the side of reasonable doubt, but he took pains to explain why, noting that everyone involved in this case deserved an explanation.
"I am left with a reasonable doubt, and I am duty-bound to find that the Commonwealth has not met its burden to prove that Ms. Fitzsimmons committed an assault by means of a dangerous weapon."
Critically, Karp rejected the defense's implication that Noonan fabricated his account as part of a cover-up.
"I saw no evidence of a conspiracy in this case. What I saw was dedicated public servants, like Officer Noonan and his fellow officers, doing the best they could under rapidly evolving, emotional circumstances."
That's an important distinction. The judge didn't call Noonan a liar. He didn't call Fitzsimmons one either. He said the prosecution's evidence wasn't enough to clear the bar. The system worked as designed: when doubt exists, the accused walks. That's not a failure. That's the standard.
This verdict leaves a lot of uncomfortable questions unanswered, and not the kind that a courtroom is equipped to handle.
Fitzsimmons described being shot in vivid, harrowing terms. She recalled a punctured lung, a body that felt like it was burning, and a consciousness she wished she could lose.
"I went into like a huge adrenaline shock. It didn't feel like normal pain. It almost felt like absent pain, but it felt like my entire body was burning, and I was completely alert, completely awake the whole time."
After being carried outside, she reportedly kept repeating to firefighters that she wanted to die. A woman in the middle of a mental health crisis, with a newborn being taken from her and a restraining order filed by her fiancé, Justin Aylaian, was shot by a colleague and then prosecuted. Whatever the legal merits of the case, the human wreckage is enormous.
The Essex County District Attorney's Office released a statement to Fox News Digital, standing by the prosecution, saying the case "was brought in good faith, supported by credible police testimony and corroborated by the physical evidence." They added that "while respecting the judge's verdict, we disagree."
They also commended the officers involved, calling this "an instance of police officers acting to the best of their ability during a tragic and rapidly evolving incident."
Cases like this one resist clean narratives. Conservatives rightly support law enforcement and understand that officers face impossible decisions in fractions of a second. Nothing about this verdict requires abandoning that principle. Judge Karp himself affirmed it.
But this case also illustrates what happens when the system sends armed officers to handle situations that are, at their core, mental health emergencies. A woman who was by all accounts trying to end her own life ended up shot, charged with attempted murder, and dragged through a year-long prosecution that a judge ultimately found unsupported by sufficient evidence.
That's not an argument for defunding police. It's an argument for asking whether the tools we give officers match the situations we send them into. Serving a restraining order and removing custody of an infant from a person in crisis is an inherently volatile task. The officers who showed up that day didn't create the volatility. They walked into it.
Officer Noonan made a split-second call. Fitzsimmons says he got it wrong. The judge says the prosecution couldn't prove otherwise. The DA's office says the evidence was credible. Everyone involved now carries the weight of June 2025 for the rest of their lives.
No verdict changes that.