He was a proud longtime Austin resident, Victoria Schaefer, his daughter-in-law, said Saturday. He would call his only son at the crack of dawn each year and wake him up to wish him happy birthday.

And he was dedicated to his mother, who shared a duplex with him on Lanshire Drive until her death almost two years ago.

It was there on Friday that a police officer shot and killed John Schaefer after he refused to surrender his gun and then aimed his weapon at the officer, officials said.

His family is grappling with the loss of a man Victoria Schaefer called a rule follower, a U.S. Navy veteran who never broke the law.

She spoke to the American-Statesman by phone from her father-in-law’s home, where she was collecting belongings that were important to him. Photographs of her boys, ages 12 and 13, were all over, she said.