Neither of the two Denver police officers who shot at and killed a knife-wielding man in the early hours of New Year’s Day will receive criminal charges.

District Attorney Beth McCann, in a Monday letter to police Chief Paul Pazen, wrote that “under Colorado law, the officers were justified in their uses of deadly physical force and criminal charges could not be proved.”

McCann’s review narrated the events that began at 12:53 a.m. on Jan. 1, when police received a “weapons complaint” from the 900 block of South Irving Street. The victim told responding officers that his roommate, 20-year-old Gerardo Antonio Conchas-Bustos “had assaulted him with a metal pipe and threatened him with a knife.” The officers noticed injuries to the man’s head and hand. The victim did not ask for further police action beyond assistance safely returning to the home.

Three officers, Juan Gamboa, Diego Archuleta and Frank Curiel, announced their presence in English and Spanish once at the residence and performed a walk-through to ensure it was safe for the victim and two other female residents. Gamboa was near a door to the garage when Conchas-Bustos reportedly ran up a stairway toward him holding a large knife.

“All of this happened in a second or two,” McCann wrote. “Officer Gamboa realized he was in danger of losing his life and fired his weapon at Mr. Conchas-Bustos, firing six times.”

Archuleta was behind Gamboa when the shooting began, and he also fired once at Conchas-Bustos. The officers attempted to provide first aid, but Conchas-Bustos died at the scene.

Gamboa, who did not watch the body-worn camera footage prior to making his statement on Jan. 2, told investigators that when he saw Conchas-Bustos run toward him, “I didn’t even have to time make a command, I just took [a] step back and I knew I couldn’t go back any farther because my partner was behind me. I knew I had just gone down two steps, so I wasn’t going to be able to create distance….so at this point I had no — or no other option but to discharge my firearm.”

The original victim did not witness the shooting, but described similar behavior from Conchas-Bustos with the knife that prompted his call to police. Crime Scene Investigators recovered the kitchen knife, approximately 10 inches long, from the garage.

“Criminal liability is established only if it is proved beyond a reasonable doubt that all of the elements of an offense defined by a statute have been committed and it is proved that the offense was committed without legal justification,” McCann noted.

Pursuant to Colorado law, a police officer’s use of lethal force is justified against “what he reasonably believes to be the use or imminent use of deadly physical force.” Senate Bill 217, which the General Assembly passed in the wake of racial justice protests earlier this summer, altered the standard for deadly use-of-force to “only when all other means of apprehension are unreasonable given the circumstances,” among other factors.

McCann noted that her office would have to prove to a jury that the officers’ actions were unjustified, which she believed she could not.

“Officer Gamboa’s belief that he was about to face unlawful physical force was reasonable as was his belief that a lesser degree of force would have been inadequate,” McCann explained. Her evidence included Conchas-Bustos’s past behavior toward the victim, the fact that he held the knife “in a stabbing position” and the presence of blood on the knife blade.

“His judgment that Mr. Conchas-Bustos intended to stab him and could easily have killed him was reasonable; therefore, it was reasonable for Officer Gamboa to defend himself with deadly physical force,” McCann concluded. “Likewise, because Officer Archuleta believed that Officer Gamboa was in danger of being killed, it was reasonable for him to use deadly physical force.”

The Denver Channel reported in January that Conchas-Bustos had no prior criminal record, except for a traffic violation. His obituary notes he is survived by his mother. Denverite found that neither officer had been involved in prior shooting.

This Thursday, McCann will hold a virtual community meeting from 5:30-6:30 p.m. to discuss her findings.