Good Guy with a Gun #338: New Haven, CT

He was a loving father, a very polite gentleman, and the guy with a machete on the seventeenth floor. | Original incident: October 4, 2024

Oct 04, 2026

These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is somewhat updated from the calendar version.

Around half past five on a Friday afternoon, a man was making his way along a 17th-floor hallway in a New Haven apartment tower — a building he lived in — banging on the doors and rambling. He was carrying a machete.

The tower is part of Bella Vista, a complex of five buildings and more than 1,400 apartments reserved for elderly and disabled tenants. Multiple people called 911 about him.

Then the calls changed: Now people were reporting gunshots.

After an altercation with another resident on the floor, that resident shot him.

Neighbor Howard Myers heard it: “Like a book hitting the floor, there’s that loud crack. Had no idea what it was.”

The man with the machete was 56-year-old John Reynolds. He died of his injuries.

Officer Christian Bruckhart, the police department’s spokesman, didn’t have much on what transpired between the two residents: “We know that there was some sort of altercation that happened within the hallway. One individual shot the individual.” That’s all we have.

The 911 callers had told dispatchers that Reynolds had a history of mental health problems, and that he might’ve been under the influence. Police knew him, too. “We had a few instances with him here or there,” the spokesman said, “but nothing that was of the magnitude of what we saw the other day.” One resident told WFSB about seeing him outside the building with a machete before.

His cousin, Chinita Hagwood Davis, didn’t argue with the mental health part. She remembered “a very polite gentleman and a loveable father” whose oldest son was in college, making him proud.

“Even though he had some mental health issues, he was still a good guy,” she said. “Nobody deserves to get killed.”

But a man can be all of that to his family and still be the threat to his neighbors, wandering the hallway with the machete.

The shooter stayed at the scene. His gun was licensed. Police and prosecutors set about working out whether it was self-defense.

The spokesman sketched the question for WFSB. “Just in general in Connecticut, you are allowed to use deadly physical force in defense of yourself,” he said, but also: “If you have a way of getting away from something you feel [is] threatening, the state would say we’d prefer you do that first, rather than resorting to just using deadly physical force.”

As WFSB summarized the statute, you can use deadly force if you believe the other person is about to kill someone or inflict great bodily harm, and you don’t have to retreat inside your own home.

The following week, the spokesman told CT Insider where things stood: “The case is still active but to my knowledge no decision has been made whether to charge him or not.” We can find no follow-up suggesting that the shooter was charged.