[I]n the late morning on a cold Tuesday, Jan. 16, Nathan Giffin was shot and killed in a hail of police gunfire on the snowy grounds of Montpelier High School, where he had fled after robbing the Vermont State Employees Credit Union. He was 32.
Giffin was shot following a standoff lasting 50 minutes — with the high school on lockdown and law enforcement officers swarming the athletic field where he stood. Police said Giffin issued threats and made suicidal statements, and he displayed a handgun. The weapon was later identified as a BB gun.
“This is the saddest day in my 22 years of being an educator,” Montpelier School District Superintendent Brian Ricca said a day after the shooting.
“A family has lost a son,” Ricca said. “It’s really hard to grapple with. I am feeling as a dad, such sympathy for the Giffins in terms of the grief they must be feeling.”
The school was not only recovering from the effects of the lockdown the day before, Ricca said, but also confronting the fact that the young man fatally shot by police on school grounds was a former student.
Fourteen years ago Giffin was a senior at the high school less than a mile from Vermont’s Statehouse. He graduated in 2004. His mother, Theresa Giffin of Montpelier, was a kindergarten teacher in the district. She retired a year ago. His father, James Giffin of Montpelier, was the interim commissioner of the Department of Liquor Control from June 2015 to March 2016.
Giffin’s family and friends contacted by VTDigger in the days following the shooting have declined comment. A common refrain has been, “Let him rest in peace.”
People in the community have taken to social media, sharing remembrances of the person they knew, and condolences for his family.
“This evening I’m grieving for Nate Giffin and his family. Nate was a family friend who lived with our family for a short time when he was a teen,” Daniel Wetmore posted on his Facebook page. “An incredibly hard worker. Friend to our children. Grieving for his parents who have given so much to the Montpelier community. I’m so sorry.”
Wetmore later added, “I’m writing these posts just to try to create a bit larger view and a personal view. So quickly a tragedy like his becomes an impersonal and argumentative debate about all kinds of issues. My heart just breaks for his parents Theresa and Jim.”
Giffin’s own words, in statements made at a federal court hearing two years ago, show a young man who wanted to make things right, but was unable to overcome mental health problems and an addiction to drugs.
In 2014, Giffin was in court to face the judge who, two years before, had sentenced him to prison for robbing a bank. A transcript from that hearing offers a glimpse of Giffin’s struggles, and an opportunity to hear Giffin himself, grappling with the life challenges and difficulties he faced.
“Your Honor, I’m very disappointed in myself to be back here in front of you,” Giffin, then 30, told Judge William K. Sessions, according to a transcript of the hearing, filed in the case. “Like – I don’t know. I didn’t think this was going to happen.”
Giffin had been sentenced by Sessions in 2012 to two years in prison for the gunpoint robbery of the Randolph National Bank in Williamstown in 2010. His previous record included convictions for cocaine possession, resisting arrest, unlawful trespassing and multiple burglaries.
Following his release from prison, having served the bank robbery sentence, Giffin got a job at Positive Pie, a downtown Montpelier restaurant, and appeared to be doing well. But then in 2014 he was charged with breaking into the restaurant and stealing cash.
The felony offense was later reduced to misdemeanor petty larceny. According to reporting by the Times Argus, Scott Williams, who was Washington County state’s attorney at the time, said the charge had been reduced because of support for Giffin from the manager of Positive Pie, the restaurant he had burgled, who understood Giffin had drug issues.
But the new brush with the law meant a return to the federal court where Giffin had been convicted of the bank robbery, and likely revocation of probation.
“I feel really bad about the restaurant there. They treated me like family,” Giffin told Sessions, according to a transcript of the Sept. 8, 2015, hearing.
“You know, the owner used to trust me with his kids by myself teaching them how to cook during spring break and stuff, you know, when his grade school kids were on vacation and, you know, that was no different from stealing from my family or anyone else,” Giffin said. “Like I try to justify it to myself about why it would be OK, but I know there’s no justification for what I did.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Wendy Fuller told the court that Giffin had been given a relatively lenient sentence for the bank robbery.
“We really went to bat for him. I sort of felt like I went out on a limb for Mr. Giffin hoping that this would help him get further in his life,” the prosecutor said. “He was only on supervised release four months — four months — and he committed his — according to the report — his fifth burglary.”
