by Norm Stamper
The radio crackles. Team 2 is on the air. They’ve spotted the Galaxie up ahead, though they can’t tell whether there’s a kid in the car. They tail Carberry for a while, then back off as Team 1 slides into place. Carberry takes a serpentine route through the residential streets south of El Cajon Boulevard. Team 1 sloughs off, replaced by Team 3. A few blocks later, Hoyle and I take over. I see Joey’s blond mop on the passenger side. I get on the radio to the other teams, “The kid’s definitely in the vehicle. Repeat. The kid is in the car.” I switch over from tac to freq 3 and advise all patrol units to stay out of the area until notified. “We don’t want to spook this guy.”
Carberry turns north on Texas and crosses the boulevard for the first time since we’ve been tailing him. He’s in commercial territory now. A promising sign. The Galaxie makes it through on the yellow at Meade but we catch the red. “Bust it, Freddie.”
“You got it, Boss.”
I switch back to tac. “Stay close, guys. But don’t let him spot you.” Hoyle rolls through the red light, slow, like a tourist with his head up his ass. “Nicely done, partner.”
At Madison, Carberry signals a left. The gas station: He’s headed for the Mobil station on the northwest corner to make his next call. It’s only a hunch, of course, but strong enough for me to instruct all detective units to converge. When traffic clears the intersection, Carberry does indeed turn in to the station. He parks in front of a row of pumps, gets out of the car, chats for a second with the attendant, then heads for the phone located just inside the service bay. We pull onto the lot like we’re going for gas. “Stay with Joey,” I say to Hoyle. “I’m going after him.”
I slide out of the car, letting Carberry get as far away from the kid as possible. He stops at the phone. As soon as he lifts the receiver I badge him. “San Diego Police.” I don’t shout it but say it in the firm, clear “command presence” voice I was taught in the academy. “Let’s talk, Joseph.” Joseph doesn’t want to talk. He drops the phone, leaving it dangling on its coiled chrome snake, and rabbits across the service bay and out an open door on the other side. I pull the .38 from my waistband and give chase. This time, I do shout. At the top of my lungs: “Stop or I’ll shoot!” I won’t, I know. I’d never shoot the guy in the back, even with what I know about him. But talk’s cheap: maybe it’ll cause him to put on the brakes. Instead, he kicks on his afterburner and shoots past old tires and barrels of oil and solvent. He circles back to the car where Hoyle is trying to get into the locked passenger side to extract our little hostage.
Carberry beats me back to the car by three or four steps. It’s at this point that the situation, not unlike dozens of similar incidents I’ve handled before, becomes dissimilar. I don’t expect what comes next. All along, I’m thinking I’ll use my mouth or my fists or my right arm to solve the problem—logically, I’d choke him out.
But Carberry takes away all but one option as he jumps into the car, grabs something from his waistband and, shielded from my view, jabs it hard and fast against Joey’s head, then screams in an inhuman voice, “I’m gonna kill him! I’m gonna kill him!” He convinces me. I stick my gun into the car, point it at the back of his head, level the barrel so the slug won’t follow a downward path, and pull the trigger.
A 125-grain bullet from a .38 S&W revolver leaves the muzzle at 1,025 feet per second. The bullet I put into Mr. Carberry’s head traveled approximately six inches.
As I start to grab Carberry I hear a shot, and glass breaking. I jump back. What the fuck? Then another shot. I scream at Hoyle, “That’s enough!” He’d seen Joey’s head drenched in blood, was certain the kid had been shot. I pull Carberry’s limp body by the back of his shirt and jerk him out of the car. He weighs no more than a pillow. I pitch him to the ground. He falls face first to the pavement. I reach in and extract the blood-and brain-soaked child. He’s numb, silent. I bundle him in my arms for a moment and look into his eyes. I hold him aloft, check for holes. I stand him on his feet, long enough to see if he’ll fall over. He looks down, sees his father, and begins to scream. As I lift him back into my arms I spot Kelly and Varley. They’ve sprung from their car and are charging toward me. Varley, a big, gregarious Portuguese from my academy class, gets there first. I pivot and lateral the kid into his arms. He hands him off to Kelly, darts back to their car, and jumps behind the wheel. The two detectives make a dash for Hillside, Joey on Kelly’s lap. This is good, I think. Kelly, frog-voiced, gruff and cynical on the outside, is actually one of the department’s most sensitive souls. And a first-aid instructor.
