Whatever the circumstances that bring officer and assailant together, and whatever the assailant’s motive for the behavior that prompts police gunfire, all shootings boil down to the same point: police officers decide that the person they face will do them or another innocent person grave harm if they don’t shoot.
The stories in this chapter show what happens when officers reach that critical point. Readers will meet young officers thrown into violent shoot-outs while they were still wet behind the ears, veteran officers who kill knife-wielding madmen, and officers and shootings of every sort and stripe in between. More than a dozen of the officers I interviewed were injured during their shootings. We will hear from a few of them. Although—as detailed in the Introduction—most officers never shoot anyone, a small number are involved in two or more shootings. Several of the officers I interviewed fall into the multiple-shooter category, and we will hear from two of them here. Finally, I was occasionally able to interview two or more officers who fired their weapons in the same incident. To provide the reader an idea of how different officers experience the same shooting, I have included a handful of stories that deal with a single incident.
As was the case in the first three chapters, the stories are presented in a series of groups, starting with two of the more dramatic shootings, both of which happened when the involved officers were mere novices.
Baptism by Fire
One of the reasons police agencies put newly minted academy graduates through a probationary period that includes substantial time riding with senior officers is to allow young officers the opportunity to break into the rigors of police work slowly. Fate is no respecter of time on the job, however, and some officers find themselves in deadly straits before they have learned the ropes. We saw in previous chapters that this can include witnessing fellow officers struck down in the line of duty, watching other officers shoot citizens, and nearly shooting people themselves. This section completes the picture of rookies’ exposure to deadly violence with a pair of stories from young officers who shot people long before they had a chance to get their police legs under them; in the case of the first officer we hear from, just ten days after he hit the streets.
• • •
My first training officer was a fairly young guy, who spent a lot of time talking with me about deadly force. At the time I showed up at the station, he had been in two shootings in less than two years. So he was one of those guys that was just always in the middle of whatever action was going on in the division. Because of that, he put a major emphasis on deadly force in training.
When he told me about those shootings, I figured that couldn’t happen to me. I was just getting out on the street. I was like, “Well, yeah, I know it happens, but it’s probably not going to happen to me.” I mean, I knew that something like that could happen, but in my mind I thought it wouldn’t, at least not early on in my career. Then, on my tenth day in the field, it happened.
It was a Monday and we were working day shift. We were very busy because of this gas station across the street from a housing project that was a real crime magnet. The gang-bangers who lived in the projects would run across the street, rob the patrons at the gas station, and then run back into the projects. As a trainee, I had to write all the crime reports for our car, and I was getting report after report after report of robberies at that gas station. My training officer wanted to make sure he got off duty on time that day—I can’t remember why—so he said, “Let’s park our car near the gas station and sit and write your reports there. Maybe we can keep them from robbing it, so we can go home on time.” So that’s what we did. We parked in a visible area to the rear of this little tiny hot dog stand that was right next to the gas station.
So we were parked there in a marked black-and-white radio car writing our reports when both me and my partner saw this guy walk up to a customer who was putting gas in his car about thirty to forty feet away from us. The guy didn’t look at us. He just reached into the back of his waistband, pulled out an automatic, jacked a round into the gun, and stuck it into the customer’s stomach. The guy then took the customer’s wallet and started going through his pockets.
My training officer grabbed the radio and put out the emergency traffic that we had an armed robbery in progress and where we were. I don’t even remember drawing my gun, but by the time my training officer got off the air, I had my gun out and I was ready to go. He told me, “OK, wait till he gets away from the victim,” because the crook still had the gun in the guy’s stomach.
After a little while, the suspect finally looked over and saw us sitting there. My training officer said, “We’re going to let him walk away, and then we’re going to pull forward.” And that’s exactly what happened. The guy pretended like maybe we didn’t see this whole thing in front of us, put the gun down by his side, and started to walk away. As we started to pull forward in the car, the guy started to run. When he got to the curb, he slowed down, then ran out into the street. It’s a major street—four lanes across—and when he got to the middle of it, he turned around and started firing at us.
I was still sitting in the radio car with the door open, one foot on the ground. I knew the guy was shooting at us because I saw him shooting, but I didn’t really hear the rounds going off. The audible start-up and “BANG!” that usually happens when you pull the trigger wasn’t there. It was just a soft “pop, pop, pop.” He fired nine rounds at us—all misses. My partner fired four, and I fired two. At the time, I didn’t know my partner fired because I didn’t hear his shots. In fact, when it was over, I asked him, “Did you shoot, or was it just me?”
When the shooting started, there was this Housing Authority police unit right there, almost between us. When they saw what was happening, they just left. I remember them watching us in this gunfight, looking at us, and putting it in reverse. I remember their tires screeching as they left. I couldn’t believe it.
