On August 12, 2024, 28-year-old Kevin Price called 911 to report a domestic altercation with his boyfriend at their apartment in Fitchburg.

Price called a little before 8:00 a.m., and through heavy breath said, “There’s an issue. We have no contact orders, and we saw each other. And he tried to break my neck.” The dispatcher asks where this happened. “Nevermind,” Price said and hung up.

The dispatcher immediately called back and heard Price breathing before he hung up, according to a Dane County Public Safety Communications incident report.

About an hour later, Fitchburg police officer Peter Johnston shot Price three times. Price died three days later at SSM-Health St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison.

There are many unanswered and disconcerting questions surrounding the shooting of Kevin Price, and his family members and close friend, PJ Chamberlain, are now calling for greater police accountability in fatal shootings. The work they are doing is raising questions about law enforcement’s role in crisis intervention, especially since this incident is just one in a much longer history of troubling interactions between local police and people in marginalized communities in the Madison area.

Price was “very creative and caring” 

Price grew up in Racine with his two brothers and was known as a kind and thoughtful person from an early age. Price’s grandmother, Ruthann Mork, remembers him as “a great kid, who everybody liked and had tons of friends. He was a talented artist, and everything Kevin touched he was wonderful at.”

Price graduated from Racine Lutheran High School in 2014, where he excelled in classes and joined the National Honor Society. The same year, he started attending UW-Madison on a full academic scholarship.

Chamberlain, who has been on the front lines of telling Price’s story in pursuit of justice, met Price in 2016. The two soon bonded over shared interests in video games and TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Chamberlain called Price a “very creative and caring” person who was easy to talk to and get to know. He expressed his creativity through painting, drawing, cooking, and gardening. Chamberlain remembers often receiving pictures of flower arrangements from Price that he had picked from his garden.

Price called 911 for help 

Within minutes of Price’s 911 call, Fitchburg officers arrived at his apartment.

According to the Dane County incident report, Fitchburg officers Johnston, Michael O’Dell, and Clint Dretske arrived at Price’s apartment and knocked on the door but received no answer.

Officers Johnston and O’Dell left while Dretske remained at the apartment and spoke with a neighbor who told Dretske she witnessed an argument between Price and his boyfriend Javier DeLuna earlier that morning. She showed Dretske a video she had taken of the argument and confirmed that Price and DeLuna’s cars were still in the parking lot.

Johnston and O’Dell then returned to the apartment and noticed the window blinds had been closed. The officers inferred someone was home and decided to force entry into the apartment to check on Price’s welfare. At this time, Fitchburg officers Lisa Heitman and Jean Pierre Contreras were called to the apartment to help.

Body camera footage shows the officers gave multiple warnings that they planned to enter the apartment, and after no response, all five officers entered. Inside the apartment, they found the rooms cluttered, which officers described as a hoarding situation. As officers made their way into the apartment, DeLuna walked out from the hallway with his hands in the air. He was escorted outside, where he told officers Price was still inside, possibly hiding in a bedroom closet with a knife.

Officers located Price in a bedroom closet behind piles of boxes and clothes, blocking any clear path for officers to reach him. Body camera footage shows Johnston entering the bedroom with his gun drawn. O’Dell entered soon after with his foam baton launcher, a non-lethal intermediate force tool.

Officers ordered Price to show himself and to come out of the closet. Once Price began to stand up and exit the closet, officers asked him if he had a knife and Price responded that he did. As Price attempted to climb over the piles of belongings, officers yelled for him to drop the knife.

From several feet away, Johnston shot Price three times in the chest. At the same time, O’Dell deployed his foam baton round at Price.

O’Dell later told state investigators the room was too cluttered for them to exit quickly, and “If they waited any longer, [Kevin] could have lunged at them and gotten pretty close to them pretty fast.”

Price was then taken to St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison. He spent three days in the hospital without his family knowing before he died. The DOJ’s investigation of the incident acknowledged Johnston’s shooting resulted in Price’s death. Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne determined no criminal charges would be filed against Johnston and responding to Price with deadly force was permitted under law.

Price’s identity as gay & biracial put him at risk 

Chamberlain says Price’s identity as both gay and half-Black put him at an increased fatal outcome risk when interacting with police.

In the U.S., Black people are 2.8 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than white people, according to 2025 data from Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit group that tracks police shootings. In Wisconsin, those disparities are higher, with Black people over 5.3 times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts.

Similarly, according to a 2023 report from the Madison Police Department, a Black individual is over eight times more likely to be arrested at least once than a white individual in the city. Gregory Gelembiuk, data analyst for Madison’s Office of the Independent Police Monitor, said racial disparities in Madison’s policing have largely remained stagnant in the past decade. “If there has been any improvement, it hasn’t been dramatic.”