A few minutes later, with patrol cops and detectives swarming the lot, Kelly calls from the hospital. “The kid’s okay, Norm. He’s okay. No injuries.” No injuries . . . no injuries.
Called from home, Homicide Team 1 shows up, most of them within the hour. Their sergeant is Jack Mullen, one of the best homicide dicks in SDPD history. He divides up the labor: witness interviews, scene reconstruction, measurements, diagrams, photos, identification, collection, and preservation of evidence. The gas station is closed down, taped off. Mullen sees to it that Hoyle and I are separated, our guns taken from us.
I’m standing alone, dispassionate, impressed by what I see. SDPD Homicide is doing its thing by the book.* They finish with us, at least at the scene. Hoyle and I, thirty feet apart, are about to be driven to headquarters, in separate cars. It’s dark now. Most of the station’s lights are off. Dew is collecting on Carberry’s car. I feel—nothing. A patrol sergeant has been assigned to transport me to headquarters. Homicide detective Jim Sanders waves him off. “Come on over here for a second, Lieutenant.” He takes my arm, moves me away from the others. “Take a look at this.”
In the palm of his hand, wrapped in a mechanic’s blue-colored rag is an invention of Sanders’s creativity, and a product of his fealty to the brotherhood. It’s a metal measuring tape with a black plastic-handled screwdriver jammed into its slot. “Look at it, sir. Anybody’d mistake this sucker for a gun. It was on the floor, right there where you pulled the body out.”
“I didn’t see it, Jim.”
“You sure, sir? It was right there.”
“I didn’t see it.”
“Oh. Oh, okay. Sure.” I imagine the detective struggling with how not to mention this find in his exhaustive inventory of the car’s contents.**
I started to walk toward my ride then turned around. “Jim?”
“Yeah, Lieutenant?”
“Thanks.”
There was no gun. The man I shot to death was unarmed.
Back at headquarters, O’Brien tosses me the keys to the patrol chief’s office. “There’s a lot of press around,” he says. “You won’t get interrupted there.” I walk down the long, dark corridor and unlock the double doors leading into the corner pocket. The place is like a tomb. I switch on the light in Chief Bob Jauregui’s office, take a seat in his executive chair, and insert a blank 153 into the Olympia typewriter sitting on a credenza behind the desk. As I start to type I notice the blood. It hadn’t registered. It’s cakey, rust-colored, and splattered all over my shirt and pants, and my brand-new shoes. I’ll never get that out of these shoes. The bastard. Then I remember. I call Patricia.
“Hi.”
“Are you okay? You sound funny.”
“I’m fine. I just wanted you to be aware of something. It’ll be on the news tonight.”
“What?”
“I shot a man.”
“Oh, Norm. Is he . . . did you . . . is he . . . dead?”
“Yes.”
I finish the report and walk it over to Sanders in Homicide. Then I call Patricia back. “Let’s go have pizza, okay?”
“Pizza?”
“Yeah, Venice.” Our favorite pizza joint, Thirty-third and El Cajon, just a few blocks from the shooting.
“Are you sure you . . .”
“Yeah, I’m sure. But I don’t want to talk about it, okay? I need to do something normal.” I pick Patricia up at our new home in Tierrasanta. At Ven
ice we split a No. 3 with pepperoni and mushrooms and talk about Nixon and Vietnam and the hopelessness of McGovern’s campaign.
Four years after the shooting, Father’s Day. My ten-year-old son is with us for the weekend. We’re shooting hoops in the backyard. Matt wants to know why I always stare off into the canyon, why I’m always quiet, or mad at him, on Father’s Day.
