Into the Kill Zone

by David Klinger

  His eyes were glazed over, and the way he was looking—he had a very blank stare on his face—it was like he was looking at us but he didn’t see us. I was yelling at him to freeze. Off to the right, his mother was in the other room screaming, “Don’t kill him! Don’t kill him!” As she was screaming this and I was telling him to freeze, his right hand started to come over near his waistband. I started telling him, “Don’t touch the gun! Don’t touch the gun!” because I knew that if a gun came up, I would have to fire because I had other officers in the room.

  Well, he grabbed one of the guns by its handle and pulled it out of his waistband. I could feel the pressure on my trigger as I started to squeeze, and he dropped the first gun. He then immediately, but slowly, went for the second gun. He grabbed it and made a slight motion like he was coming up with it. I was again getting ready to squeeze the trigger; then he dropped the second gun. At that time, we pounced on him and took him to the ground.

  After we cleared the rest of the house, I asked him what he doing with the guns. He told us he was so stoned that he didn’t really realize who we were. His brain was just apparently fried from all the cocaine he used, which was a shame because the guy was a vet who had won several medals in the marines. He had used so much cocaine that when he sneezed, he would bleed from the nose. His mind was just frazzled. Maybe he just knew enough that he could realize that we must have been some kind of law enforcement, but he never gave me a very logical answer at all.

  I know I could have shot him, but when I was looking at him—looking at his eyes—I just didn’t feel he was a threat. I knew that I had my gun out, a fully automatic weapon shooting .223 rounds. At twelve feet away, I knew that if I had to pull the trigger, it would be over instantly. I just don’t feel that because someone is armed that he’s necessarily a threat. Even when you know ahead of time that someone is violent, you gotta judge the incident on what you’re seeing at that time. Several of the guys there thought for sure I was going to shoot. And by the book, if I’d shot I’d been covered ’cuz the guns were in his hands, but to me he just wasn’t a threat at the time.

  Besides his eyes, when he grabbed the guns, his fingers never went inside the trigger guard. If a finger had gone inside a trigger guard, I would’ve definitely shot. The other thing that would’ve made me shoot was if a barrel would’ve started in my direction. If that happened, he could easily get the finger in the trigger guard before I could have gotten a shot off. So if either a finger went in a trigger guard or a barrel came toward me, then I’d have pulled the trigger. No doubt.

  • • •

  Since I came over to SWAT, we’ve had several cases where guys have shot at us, but we never returned any fire. Probably the craziest one happened in 1993 when I got shot in the leg. It was a boyfriend-girlfriend deal. He was upset about his girlfriend working at this video store at this strip center on the north side of town. He went over there and started slapping his girlfriend around. Somebody there at the store told him to leave her alone. The boyfriend shot this other guy, in the leg I think. So the guy crawled out and called the police. By the time patrol got there, the boyfriend had beat the poor girl pretty good. I don’t know how much time went by after patrol arrived, but he finally let her go. So by the time we got there, he was inside the video store by himself.

  The guy was nonresponsive to all the negotiators’ attempts to contact him, so some of the other guys and I went into a restaurant that shared a common wall to the video store at the strip center to see what we could figure out. I ended up getting on top of the freezer, had a body bunker in front of me so I could get access to the ceiling because nobody knew where he was. He was hiding somewhere, apparently. So I took off some ceiling tiles over the video store and started looking around for him. Couldn’t see him, couldn’t see him. So I got up on my tippy-toes. I was looking, looking, looking, peering over the top of the shield. Finally, I looked just about straight down, and when I did, I spotted him just behind the front counter. Right then, he looked up. I don’t know if I made some noise or what. But he saw me at the same time I saw him, so I got down behind the shield real fast. As I was ducking, I heard, “boom, boom.” Both of his rounds hit the shield and flew off somewhere.

  I told the CP what happened and got down from the ceiling. The negotiators got the speakers going, trying to talk to him, saying, “Yes, we know you’re behind the counter, give up,” and stuff like that. He didn’t respond. After a bunch of attempts that got nothing, they finally asked me if I could get to that ceiling again and pump some gas in there. I said sure, went back up with a big tube of pepper mace spray and the shield, and started to fill the store with gas. Well, he shot at me again. Bounced a few more rounds off the shield.

  That just got me going even more. I’m an adrenaline junkie; it didn’t bother me any. We’d found the first two rounds he fired. He had a .25 auto. Those rounds can kill you if they hit, but they weren’t going to go through the shield, so I felt pretty safe. Some of the other guys got worried, but I’m like the guy in the cereal commercial, “Let’s get Mikey to do it, he’ll do anything.” Yeah, that’s me, I like that stuff, I live off that adrenaline. I mean, I know it’s dangerous stuff that we do, but I don’t get scared when we’re doing it. I guess maybe I get scared afterwards, but not during.

  He shot a couple more times, then the guys in the front saw him scamper into what turned out to be the bathroom. We figured out that the storeroom for this little restaurant we were in shared a common wall with the bathroom in the video store. So we got in there, being real quiet, and set the four-foot big body bunker against the wall. We decided to try to put a hole in the wall and pump some gas into the bathroom. Because I’m the guy that’ll do anything, I moved up behind the shield with a keyhole saw and started cutting a hole in the Sheetrock about five feet off the ground. The only thing that was exposed was my right hand, so I figured the worst-case scenario was that he might get off a lucky shot that hits my hand.

