The Warning Was There. The Tool Wasn’t.
On the night of March 7, 2026, 53-year-old Megan Nieberle, a veteran nurse at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, was driving through Tredyffrin Township in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Out of nowhere, she was shot in the head. She died the next day. Police say she had no connection to her killer. She was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
What makes this case especially painful is what happened a few days before the shooting. Another woman had a disturbing encounter with the suspect, 44-year-old Steve Jahn, which she reported to Caln Township Police. Officers tracked Jahn down and reported that he was openly hostile with them.
That wasn’t Jahn’s only encounter with law enforcement that week. Just a few hours prior to the shooting, Jahn called 911 from a bank parking lot, telling dispatchers he was being followed and that he had a loaded 9mm revolver. Tredyffrin Township police officers responded. They found him agitated and paranoid, convinced that people were “going after him.”
The officers offered to escort him to a local hospital for a mental health evaluation. He agreed—until he didn’t. When they arrived, Jahn decided the cars in the hospital parking lot were part of the conspiracy against him and refused to go inside.
Because he hadn’t technically broken any Pennsylvania law and held a valid concealed carry permit, police in Caln and Tredyffrin townships had no legal mechanism to hold Jahn or disarm him. The officers let him leave.
A Legal Gap With Real Consequences
Pennsylvania does not have an Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO), commonly known as a red flag law. In the District of Columbia and the 22 states with these laws on the books, law enforcement officers—and, in many states, family members—can petition a civil court to temporarily remove a person’s access to firearms when there is credible evidence they pose a danger to themselves or others. The person gets a hearing, due process is preserved, and the order is temporary, until the person can get the help they need.
In Tredyffrin Township, officers had direct contact with an armed man in what appeared to be a serious mental health crisis. He was telling them he felt threatened. He was refusing voluntary psychiatric care. He was armed. But without an ERPO, law enforcement options were limited. The officers could detain him if he was an imminent danger under existing mental health statutes, but that’s a high bar requiring immediate threat, not paranoid behavior. So he drove away. Two hours later, Megan Nieberle was fatally shot.
This is precisely the scenario ERPO laws are designed to address: the gap between warning signs and tragedy, when someone needs intervention but hasn’t yet committed a crime. If the Caln Township officers had been able to file an ERPO claim days earlier, Megan Nieberle would likely still be alive today.
The state’s Democrat-controlled House passed ERPO legislation in May 2023, but it stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate. The House tried again last September, but the legislation failed to pass by one vote, leaving Pennsylvania in the company of states that lack this critical intervention tool.
Since then, opposition to ERPO laws has intensified in the state. In September 2025, a Pennsylvania lawmaker introduced a bill specifically aimed at preempting any future ERPO law in the commonwealth. It’s part of a broader national trend. Montana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming have already passed anti-ERPO laws, even as research consistently shows these laws save lives.
Pennsylvania Isn’t Alone—Or Unusual
Similar stories have played out in other states without ERPO laws, or where existing tools went unused.
The 2023 Lewiston, Maine, mass shooting claimed 17 lives. The perpetrator, Robert Card, had been experiencing a serious mental health crisis for months. His family tried to alert authorities. Army officials were warned. An ERPO law would have given family members direct legal recourse to petition a court to remove Card’s firearms, bypassing their dependence on law enforcement to act. The tragedy encouraged Maine voters to approve an ERPO law in November 2025, more than two years after the shooting.
The 2025 Manhattan NFL headquarters shooting was carried out by a gunman who had driven from Nevada. He had been hospitalized twice in Nevada for mental health evaluations in 2022 and again in 2024. Law enforcement believed he posed a danger to himself and others both times. Nevada actually has an ERPO law, but it is rarely used. In fact, an ERPO could have been sought during either of those intervention moments, but it wasn’t.
The 2025 Minneapolis school/church shooting prompted fresh scrutiny of how ERPOs are used even in states that have them. Minnesota’s ERPO law went into effect in 2024, but investigators found no ERPO had been sought for the shooter, despite persistent warning signs of mental disturbance in the suspect’s writings and videos.
The pattern is consistent: someone in crisis, warning signs visible to those around them, and either no legal tool available to intervene, or a tool that existed but wasn’t used.
What the Research Shows
While awareness and enforcement remain uneven, ERPO laws are widely approved by Americans. 97Percent’s 2024 survey of more than 5,100 gun-owning registered voters across the country found that even 72% of gun owners support ERPO policies, and every single state showed majority support—including deeply conservative states like West Virginia and North Carolina. That’s a broad coalition that lawmakers would do well to acknowledge.
We’ve also studied how these laws work in practice, and our research shows that ERPOs are most effective when enforced consistently and when law enforcement receives proper training. That’s why 97Percent has developed a law enforcement training program specifically designed to help officers understand when and how to use ERPO tools—respecting due process while maximizing their potential to prevent violence.
A multistate study published in 2024 in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law estimated that one suicide was prevented for every 17 to 23 ERPOs issued. Research also shows ERPOs can be effective in preventing mass violence. A 2022 Johns Hopkins University analysis of nearly 6,800 ERPO cases found that about 10% involved a credible threat to kill three or more people. These are documented outcomes—not hypotheticals—in states that have done the work.
The Bottom Line
The police officers in Caln and Tredyffrin townships who responded to the incidents involving Steve Jahn appear to have acted in good faith. They showed up. They tried to help. The Tredyffrin officers even escorted him to the hospital. But the state gave them no legal mechanism to do more when he refused care and walked away with his guns.
An ERPO wouldn’t have been a guarantee. No law is. But it would have given those officers—and potentially Jahn’s family—a path to a court, a hearing, and a temporary order that could have changed the tragic outcome of March 7, 2026.
The warning was there. The tool wasn’t.