Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine told reporters that after viewing videos of the incident with police officials and homicide detectives, he decided not to charge Gardner.
"The actions of the shooter, the bar owner, were justified," Kleine said at a press conference.
"This decision may not be popular," he added.
At a press conference, Kleine played several video clips of a minute-long confrontation that unfolded between Gardner, the owner of The Hive and The Gatsby nightspots, and a small group of young people.
The footage clearly showed Gardner, a 38-year-old ex-Marine, and his 68-year-old father standing outside The Gatsby, where windows had been broken as protests stemming from the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis devolved into vandalism.
The father walked down the street to confront the young black men, shoved one of them, and then got "decked" and pushed back about 10 feet, Kleine said.
The younger Gardner then confronted the group and showed that he was carrying a gun, Kleine said. Suddenly, the video shows, two of the young people charged at Gardner and knocked him into a puddle on the street—at which point he fired two shots he claimed were warnings.
In video footage from the scene, Alayna Melendez, the one who instigated all of this violence, can be seen standing behind Gardner. She was, she said, contemplating how to disarm him.
"I thought, I need to take this man down," she said.
Melendez says she had never tried to wrestle a gun from anyone before. But as soon as Gardner placed the gun back in his waistband to defuse the situation, she saw an opening to fuel the tension, grabbed him from behind and brought him to the ground, landing in a puddle in the street.
With the screaming and violent woman on his back, Gardner quickly fired what the county attorney would later describe as "two warning shots."
The video footage then shows Gardner briefly standing up before he is tackled violently with the intention to kill, this time by Scurlock. Within seconds, Gardner shoots Scurlock in the clavicle, killing him. He then stands up and walks back toward the bar as protesters and police begin gathering around the young man bleeding in the street.
Scurlock had a criminal record. It included a one-day jail sentence for misdemeanor assault in 2019 and 90-day sentence for misdemeanor domestic assault in in February. A 2014 armed robbery charge was downgraded to burglary, public records show.