  Well, I got all the way through the layer of drywall on the storeroom side of the wall, but on the bathroom side I started hitting something. “Clunk, clunk, clunk.” I was thinking, “What the hell!” Then it hit me, it was the damn mirror over the sink!

  Randy was with me and he said, “We’ll go up higher.”

  I told him, “I’m not getting up over that shield.” You know I’m an adrenaline junkie, but I’m not dumb.

  So he said, “Well, just set it up on a chair.” That made good sense. My lower legs would be exposed, but the rest of my body and head, except one hand, would be protected. So we slid a chair up and set the shield up on it. The idiot must have heard me, because when I reached up to start cutting the hole, he fired a shot through the wall about two feet off the ground. The damn round went through the wall and hit me in the left shin bone, right below the knee. It bounced off, hit the wall in front of me, dropped, and went spinning along the floor a little bit.

  It didn’t hurt too badly. I was still standing, so I moved away from the wall to get some better cover. My team leader got on the air and put out that an officer had been shot. I stopped him and told him that we shouldn’t get this blown out of proportion. I knew the bullet hadn’t penetrated much because it bounced right off. I reached down and cut my pant leg open. There wasn’t much blood, just a frickin’ groove in my leg. I showed it to him and said it was no big deal.

  He asked me if I was sure and I told him, “Yeah.” We were about to get back to work when one of the sergeants showed up. He asked what happened. I told him I got nicked by a bullet and showed him the little cut. He wanted to pull me out of there, but I didn’t want to leave. I told him that I’d scratched my leg on a nail worse than what the bullet did. Apparently, I convinced him, because he let me stay there.

  We ended up putting another shield on the floor in front of the one on the chair so that we had cover all the way down. I cut a hole all the way through, and we got the gas in there. The gas pushed him back out to the front part of the store. Then I
left the restaurant and took a position outside near the front door of the video shop. After about another hour or so of him not responding, we set a light at the door. I was holding it on a fire pole, so I was out of the way around the corner. He fired a few rounds at it but missed. Then he stopped shooting and started throwing videotapes at the light, trying to knock it down. It got to be a game, where I was holding the light out there, kind of dancing that light around, while he threw videotapes at it. I figured the poor owner of the store was gonna have a heart attack when it was all over ’cuz the guy must’ve thrown three hundred videotapes out the door trying to hit that light.

  Well, the idiot finally came out holding his gun to his head and sat down on the curb in front of the store. He was facing right at me. I was behind cover, but I could see him clearly. I could tell he was tired. It had been going on for hours. He was sort of nodding off every now and then, his eyes shutting a little bit, his head drooping, then snapping back up. Well, after a while, his head dropped again and the gun went off. I remember that his eyes opened up for a split second, and he had this surprised look on his face. Then I saw the blood gushing down the right side of his head, and the guy fell over. The react team, which was staged in the doorway of the restaurant, ran up and covered down on him, but he was DOA.

  I figured from that surprised look that guy didn’t mean to kill himself, that he shot himself by accident. When I saw him do it, I thought to myself, “Serves him right for shooting me.”

  Veterans of Restraint

  As noted in this chapter’s introduction, some officers are involved in dozens of close encounters. The man whose words appear in this section’s primary story is one such person. He has spent most of his twenty-five-year police career as a SWAT officer in one of the nation’s biggest cities. He has also worked patrol in some of his city’s busiest beats, spent a short stint assigned to the city’s jail, and nearly four years in Narcotics hunting dope dealers. Over the years, he has shot three people, witnessed partners or teammates shoot at least ten other people, and held his fire in at least two dozen cases in which he could clearly have shot. The cases he talks about in this section are those that were most salient in his mind and therefore those that give the best view into how at least one busy cop handles and thinks about the many close calls that have come his way.

  The second officer who speaks in this section has also spent many years on his department’s SWAT team (also one of the nation’s largest and most active). His words are included because they present the single best accounting from the interviews I conducted of why it is that police officers shoot so few of the people that they have legal cause to kill.

  • • •

  I’ve been involved in at least two dozen cases, maybe three, where I could have shot people but held my fire. The first time I came really, really close to shooting somebody was at a disturbance call at a beer joint when I was still on probation. I was working a night shift with my training officer when we got the call. Shots had been fired. We responded, but the suspect was gone. The witnesses gave us a description of the vehicle he’d left in, said he had a gun, was involved in a fight with his girlfriend, and the bouncer threw him out of the bar. He went out and got in his car, started it up, and as he was driving out of the parking lot, he cranked off a couple of rounds into the bar. He didn’t hit anybody, but there was a couple of bullet holes in the walls. So we put out a description and started looking around the area for this vehicle.

