By Harriet Ramos
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
FORT WORTH — The 35-year-old man who was fatally shot by police during a standoff at a northwest Fort Worth home on Jan. 30 said he wasn’t going back to prison, according to 911 audio and body-camera video released by the Fort Worth Police Department on Thursday.
Nicholas Scott Sides refused multiple commands to drop his handgun and instead fired four times at the officers who were outside his home in the 1700 block of Skyline Drive, police said. A SWAT team officer then fired one round from a rifle, fatally shooting Sides.
“Our purpose as police is to protect the vulnerable from harm, and our job is to protect life, protect peace and protect property, in that order,” Fort Worth Police Chief Neil Noakes said at the Thursday, Feb. 6, news conference. “The sad fact is, oftentimes it’s police officers who find themselves in physically vulnerable situations like this.”
The encounter with Sides started around 4:15 p.m. when Lake Worth police Officer Krista Segeda pulled him over for a traffic violation in the 5700 block of Azle Avenue. Sides stopped his pickup truck and talked with Segeda, but Segeda’s intuition told her something wasn’t right, Lake Worth Police Chief J.T. Manoushagian told reporters at the news conference.
Segeda called for backup. When the other officer arrived, they both approached Sides’ red Dodge pickup with the intention of asking him to get out so they could investigate further, Manoushagian said.
Body-cam video footage shows the officers approach the Dodge, one on each side. One of them hands Sides something through the driver-side window. The officer appears to be talking with Sides, and she puts her hand on the door handle of the pickup.
Sides immediately closes the window and speeds away. The two officers give chase, and video footage shows the red Dodge racing down the road ahead of them into Sansom Park. The pickup enters the yard of a home in the 5200 block of Buchanan Street and crashes into a fence at the back of the property line.
The door on the driver’s side opens, and Sides gets out of the pickup with a gun in his hand. Five shots are heard as he fires at the two officers in their SUVs several yards behind him.
One of the rounds hit the hood of Detective Carly Page’s SUV, Manoushagian said.
Sides runs into the cover of some trees and outbuildings in the yard. The officers get out of their SUVs and take up a position behind one of the trees.
“Drop the gun!” one of them yells.
Sides says something that can’t be heard on the video, and one of them replies, “Don’t do it. Please give it up, sir.”
Sides points the gun at his own head during part of his interaction with the officers. They try to reason with Sides and tell him to put the gun away.
“Just shoot me,” he says.
“Dude, you’re not in that much trouble. Drop it,” one of the officers tells him.
Sides gets back in his pickup and turns around. A few minutes later, he plows through the front fence and speeds out of the yard.
Officers chased Sides all the way to the 1700 block of Skyline Drive in Fort Worth. The video shows him pull into the driveway and run toward the house.
Officers learned Sides’ mother was inside the home, Manoushagian said. She came out of the house so officers could see her and then went back inside.
Lake Worth police immediately called for the Fort Worth Police Department’s SWAT team, according to Manoushagian. While they waited for SWAT, they secured the release of Sides’ mother and evacuated her from the area.
With the departure of Sides’ mother from the home, the incident transitioned from a hostage situation to a barricaded person, Manoushagian said.
“The emphasis in those two situations is very different,” Manoushagian told reporters. “A barricaded person is predicated on taking our time, negotiating, deescalating and attempting to bring the situation to a successful resolution.”
The Crisis Intervention Team accompanied SWAT to the scene, and officers tried for hours to reason with Sides, Noakes said.
Sides threw fireworks from inside the home and threatened to burn the house down. Noakes said the suspect’s behavior became more and more erratic, and officers were concerned the situation would escalate.
At one point, Sides calls 911 and tells the dispatcher he’s the person having a standoff with the police. He says he’s trying to get in touch with his mother “because they’re sending SWAT here to kill me.”
The dispatcher encourages Sides to comply with whatever officers are asking him to do, according to 911 audio.
“I’m not doing that,” Sides replies. “That’s the issue. I’m not going back to prison for the rest of my (life). I’ll kill myself first.”
According to Noakes, officers fired gas into the house with the hope that the suspect would give himself up. Instead, Sides came out holding a gun to his head.
An officer can be heard on the video giving him commands to stop and drop the gun.
“I don’t want to hurt you, dude. Put your gun down,” the officer says. “We don’t want to hurt you.”
“He’s saying, ‘Not going to happen,’” another officer says.
Sides keeps walking toward the officers.
One of them fires three rounds from a “less lethal” weapon containing foam-tip projectiles. Instead of complying, Sides fires his handgun four times in the direction of the officers.
A SWAT officer fires a single shot, and Sides falls to the ground. He was given medical attention at the scene, but died at John Peter Smith Hospital a short time later, officials said.
A handgun was recovered outside the house, according to police.
Sides was on parole for aggravated robbery at the time of his encounter with police, Manoushagian said. He was also on federal probation for unlawful transport of weapons, which meant he wasn’t allowed to carry a gun.
Other than carrying a firearm, police can’t confirm he’d done anything criminal immediately prior to being pulled over by Segeda in Lake Worth .
“The outcome was dictated by the suspect,” Manoushagian said. “In our eyes, the officers did everything they possibly could have done to bring this to a peaceful resolution.”
This is the fourth shooting this year involving officers from the Fort Worth Police Department — the same number as occurred in all of 2024, according to Noakes.
“Our hopes and prayers are that this is an outlier,” Noakes said. “That if January was a fluke, that we don’t see this for the rest of the year.”
Fort Worth officers critically wounded a 31-year-old man who shot at them during a Jan. 9 standoff on Seafield Lane , police said. On Jan. 15 , Fort Worth officers killed a 28-year-old man who they said charged at them with two knives during a domestic violence call on Westgate Drive .
Family members of the men shot on Westgate Drive and Seafield Lane reported they were suffering from mental health crises.
A Fort Worth officer also fired at a man who reportedly pointed a gun at residents of an east Fort Worth apartment complex on Jan. 15 . The suspect ignored the officer’s commands and appeared to be reaching for his weapon, police said. Neither the officer nor the suspect were injured.
On Jan. 31 , Tarrant County sheriff’s deputies fatally shot a 19-year-old in Haltom City when the man assaulted one of them with a knife, officials said. The deputies were trying to serve him a mental health warrant after his family reported he was behaving erratically.
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