The man shot by the Summit County deputy was Donald Wayne Ball, a 41-year-old honorably discharged Marine and former employee of Blackwater Worldwide, a private military company now known as Academi.
Ball, who had a no-bail warrant out for his arrest, was killed in the early morning hours of Nov. 9 when he evaded a traffic stop in Kamas and fled toward Woodland.
He ultimately crashed his car after crossing the Provo River on Bench Creek Road into Wasatch County. The Wasatch County Sheriff’s Office said he got out of the car and “advanced toward the deputy with a large, blunt object” before he was shot.
Authorities have not specified what the object was, and neither bodycam nor dash camera footage has been released.
The Utah Attorney General’s Office is leading the multi-agency investigation. A Summit County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson said more details may be released over the course of the investigation.
Ball had been living off the grid in a remote cabin at the western edge of the Uinta Mountains about 70 miles from where he grew up in West Valley City.
His childhood friends Kelly Fox and Nick Moss remember him as a good friend and generous person. But they said Ball’s deployments in Iraq changed him.
Ball’s father David died when he was a sophomore at Cottonwood High School. His junior year, Ball decided to join the Marines and would enlist shortly after graduating in 2001.
Fox said their friend’s first deployment in Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom was traumatic.
“Donald was one of the only people in his whole unit, in the first invasion in Iraq, that came back not in a body bag and not missing limbs,” Fox said.
After that, Ball was deployed in both Fallujah and Ramadi. When he returned home, Blackwater offered him a security job back in Iraq.
The former Marine would get entangled in an infamous 2007 massacre in central Baghdad’s Nisour Square.
There, Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqis and wounded 20 more. The FBI later said 14 of those killings were unjustified.
Ball was one of five Blackwater guards indicted over the Nisour Square massacre in 2008, although charges against him would be dropped in 2013.
The FBI arrested Ball back home in Utah while he was working as a constable for the Salt Lake County Court.
The first indictment got thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct, but after a second, a federal court found three of the other guards guilty of manslaughter and one guilty of murder in 2014. President Donald Trump pardoned the four men in 2020.
Ball’s friends say he maintained his innocence and said investigators wouldn’t find ballistics from his weapon. Still, Fox said the indictment hurt him, making it especially difficult to find work.
“He had just graduated from the police academy. He was finally getting his stuff together; he was going to school like, he was doing good for himself. And those charges screwed, completely ruined, his whole life,” Fox said. “And that's when Don changed.”
Ball would struggle with mental health problems and substance abuse in the years following his deployments and prosecution. His friends say he pushed people away, but he also enrolled in the University of Utah.
“It was just tough for him to handle. And he did—he went through a long struggle for a lot of years with different demons. And he was finally coming out of it, from what I understand, the last couple of years, and he was trying to get everything back,” Moss said.
Ball caught felony charges in 4th District Court in 2018 for damaging communications infrastructure.
A 2020 letter to the court from a psychiatrist at the Department of Veterans Affairs said Ball was receiving outpatient treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, paranoid delusions and cannabis and methamphetamine use. The VA said he was “in full sustained remission” and did not require medication.
Then Ball’s house was foreclosed on. Moss says Blackwater had promised to take care of Ball financially after the Nisour Square controversy and was sending checks of around $8,000 per month.
Eventually the military contractor gave him the option of taking a lump sum of around $500,000, which Moss said Ball accepted and used to purchase his remote cabin south of Woodland in Wasatch County. The county went on to repossess the property because of unpaid property taxes.
That made Moss suspicious, because Utah offers property tax relief to disabled veterans. PTSD qualifies as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
A company bought Ball’s house and served him an eviction notice this summer. Court documents say he didn't comply.
Since February, a warrant was out for his arrest for violating his probation in the 2018 felony case. The violations included not maintaining contact with his probation officer and not completing substance abuse and mental health evaluations.
The Wasatch County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement its deputies were making efforts to reach Ball away from his residence because they wanted to avoid a potentially dangerous confrontation.
Ball’s friends haven’t seen his remote cabin, but Moss said he thought Ball got rid of his guns and basically became a “hippie.”
Both friends say they find it hard to believe Ball was a danger to law enforcement. Moss said he expected to get a call one day that Ball had taken his own life.
“I was always worried about that because of how much he was carrying on his shoulders,” Moss said. “This is not the call I expected to ever get. Ever.”
He said Ball had been living with his sister in Las Vegas, was clean and only just returned to Utah a couple weeks ago.
“We just want to bury him and, and bury him when he was at his best,” Moss said, “at the time that he was proud of himself, and everyone was proud of him, before the cloud of this trial, you know, destroyed him.”
Ball’s mother Karen passed away in August 2022. Moss said the rest of his immediate family has retained attorney Greg Skordas after the shooting Nov. 9.
Skordas did not respond to requests for comment Friday.
According to a Summit County Sheriff’s spokesperson, the office’s last deputy-involved shooting was in 2015. The last such fatal shooting was in 2004.
