The Maryland Office of the Attorney General announced Tuesday it won’t charge a Howard County Police officer who fatally shot a man who charged at him with a spear in Columbia last summer.

State officials ruled that Officer Michael McKee, who has been with Howard County Police since July 2022, used “appropriate” and “reasonable” force when interacting with Micah Booker in the Carters Lane and Oakland Mills Road area of Columbia, a report released Tuesday read.

The 23-year-old man called 911 saying he stabbed his brother, Samuel Louie Booker IV, 26, in a residence in the area. He told dispatchers he was wearing gray clothing, standing near a bus stop and carrying weapons, such as a spear, knife and pepper spray, state investigators said in their report.

The younger Booker told police to kill him, the attorney general’s office reported. McKee responded to the bus stop and commanded Booker to put down the spear he was holding, but Booker refused.

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Body camera footage released in July lasted just seconds, showing Booker charging at McKee with a spear in his hand before the officer shot him dead. The Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner found two gunshot wounds to the head as the source of Booker’s death, state investigators said.

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Sherry Llewellyn, a spokesperson for the Howard County Police Department, said they are appreciative of the Independent Investigations Division’s “thorough investigative work in this case.”

The IID of Maryland’s attorney general’s office investigates all police-involved fatalities throughout the state. Booker’s was the only death at the hands of a Howard County Police officer last year.

In 2024, Tyree Winslow, 29, was shot by officers after refusing to drop a gun. State officials declined to charge the two officers involved in his death after the chief medical examiner ruled the manner of his death a suicide, concluding he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, not those from officers.

This article has been updated.