Ten years after the shooting, divorced from Patricia, I’m dating a defense attorney in Santa Monica. We have an argument in her apartment. I walk to the beach, take my shoes off, and start running as fast as my legs and lungs permit, on the undulating dry sand. Off in the distance, rippling through waves of heat, I see the back of Carberry’s auburn head. A second later it blows up, brains and blood exploding everywhere. Someone or something jerks my legs out from under me. I crash to the sand, and can’t get back up. I can’t catch a breath. I don’t know what to do. I’m embarrassed.
Thirteen years after the shooting, I’m sitting on a sofa, talking to a shrink. Under orders. Lisa, the new woman in my life has issued an ultimatum: Get help, or get lost. I don’t understand. I’m fine. I’m happy. I’m not nuts. But I love her, so here I am. The shrink wants me to talk about the shooting. No problem. I’ve told the story, several times. To recruits, so they can learn about tactics. To citizen groups, so they can understand more about DV. But this is different. I relive that September afternoon. It hits me that I’ve never spoken to anyone about the feelings. That’s because, until this moment, on this couch, I hadn’t realized I had feelings about it. I cry, tears rolling down my face. I start shaking, and can’t stop.
It’s better today. In the era of my shooting, police administrators were clueless. Nobody thought to replace the cop’s firearm, sometimes for days. When the significance of that oversight dawned on police officials—a cop without a gun is like a CPA without a calculator—they adopted a policy of immediately replacing the firearm. Someone, I don’t remember who, had loaned me a .38 the day after. I’d thanked him.
In the early seventies a cop who shot and killed someone was often subject to the worst possible response from his colleagues: praise. Not for his actions or his decision making or even the result but for the shooting act itself. We didn’t know any better. We didn’t have peer counseling or psychological services. We didn’t know that a cop involved in a shooting, particularly one that ends in death, is a different person after he or she has pulled the trigger.
“Nice shooting, Lieutenant,” said a patrolman who’d been giving me the cold shoulder ever since I’d gone public with my beefs about our business. “Guess I was wrong about you.” Nice shooting? How could I have missed? Wrong about me? You asshole. You think I feel good about killing a man? But his was a common reaction around the station house. People who’d never done it saying “you done good,” patting you on the back, like you’d scored the game-winning TD.
Almost as bad were those who acted like it hadn’t happened. When O’Brien offered up the keys to the chief’s office, it was the first and last thing he said to me about the shooting. Ever.
A cop who’s involved in a killing (or any other traumatic event) needs to be handled with care—for his or her own well-being as well as the future safety of the community. The shooter must be taken off the streets, of course. (Permanently, if the incident is a terminable offense; manslaughter comes to mind, as does murder. Also terminable? A shooting that reflects a cop’s incurable fear or impulsiveness or indecisiveness.) The officer should be given a desk job long enough for the investigation to establish the facts, and to determine whether the cop is fit for duty. How to make that determination? A session on the couch.
At the time of my shooting there was no requirement or expectation that cops involved in fatal shootings see a psychologist or psychiatrist. The only expectation was that you’d be back at work the next day, presumably with a borrowed gun. At the time that was fine with me: I didn’t want my colleagues thinking I’d been traumatized by the event, for chrissakes.
In subsequent years, officers involved in fatal shootings were offered the option of seeing, at company expense, a psychologist or psychiatrist. But the problem with noncompulsory visits was that they tended, in our macho culture, to stigmatize those who elected to “talk it out,” to get help for their flashbacks, their night sweats, their feelings of guilt (even in unassailably justified shootings). In time, we figured out that the best policy was to mandate psychological fitness-for-duty appraisals, conducted by competent professionals who are familiar with the police culture (and, of course, with the short-and long-term emotional effects of the use of lethal force). If everyone goes, no one gets stigmatized.
