By: Shawn Vincent

56-year-old Ronald Gasser shot and killed former New York Jets running back Joe McKnight at a red light in a New Orleans suburb on December 1, 2016. Minutes earlier, McKnight, driving an Audi SUV, had cut in front of Gasser in traffic, and what followed was a five-mile-long, tit-for-tat road-rage incident that involved the two drivers weaving through traffic, shouting obscenities, and trading rude gestures through open windows. When the cars stopped at the light, McKnight got out, walked to Gasser’s car, and leaned into the open passenger-side window. Gasser, seatbelted behind the wheel, drew a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson and fired three rounds, striking McKnight in the shoulder, the hands, and, fatally, the chest. McKnight was unarmed.

 

At trial, the defense said McKnight had been “basically trying to kill him and run him off the road,” and that Gasser fired only when McKnight lunged through his window. Prosecutors said McKnight had merely rested his forearms on the door, and that Gasser—enraged rather than afraid—had goaded McKnight out of the car with the intent of luring him into a physical confrontation. When McKnight took the bait, the prosecutors suggested, “the trap was sprung.”

 

 Both sides agreed on one fact: McKnight’s hands crossed the threshold of the vehicle, and the defense built its case on it. Louisiana law allows deadly force against an intruder who crosses the threshold of a person’s home or car, and defense attorney Matthew Goetz argued the statute covered Gasser. But a witness, Veronica Hoye, testified that she heard McKnight shout, “No, YOU get out of the car,” suggesting Gasser had invited the confrontation to his window. Jurors also heard, from Gasser’s own statements, that he had taken his pistol from his gym bag and set it within reach roughly a mile before the cars reached the light. Prosecutors also pointed to a ladder lying across Gasser’s passenger seat—a physical barrier, they argued, between him and McKnight’s reach into the cabin.

 

After the shooting, Gasser stepped out of his car still holding the pistol. When two bystanders went to help McKnight, Gasser set the gun down, but he never called 9-1-1 or moved to render aid himself. Sheriff Newell Normand initially declined to arrest Gasser, citing his self-defense claim and a lack of evidence to disprove it. He had cooperated fully from the start—he remained at the scene and submitted to a recorded interrogation without a lawyer. Parts of the account he gave investigators, however, would later be contradicted by the physical evidence and witness testimony. After four days of public protests, Gasser was arrested and then indicted for second-degree murder. 

 

At trial, jurors learned that, ten years earlier, at the same intersection, Gasser had climbed out of his truck and beaten another motorist who complained about his driving. An appeals court agreed the incident “helped establish intent and lack of accident and mistake.” Gasser did not testify at trial, and his defense rested on the interrogation video. The jury deliberated seven hours and returned a compromise verdict of manslaughter—not the second-degree murder prosecutors had sought. 

 

Judge Ellen Kovach, who had broad discretion in sentencing, chose 30 years. “Let this be a cautionary tale,” she said, “to all drivers who rage behind the wheel of their car at other drivers.” Don West, veteran criminal defense attorney and National Trial Counsel for CCW Safe, believes that without the prior road rage incident, Gasser would have stood on much better ground. In a self-defense case, West says, “your past will become your present.”

 

The case did not end there. The jury’s verdict had been 10-2—a non-unanimous outcome that the US Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in 2020, vacating Gasser’s conviction. Prosecutors moved to retry him on the original second-degree murder charge, but the Louisiana Supreme Court held that double jeopardy barred the more serious count. Facing a manslaughter retrial, Gasser pleaded guilty in December 2022 and was sentenced to ten years. He was released in October 2024, less than eight years after the killing.

Lessons for Armed Defenders

Avoid the fight (Lesson #36)

During each mile of the road rage incident, Gasser had opportunities to disengage, roll up the window, ease off the gas, let the Audi go. Instead, the two men chased and goaded each other until they found themselves boxed in at a red light with nowhere to go. Gasser’s history of violence—at that very intersection— made his failure to disengage even more costly. That prior incident helped prosecutors convince a jury that Gasser sought confrontations rather than fled from them, and it led to a manslaughter conviction. 

 

Don’t get emotionally hijacked (Lesson #8)

Prosecutors built their case on a simple proposition: Gasser was not afraid when he fired—he was enraged. On the interrogation video, Gasser recalled McKnight begging him to stop the car, and recalled his own answer: “I’m not going to stop for a punk like you.” That contempt, in his own voice, was what the jury weighed against the legal standard of a reasonable fear of an imminent threat of great bodily harm or death. The manslaughter verdict the jury returned—an unintentional but illicit killing carried out in the heat of passion—was, in effect, a legal finding that anger had driven the trigger pull.

Don’t be the first aggressor (Lesson #10)

The fact that McKnight’s hands crossed the threshold of Gasser’s passenger-side window served as the defense’s strongest argument justifying the use of deadly force. But a self-defense claim falls apart when the jury sees the defender as the first aggressor. An anonymous juror later told a reporter that the panel had split on a single question: did the encounter begin when Gasser responded aggressively to being cut off, or when McKnight stepped out of his car at the light? The jurors who believed Gasser started it won the room. The pursuit through traffic, the witness who heard him invite McKnight to the window, and his own admission that he had readied his pistol well before the cars stopped suggested Gasser set the stage for the fatal encounter at the red light. 

Respond proportionately to unarmed threats (Lesson #18)

McKnight was unarmed, but he was also, by the defense’s account, a powerfully built professional athlete leaning into the car of a smaller man belted into his seat. Don West says that, in that position, “McKnight would not need to be armed to be dangerous.” An empty-handed attacker can pose a genuine deadly threat, but the absence of a weapon creates a controversy that may be left to a jury to unravel. Prosecutors argued that deadly force against an unarmed man was excessive for the circumstances, and the jury’s manslaughter verdict suggests they were not persuaded that Gasser’s response was proportionate to the danger he actually faced.

Call 9-1-1 (Lesson #30)

Gasser stayed at the scene, but he did not call 9-1-1, and he made no effort to help the man bleeding on the pavement a few feet away.“You may feel the last thing you want to do is help someone who just tried to kill you,” Don West says, but Gasser’s failure to call 9-1-1 and render aid “became a negative aspect in the case.” The prosecution invited the jury to read that inaction as evidence that anger drove Gasser’s actions rather than a reasonable fear. 

Don’t give in-depth statements to police (Lesson #31)

Gasser consented to eight hours of recorded questioning without a lawyer, and prosecutors played the entire interrogation for the jury. his statements did not line up with the physical evidence. Gasser told investigators that McKnight lunged at him before he fired. A forensic pathologist read the wound to McKnight’s shoulder as the mark of a man backing away, and the absence of stippling on his body placed him more than two and a half feet from the muzzle. Don West says that with his detailed statements, Gasser “gave the prosecutors something to disprove.” Even an honest person cannot get every detail right in the hours after the trauma of a shooting, and each detail that later clashes with the evidence becomes a crack in the defender’s credibility.