LGBTQ+ people also disproportionately report mistreatment from police and experience higher rates of police-initiated contact than non-LGBTQ+ people, according to a national 2024 report from the American Civil Liberties Union. The report goes on to state that LGBTQ+ people who are multiracial are three times as likely to have experienced insulting language by the police than non-LGBTQ+ multiracial people and twice as likely than white LGBTQ+ people.

And compared to non-LGBTQ+ people, LGBTQ+ people experience higher rates of police-initiated contact, including being stopped, searched, arrested, or held in custody. LGBTQ+ people of racial groups report higher rates of police-initiated contact throughout their lives compared to their non-LGBTQ+ counterparts.

Chamberlain, who works for the Community Pharmacy, a worker cooperative whose mission is to promote health and wellness in Madison, said people carry inherent biases against others who don’t look like them or don’t share their identity. “Whether or not the officers involved were aware of their biases or aware of how Kevin’s race or sexuality could change the way they interact with them, you never know,” he said.

Calls for police accountability 

Chamberlain runs the @justice4kdp Instagram, where he shares information about Price’s shooting and raises questions about why police shot Price instead of using crisis intervention methods to safely approach Price, who they knew was hiding with a weapon.

But Price’s death isn’t the first time Madison area activists have raised questions about police shootings and called for accountability following deadly police encounters of Black and biracial individuals. A number of police accountability protests rippled through Madison following the police killing of 19-year-old Tony Robinson in 2015.

Like Price, Robinson was a biracial man killed by a white officer after police were called to perform a wellness check. A friend of Robinson called the police saying Robinson was yelling and jumping in front of cars after ingesting psychedelics. MPD Officer Matt Kenny responded to the “check-person” call and fatally shot Robinson in an apartment stairwell. Ozanne also cleared Kenny of legal wrongdoing in Robinson’s death.

Following Robinson’s death, there were numerous protests and calls for justice. Around 1,500 protesters, many of them high school students who had staged a walk-out, filled the state capitol and marched down State Street on March 9, 2015, to protest against Robinson’s killing. Robinson’s grandmother, Sharon Irwin, has fought multiple times to get Ozanne to reopen the case and bring charges against Kenny.

Those calls were amplified five years later during Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin.

Gelembiuk said these protests and continued calls for police accountability spurred city leaders to establish the Police Civilian Oversight Board and the Office of the Independent Police Monitor in 2020, and that these oversights have helped shrink officer-involved shootings in the past decade within the Madison Police Department. However, the board and the monitor only work with Madison police, so this level of oversight isn’t seen in neighboring cities like Fitchburg.

Even with these accountability measures in place, Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement member Kai Rasmussen said there hasn’t been enough meaningful change within police departments. Rasmussen pointed to Rashad Nelson, Aaron Willis, and Aajayah Rai, who were killed in a car crash during a police chase on New Year’s Day in 2024. The pursuit was initiated by a Monona police officer, who decided to pursue their vehicle because it looked “suspicious.” That pursuit continued for three miles and ended in the town of Cottage Grove when the vehicle crashed into a tree. All three passengers who died from the crash were Black, and the Monona police officer did not face criminal charges.

Members of the Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement carried a banner at the People’s March on January 18 with Price’s name and the names of three individuals who died in the police chase, along with the words “jail killer cops.” Rasmussen said the banner now hangs in Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement’s office, and that it’s challenging to look at the names of people killed by police and not see the police officers being charged, noting that, “Every time we raise their names up, nothing has changed at all.”

LGBTQ groups in Madison have also protested against their interactions with police as the community faces disproportionately high rates of targeting and arrest at the hands of law enforcement. In the leadup to Madison’s fifth annual OutReach LGBTQ+ Pride Parade, residents questioned police participation in Pride events. Community members and those involved in the event became divided over whether to include law enforcement groups in the parade and MPD Pride’s (Madison Police Department’s LGBTQ+ employee group) sponsorship of the event.

OutReach eventually pulled MPD Pride and the UW Police Department sponsorship applications from the event. The group went on to invite LGBTQ+ and allied officers to participate in the parade so long as they were off-duty, unarmed, and out of uniform.

As the conversation around justice for victims of deadly police interactions reignites in Dane County, Chamberlain says he hopes for greater police training around mental health support and domestic violence responses.

“I’m trying to bring awareness to the ways people with mental health issues and people in domestic violence situations are interacting with people,” Chamberlain said. “I want people to know how interactions with the police can go wrong and change it for the better.”