Even though the Positive Pie burglary resulted only in a misdemeanor conviction, Fuller said, “This conduct is just outrageous.”
Attorney Natasha Sen, representing Giffin, told Sessions that, whatever sentenced he received for violating probation, what her client needed as a matter of priority was mental health counseling.
“(H)e recognizes he really needs mental health treatment, and I think that he’s been funneled into a lot of substance abuse treatment,” Sen said, “but I don’t think that’s quite getting at the issues he needs assistance with, and he knows whenever he’s released to the community, after whatever sentence the Court imposes and finds appropriate to impose here, he needs to find a good mental health counselor, and he recognizes that is really one of the deficits that he’s been working with.”
Sen added, ”I asked him if he had looked for a good mental health counselor once he had been released. He said no I was more focused on doing what my probation officer — state probation officer had wanted to do. Substance abuse counseling — he was focused on that treatment.”
Citing the seriousness of the previous bank robbery, and his betrayal of his employer, Sessions sentenced Giffin to two more years in prison.
“You had a personal relationship with these folks,” Sessions told Giffin. “You took care of their children, and despite that because you were in a financial pinch you chose to violate that trust.”
Sessions told Giffin, according to the transcript, that he had given him a break on the bank robbery conviction, sentencing him to just two years in jail.
Giffin spoke to the judge of relationship and financial difficulties that led him back into trouble with law, and back into court.
“So the reason that you made the decision to break into this place where you had been working is because of financial pressure?” the judge asked.
“Yeah,” Giffin replied.
“So how will the Court know that every time you face financial pressure you don’t just get right back into the same kind of conduct?” Sessions said to Giffin.
“That’s what I’ve realized …. I need to learn to listen to people,” Giffin responded, adding, “I need to listen to people who have a best, who have my best interests in mind.”
With credit for time served, Giffin was released from federal custody in June 2017, according to federal Bureau of Prison records.
On Christmas Day two break-ins were reported at the big box stores in Williston, Walmart and ToysRUs. Nothing was taken, according to the Williston Police Department, but there was reported property damage.
Giffin was arrested in connection with the break-ins. He was ordered to appear on Jan. 18 in Chittenden County criminal court in Burlington for arraignment.
Giffin told the officers who arrested him that he was addicted to cocaine and heroin. He said he was “sick of living like this,” and wanted to change his life, but couldn’t get treatment, according to an affidavit filed with Williston police.
Upon receiving the order to appear for arraignment on the burglary charges, Giffin phoned the Williston police department. He told an officer that he had checked himself into rehab. He said he would not be out until Jan. 22. His arraignment was rescheduled for Jan. 30, “to accommodate his rehab treatment,” according to police records.
Six days before the day Giffin had told police he would be released from rehab, with two weeks to go before the scheduled arraignment, Giffin was dead.
Eight Vermont State Police troopers and a corporal from the Montpelier Police Department opened fire on Giffin. Police say Giffin moved toward them, with a weapon in his hand, making threatening and suicidal statements.
The weapon turned out to a BB gun — an Umarex 40XP BB pistol. Speaking with reporters later in the week, Maj. Glenn Hall, head of the state police criminal division described the type of pistol as looking so “real” that it would be “literally impossible for anyone to tell it’s not.”
“If you want people to believe that you have a real gun, this is as close as you can get,” Hall said.
Television video of the scene showed Giffin holding the pistol in his right hand, and in the moment before the nine officers opened fire, it appeared to be pointed downward.
After initially being placed on leave, the officers involved in the shooting are back on duty. The state police investigation into the shooting continues.
Ricca, the school superintendent, said he has been thinking a lot about how someone “gets to the point” that Giffin did. He sees it in the context of the necessity of reinforcing the relationships that educators make with students in the schools.
“This makes us and our schools redouble our efforts to make sure that every student has one human being that they know that is never going to give up on them, that is always going to believe in them and that’s going give them the sense that they can never be let down,” Ricca said.
“It is natural to point fingers and try to assign blame; we must resist that urge,” the superintendent later wrote in a commentary. “What lessons can we learn from this? How can we recommit our educational community to building, cultivating, and maintaining relationships as the foundation of the work we do?”