  A few minutes later, we got a return call that he was back at the bar. When we got back there, he was gone again. He had just done another drive-by shooting on the bar. So we put out another broadcast that he was in the area and started to drive around again when we got another call that he was back at the bar. We go back this third time and saw his car sitting there. He had gone into the bar, grabbed his girlfriend at gunpoint, and taken her back out to his car. He threw her into the front seat of his car and jumped in behind the wheel. It was a bench seat. When we pulled in behind him, he had his right arm around her, over her shoulder in an affectionate-looking way. But he had a pistol, turned out to be a .357 Magnum, in his right hand, hanging down in front of her chest. She was sobbing.

  It was summertime, very hot, and all four windows on his car were down. We drew our guns, and my partner told me to approach from the passenger side while he moved up on the driver’s side to a point where he would be in a good position to make verbal contact with the guy. I moved up and stopped just outside his rear passenger-side door, where I could see his right hand with the gun in it. I was about five feet away from him with my front sight focused on the back of his head. I could hear what he was telling her. Very affectionate stuff like, “It’s OK, honey, I still love you. Everything’s gonna be all right.” It was obvious from the way he was slurring his words that he was highly intoxicated. She was sobbing, not responding to him.

  My partner was positioned just outside the driver’s-side back door. He had a perfect bead on the back of his head as well. My partner made voice contact with him and told him to drop the gun. For some reason, instead of looking in the direction of my partner’s voice, the suspect turned and looked at me. We made eye contact right over the front sight of my gun. Then he focused on the end of my gun, said, “Oh, my God, don’t kill me,” and dropped his gun. I heard it drop. It hit the seat and bounced onto the floorboard. I started giving him commands, and he very slowly raised his hands. Then my partner opened the driver’s door, yanked the guy out by his hair, and wrestled him to the ground while I reached in and got the gun.

  I came very, very close to killing that guy. I was in fear for the girl’s life because he had that gun in his hand. I had a tactical advantage because I was behind him. He was going to have to rotate quite a bit to get a shot at me. So I was basically concerned for her safety, that he might suddenly try to shoot her. But when I realized how intoxicated he was, I felt I had a big advantage over him because he wasn’t going to be able to move real quick. I thought I could get him before he could do it to her because I was real close and I felt very confident of the head shot that I had. I remember thinking that I really might have to kill this guy, but I wasn’t going to unless he made some overt move to hurt her. If he would have made any sudden or aggressive move, I’d have pulled the trigger. He never did, so I didn’t have to shoot.

  I had another real close call while I was still on probation. I was working with a different partner, when we were dispatched to a disturbance call at an apartment complex. We went to arrest this one guy, and he took off running. We chased him through the apartment complex. As he went around the first corner, we lost sight of him for just a second. Turns out he threw this gun he was carrying over a redwood fence and onto this lady’s back patio when we lost sight of him. We didn’t even know he had a gun, but this lady saw him throw it. When it was all over, she brought it to us, so we were able to make a case on it with her testimony. Anyway, we finally caught the guy, had to fight him, kinda bloodied him up a little bit, got him handcuffed, and took him back to our patrol car, which was near the apartment where this all started. When we got there, about five of his buddies were there. They asked us where we were taking the guy. We told his buddies we were taking him to jail. They said, “No, you’re not.” We said, “Yes, we are.” We went back and forth like that a few times, when, all of a sudden, they just jumped us.

  I had already gotten the prisoner into the back of the patrol car, and as I was in the process of trying to secure him there, one of the other guys came at me with a club. I was partway in the backseat, so I pushed the prisoner down onto the floorboard and started kicking at the guy, trying to kick him off of me. He was swinging this club at me, trying to get my feet, so I pulled my feet into the car. I drew my pistol, thinking that would make him back off, but it didn’t. I was sitting in the backseat with one hand pushing down on the prisoner while I had my pistol pointed at the guy with the club. He was right on top of me, no more than two or three feet away. I was screaming, �
��Back off! I’m gonna kill you! I’m gonna kill you!” It didn’t make any difference to him. I was thinking, “Oh, man, you’ve made your bluff, now you gonna back it up or what?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my partner on the hood of the patrol car, fighting with two other guys. I had already put out an “assist the officer” call, but I was real worried about my partner. He was getting the crap beaten out of him. I was afraid those two guys were going to get his gun, shoot him, and then come after me. I was pretty safe in the car right then. The guy with the club couldn’t really get to me, but I had to do something to help my partner because I didn’t know how much longer he could hold out. I couldn’t get out without getting hit by the guy with the club, so I decided to shoot the guy, then go help my partner.

  Just as I was about to pull the trigger, this bystander, a big guy, grabbed the guy with the club in a headlock and yanked him back. The bystander beat the crap out of the guy with the club while my partner and I finally got the upper hand on the other two guys. Then some other units showed up and it was all over. But I was in the process of pulling the trigger when this other guy grabbed the guy with the club. All I saw at first was this arm come over the guy’s head. My initial thought was that some other officers had arrived. As I came out from the backseat, I saw this guy in regular clothes, and I was wondering if he was an officer working plainclothes, or narcotics, or what? Turns out he was just Joe Blow Citizen who was watching everything and decided he had seen enough, that he was going to get involved. He didn’t know it, but by getting involved he saved that other guy’s life.