Blown away 

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Several neighbors observed officers laughing and joking around after the shooting as Ehrenburg's dead, uncovered body lay within plain sight in an ambulance nearby.

That didn't sit well with neighbor Veronica Brown, one of those disturbed by police behavior that night.

"They were outside laughing, which I thought was very inappropriate after a man had just died," Brown says. "I'm not saying they were laughing at the situation. I don't know why they were laughing. It just surprised me that they were laughing at a time like that."

In the weeks before he was killed by police, Ehrenburg won a congressional adoption award for his work helping American families adopt children from Belarus, a former Soviet country plagued by a thuggish government and human rights violations after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In one of the last pictures of Ehrenburg before his death, he is surrounded by Congressman Robin Hayes and some of the children he helped bring to America. Ehrenburg slaved over each one of the 50 adoptions he helped with, translating thick stacks of legal papers from English to Russian and Russian to English for each child. Ehrenburg had also become adept at helping adoptive parents maneuver through the maze of laws they encountered both here and abroad.

Family and friends say that while they are shocked by the outcome of Ehrenburg's encounter with the police, they are not completely surprised by the way others describe Ehrenburg's behavior that evening. Ehrenburg could come across as short and gruff at times, a personality trait that may have ultimately contributed to his death.

The first time Barnhart talked to Ehrenburg about adopting a child, Barnhart says he thought Ehrenburg didn't like him. As he came to know Ehrenburg, Barnhart says he realized it was just a personality tick.

"But if you didn't know him, you would take it personally," says Barnhart.

It was a trait that the dozens of people who came to love Ehrenburg quickly learned to look past, particularly once they realized that it usually stemmed from the sometimes debilitating pain Ehrenburg suffered as part of the vascular disease that cost him his legs. Ehrenburg could be particularly gruff and unresponsive when he didn't feel good.

"He would say, 'I'm sick, sick.' He would say, 'I feel bad,' and then hang up on you," says Barnhart.

Though his doctors encouraged Ehrenburg to take pain medicine and attempted to prescribe it, Ehrenburg refused to take it because he feared it would dull his mind and that, in his drug-induced state, he might embarrass himself, according to his wife and friends.

"Sometimes the pain was really tough," says Skorska.

When the pain hit, he'd shut down emotionally and retreat to his bedroom and the comfort of his electric blanket to fight it alone. It appears that may be what Ehrenburg was attempting to do that evening.

What those close to Ehrenburg can't explain, no matter how many times you ask them, is Ehrenburg's use of his guns, which they say he carried, but never pointed at people. The neighborhood Ehrenburg lived in had been getting rougher for years, and he felt he needed the weapons, a pistol and a shotgun, for protection. Perhaps, they say, he was confused. Perhaps he didn't fully understand what was going on.

Ehrenburg's wife and friends refuse to concede the possibility that perhaps he was being stubborn that night, that he understood perfectly what was going on and in his agitated state couldn't deal with the stress of being told what to do in his own home and threatened police. But they are also emphatic that he had no psychiatric problems. That leaves few logical explanations for Ehrenburg's behavior that night -- or few that they are willing to accept.

But they do admit that he was stubborn. Very stubborn. Ehrenburg had decent grasp of American law, they say; he would have probably believed that he had a right to defend himself against armed intruders and that police and firefighters didn't have a right to enter his house.

The problem is that it appears they did.

"If he is decisionally capable, he can refuse anything doctors offer," says Stell, the Davidson professor who teaches bioethics. "Medic is tricky. When they show up they really have limited discretion. They are supposed to provide emergency care and not stop providing it until somebody with authority tells them to. If 911 gets called and they go to the scene, they are going to be aggressive and they don't really have any discretion to be anything else."

According to the official police statement of facts in the case, after a medic initially spoke to Ehrenburg through the front window around 9:30 p.m. and asked if he needed some help, Ehrenburg said, "Yes." But when the medic asked if Ehrenburg would open the front door, according to the statement, Ehrenburg said, "No" through the window.