A man who shot two Baltimore County Police officers in 2023 and set off a dayslong manhunt that closed schools and forced people to shelter inside their homes was sentenced on Tuesday to serve two consecutive life sentences plus 30 years in prison.

Baltimore County Circuit Judge Garret P. Glennon Jr. said as he handed down the sentence for four counts of attempted first-degree murder and related crimes that police were trying to help David Linthicum on Feb. 8, 2023, after his father called 911 and reported that he had a gun and was threatening to kill himself.

When officers Barry Jordan, April Burton and David Allen responded to their home on Powers Avenue north of Sherwood Road in Cockeysville, they walked down into the basement.

That’s when Linthicum opened fire with an AR-15, squeezing off an initial volley of 12 rounds. He then shot four more times as the officers ran up the stairs.

Outside the house, Jordan realized that he’d been hit.

Linthicum’s attorneys contended that law enforcement played a role in what unfolded, Glennon said.

“The jury, through its verdict, rejected that — as do I,” Glennon said.

He said there was also little actual evidence that Linthicum had been experiencing a mental health crisis — though he barred certain testimony at trial.

On Feb. 9, 2023, Linthicum shot Detective Jonathan Chih multiple times after he drove out to Warren Road in an unmarked 2013 Ram 1500 to check on a report of a hitchhiker.

Linthicum then stole the truck, drove over a bridge that spans the Loch Raven Reservoir and eventually wound up in Harford County. The Harford County Sheriff’s Office on Feb. 10, 2023, took him into custody.

Glennon called the crime a horrific, violent criminal episode and described Linthicum, 26, of Cockeysville, as dangerous.

“The fact this is not a sentencing for multiple murders is confounding,” Glennon said.

Assistant State’s Attorney Zarena Sita asked the judge to hand down four consecutive life sentences plus 30 years in prison.

“This sentence and the convictions in this case go a long way in letting the public know that this kind of behavior is not to be tolerated, certainly not here in Baltimore County,” Sita told reporters outside the Baltimore County Courts Building.

“While nothing that the court could have done could take away what the defendant did to those officers who were just doing their jobs, I think that the sentence and the convictions are vindicating,” she added.

Linthicum, she said, terrorized Baltimore and Harford counties. Two of the officers bear physical scars, but they all continue to grapple with the emotional fallout from the shootings, Sita said.

Police were there to help, Sita said. But Linthicum, she said, inflicted irreparable harm.

Though Linthicum might have been depressed and suicidal, he was also homicidal, Sita said.

“The general public,” she said, “needs to be protected from David Linthicum.”

Two of the officers — Jordan and Burton — spoke about how the shootings not only affected them but their loved ones.

Meanwhile, Deputy State’s Attorney John Cox read a statement on behalf of Allen, as he sat with the other officers in the front row of the courtroom gallery.

Chih was not present.

Jordan said he retired from the Baltimore County Police Department in 2024 after 28 years.

When he was in the police academy in 1996, Jordan said, an instructor told him that a guardian angel kept watch over the department. That’s because it had remarkably only lost four officers in the line of duty in its more than 100-year history.

During his time on the force, Jordan said, six officers were killed.

He said he could have ended up on that list.

“It’s only by God’s grace that I did not,” Jordan said.

Burton said she’s not only a law enforcement officer, but a human being.

She said she took an oath to protect and serve. But Linthicum, she said, shot at them “as if we were trash.”

The emotional toll from the shooting, she said, has been profound.

But Assistant Public Defender Deborah Katz Levi, one of Linthicum’s attorneys and chief of strategic litigation for the Maryland Office of the Public Defender in Baltimore, said she’s witnessed tremendous growth in her client.

She described him as a young, kind-hearted man who has strong family support.

Levi called Jennifer Woolard, a professor of psychology and vice dean for faculty affairs at the Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences, to testify about the state of research into adolescent and emerging adult brain development. That’s along with recounting the findings of two psychological evaluations and detailing her client’s traumatic upbringing.

Linthicum experienced a significant delay in speech and could not communicate with his mother, Sonja, who’s from Germany and deaf. He dealt with several learning disabilities and bounced from the St. Paul’s Schools to Jemicy School to Odyssey School. And his parents went through a contentious divorce, Levi said.

When he was 10, Linthicum, she said, first reported having suicidal thoughts. But he never received the proper treatment.

He also endured bullying, she said, and used cannabis to self-medicate.

Linthicum was suicidal when police responded to his home, Levi said. His actions, she said, were “an emotional, intuitive response to trauma.”

“We don’t need to throw the key away for him,” Levi said. “He has the ability to grow.”

James Dills, one of Linthicum’s attorneys and district public defender for Baltimore County, read multiple letters from family members, friends and teachers that remembered his client as a sweet, kind and sensitive child who later battled depression.

They expressed hope that he would receive mental health treatment.

During his presentation, Dills displayed childhood photos of Linthicum through a PowerPoint slideshow.

“David Linthicum is not a monster,” Dills said. “He is sorry for what he has done in this case.”

“It came not from malice, but from a place of unbelievable, profound sadness,” he added.

Dills read a letter on behalf of his client in which he apologized to the police and expressed to them that he did not intend to harm anyone besides himself.

Four loved ones, including Ana Bishop, Linthicum’s cousin, testified on his behalf and pleaded for mercy.

Bishop said the two spent a lot of time together growing up, and she looked up to him.

As Linthicum grew older, she said, she witnessed his confidence fade and be replaced with sadness. But he went out of his way to provide others with affirmations and make them feel special.

He used to send her a text message on her birthday right after the clock struck midnight.

Now, Bishop said, that text has become a call from jail. She said she still checks her phone, hoping that message will pop up.

Bishop turned to the officers in the courtroom and told them that she’s eternally grateful that they took her cousin alive.

But if he went to prison for the rest of his life, she wondered, what was the point?

If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, call or text 988 to contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.