Escaped killer Richard Matt was fatally shot after he pointed a stolen shotgun at a federal Border Patrol agent, the agency said Thursday.
“Agents verbally ordered the individual to put his hands up,” their statement read. “An agent observed the individual fail to comply with the verbal commands and aim what was determined to be a 20-gauge shotgun at him.”
It was the first time the feds revealed Matt, who was killed Friday with three shots to the head, had threatened his pursuers.
In earlier accounts, the feds said the agent opened fire after Matt refused to surrender.
Matt’s 23-year-old estranged son Nick Harris has called the killing of his father “a wrongful death.”
DAVID SWEAT INSISTS HE NEVER HAD SEX WITH PRISON WORKER JOYCE MITCHELL
“They shouldn’t have shot him in the head,” he told The Buffalo News after learning Matt was killed. “Three shots in the head … come on. One shot in the head is going to take a person out.”
David Sweat, the convict Matt escaped with from the Clinton Correctional Facility on June 6, was captured Sunday after he was shot twice in the torso by a state trooper.
While Sgt. Jay Cook has been hailed as a hero, the feds still have not identified the agent who stopped Matt in his tracks with a service-issued M-4 rifle.
The El Paso Times, however, reported earlier the sharpshooter was assigned to a tactical unit known as BORTAC that is based at Fort Bliss, Texas, and is often called in on major manhunts on the nation’s borders.
Matt, 49, was just a few miles from the Canadian border when he was felled. He did not say a word during the deadly confrontation and, according to various news accounts, he reeked of liquor.
Sweat, 35, has told investigators he ditched Matt five days before he was caught because he’d gotten bombed on booze he found in one of the hunting cabins they broke into while on the run. He also said the older inmate was out of shape and could not keep up with him.
Harris claimed his dad’s body on Thursday and took it to the killer’s hometown of Tonawanda, N.Y.
“We’re going to have a closed, private funeral service,” he told the Buffalo paper earlier.
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