Constable Paul Koester had just moved into a new house and was looking forward to his life in Houston, B.C., when he shot Ian Bush in the back of the head, turning the young officer's life upside down.
Constable Koester (pronounced Kes-ter) has said that he and his wife, Tammy, had moved into their small, grey duplex less than a week before Mr. Bush, 22, was killed on Oct. 29, 2005.
That same night, Constable Koester had given Corporal Derek Donovan a tour of the new place, where pizza that had fed friends who had helped him move was still in the fridge.
Constable Koester arrived in the small northern British Columbia town only days after graduating from the RCMP training college in Regina. By his own account, the Kamloops native liked Houston and intended to stay.
"I enjoyed the town and its people very much it was my intention to serve that community for a number of years," he wrote in his Nov. 17 sworn statement.
While in Houston as part of his six-month training period, Constable Koester performed many of the typical duties of a small-town police officer: putting on camps for children at risk and helping with bike rodeos at local elementary schools.
His friends and family are not talking to the news media until the matter of Mr. Bush's death has been dealt with.
One former colleague of Constable Koester described him as very slow and methodical in nature - not too good at cracking jokes, but a nice, deeply religious young man.
Since he had been in Houston for such a short time, he didn't know many people outside of the detachment, said Phyllis Jellett, who owns the Houston Barber Shop.
When Constable Koester came for his first haircut at her shop, she said, she laughed when he told her he was the new RCMP officer. She thought the 6-foot-4 rookie was a high-school basketball player.
"When I cut his hair, he was just an ordinary young man who appeared pretty nice," she said.
Her daughter Janeen, who also cut his hair a few times, said she'd been at a few parties Constable Koester had broken up. He always did all the talking, she said, because he was still learning and the other officers made him do it.
Anyone given a speeding ticket or a warning wasn't a big fan of the officer, Phyllis Jellet said, but there were never any complaints besides that.
The 30-year-old officer's parents have been at the coroner's inquiry into Mr. Bush's death all week, his father Tom taking constant notes. The officer's wife watched him testify on Tuesday, his thin angular face crinkling with emotion as he described being choked by Mr. Bush.
Constable Koester has said that he decided to go into policing because it was similar to his prior job as a seasonal Provincial Conservation Officer in Saskatchewan. He was five months into a six-month probationary training period when he arrested Mr. Bush outside a Houston Luckies game for holding an open bottle of beer.
After Mr. Bush twice gave Constable Koester a false name, he arrested him for obstruction at 9:18 p.m. Mr. Bush was dead just over 20 minutes later, when Constable Koester made an anguished cry for help on his radio.
Corporal Pierre LeMaitre, an RCMP spokesman, said Constable Koester was moved out of Houston quickly after the shooting. He is now posted in Williams Lake.