Even more helpful today is the assistance of “peer support” officers. We didn’t pioneer it in San Diego, but SDPD was one of the first to recruit volunteer cops who’d been involved in fatal or serious-injury shootings. We gave these officers intensive training in “peer counseling” and made them available to every cop who shot someone. The counselors were on call, just like Homicide and IA and deputy district attorneys and a union rep, available to roll to the scene on a moment’s notice. These cops had been there. They knew what to say and do—and what not to say and do. They knew how to help their fellow officers understand things about the shooting incident: department policies and procedures, the roles and responsibilities of Homicide, the DA, Internal Affairs, and what the shooter could reasonably expect from the department in the weeks and months ahead. Most important, they understood how the incident could affect officers psychologically, both in the moment and in the future.
There are two critical accountability concerns about officers involved in fatal shootings who are allowed to return to the streets. First, will the officer be trigger happy, too quick to resort to fatal force when “less lethal” means are available and appropriate? Second, will he or she hesitate to pull the trigger again, in a situation that demands it? In either case, the lives of both citizens and police officers hang in the balance.
EPILOGUE
Three months before I moved to Seattle I got on the elevator at SDPD headquarters and punched seven. The car stopped at the fifth floor and a DV detective got on. “Ah, Chief. I was just on my way up to see you. Got a minute?”
“You bet. What’s up?”
We were alone but he said, “I’d rather wait till we get to your office.”
“Okay.” He had an incident report in his hand. Shit, I thought, a cop. One of our officers has gone and beaten up his spouse or girlfriend. We got off the elevator and walked into my office. The detective handed me the report. I looked at the name on it. My blood turned cold.
San Diego police officers had the night before been called to the 805 bridge over Interstate 8. A man was lying between the concrete abutment and the guardrail, threatening to jump. The California Highway Patrol had closed two southbound lanes, as well as the ramp below. Negotiators talked with the despondent man for an hour, before convincing him to surrender. In his hand he clutched a small photograph of his two-year-old daughter. His girlfriend, the child’s mother, had just broken up with him after he’d beaten and threatened to kill her. On the way to County Mental Health, Joseph Alan Carberry blamed his problems on his mother, his girlfriend, and the police officer who’d shot his father twenty-one years earlier. He told the arresting officers he was going to track down and kill that cop.
I looked at the black-and-white DMV photo clipped to the arrest report. Joey was a man now, his chubby face topped by a mop of dishwater blond hair.
* We learn later from a friend of Carberry’s that Joey had lost the other shoe as Carberry loaded him into the car that morning. He’d refused to go back for it.
* Mullen, long since retired and living in Bandon, Oregon, writes police procedurals. If you’re in the market for a good, authentic read on homicide investigations, and homicide detectives, I highly recommend his books.
** In preparation for this chapter, I opened, for the first time since the shooting, a file marked “J.A.C.” Among
the yellowing reports, their staples rusted to dust, is the Evidence Report for “Special Investigation CG-2123” by Detective J. L. Sanders. Item No. 3 is “(1) Plastic handle screwdriver wedged in steel tape, wrapped in blue cloth. Received by SANDERS, placed in Crime Lab.”
CHAPTER 24
CITIZEN OVERSIGHT
THE DEBATE HAS RAGED for decades, pitting citizen against citizen, political activist against government, police union against city administration. It’s time to blow the whistle, end the agony, and do the right thing: Every city and county with a history of strained community-police relations should employ independent public oversight to investigate citizen complaints. No institution, including the police, can adequately police itself.
In 2001 the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) published “Citizen Review of Police: Approaches and Implementation,” written by Peter Finn. While declining to promote a particular system, the report describes thoroughly the costs, advantages, and disadvantages of various systems of citizen oversight. It identifies four models:
Type1:Citizens investigate allegations of police misconduct and recommend findings to the chief or sheriff.
Type2:Police officers investigate allegations and develop findings; citizens review and recommend that the chief or sheriff approve or reject the findings.
Type3:Complainants may appeal findings established by the police or sheriff’s department to citizens, who review them and then recommend their own findings to the chief or sheriff.
Type4:An auditor investigates the process by which the police or sheriff’s department accepts and investigates complaints and reports on the thoroughness and fairness of the process to the department and the public.*