Another thing I remember is that when the guy turned and started firing, I got tunnel vision on him. I also remember that I had a sight picture on him as I was firing, because I remember seeing my front sights as I was shooting and wondering why he wasn’t falling. I remember actually thinking, “Why isn’t he falling?” Then I wondered, “Why is he still running?” because after he fired his rounds, he took off running again. It turns out that we hit him four times, but we didn’t know it because he just ran into the projects.
As soon as the guy disappeared into the projects, everything got loud. My partner said to me, “We’re not going to chase him. We got to get the victim and make sure he’s OK.” Not chasing the guy was a judgment call on his part, and it turned out to be a sound decision, because all the witnesses said that the guy went around the first corner and waited there to ambush us. He waited there for us for quite a while. It wasn’t until the first assisting unit got there that he got up from his ambush position. The witnesses said that when that first unit arrived, the guy took off running a little ways, then fell in some bushes and died. And that was probably a good minute to two minutes after we shot him.
Now we didn’t know any of that at the time. In fact, after he disappeared, I thought he was gone. I thought our rounds missed him, and I didn’t think we were going to find him because, traditionally, once suspects disappear in the projects, they’re gone. So I thought the incident was over. I noticed at that point that I was breathing real heavy, like I had just run a hundred yards, when I hadn’t moved even ten feet. Because I thought it was over, I started to calm down for a couple of minutes. Then the world started to fall apart again.
When the other units got there, we started to set up a crime scene, and some other guys went into the projects to try to find this guy. Well, when they located him, a miniriot broke out. Four to five hundred people came out of the projects, and our units started taking bottles and rocks. They were upset that we’d shot one of their people. We had to get the help from all the sheriff’s stations in the region, and then the city sent us one-hundred-plus officers
right away. When the city units started showing up, a lot of the anger turned on them because some of the gangsters were telling people that some city officers had simply walked up to the guy where he lay and shot him for no reason. So the city units started taking bottles and rocks. It went from a real quick incident—a matter of seconds—with the shooting, then it mellowed for a couple of minutes, and then it turned into a major civil disturbance. I mean, we were standing there in the middle of hundreds of radio cars, hundreds of cops, two helicopters, and sirens everywhere. It was quite a production.
We were trying to maintain a crime scene where the shooting occurred. Other deputies were looking for where his rounds hit, for his expended shell casings, all that kind of stuff. City units were trying to maintain the scene where the guy fell. There were hundreds of angry people, and there were bottles and rocks flying in the projects. After about half an hour, they pulled my partner and me out of there and took us back to the station while the riot continued. About another half hour after that, the city units started taking people to jail, and things slowly started to calm down.
I had been a little bit worried about things when we were still back at the scene, but my training officer was real reassuring. He told me that I had done a good job and that I shouldn’t second-guess myself, because it was so cut-and-dried: armed robbery right there. Crook started shooting at us. That’s as clean a shooting as you can get. When he told me that, it was a big load off my mind, because I knew that if it wasn’t that way that he’d have told me so.
I tell you, that was one crazy baptism by fire.
• • •
I got out of the academy in the springtime, completed my FTO program in the summer, and was patrolling by myself in the early fall when the shooting went down. It was a Friday, my first day back at work after my normal two days off. There was another guy on my shift, named Mike Mural, that I had gone to the academy with, so we were still full of excitement for our jobs, glad to be back at work on our Monday. It was a beautiful fall day. It was cool and the sun was out. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. In fact, I remember telling Mike what a beautiful day it was.
We took some calls that morning. We ate breakfast. We took a few more calls, then met to talk and write our reports that we were catching up on. When we finished up, he went off to his beat, and I went the other way to mine. Shortly after that, a burglary-in-progress call came out. Dispatch told us that there were two men trying to get into the sliding glass door of an apartment and that the complainant was inside the house with a small child.
Mike said he was en route, and I heard another unit say they were en route too. I was pretty far away, but I responded anyway because it was a felony in progress—one of those calls where more than just two people should go. Before I arrived, Mike broadcast that he was going to go out on two guys walking out of the complex that matched the description of the burglars. Then, a few seconds after that, he advised that he was in foot pursuit, and I heard the sound of the foot pursuit on the radio. He was gasping for breath, giving out directions, giving out descriptions of the suspects, and then the radio was quiet. Then the dispatcher prompted him, asked him to advise. No response. Prompted him again. No response. Some other units arrived on the scene. Then I got there, and we started to set up a perimeter on this large wooded area that was just adjacent to the apartment complex, because that was the direction the foot pursuit had been traveling before Mike’s radio went dead.
Soon thereafter, one of the officers on the scene broadcast that a citizen had advised him that he had seen a police officer being led into the woods at gunpoint. I was thinking, “Man, this is not good.” But instead of staying where I should and manning the perimeter, I said to myself, “This is my buddy. I got to go in and find him.” So I just trudged off into the woods looking for my buddy. I didn’t put out a broadcast of what I was doing; I just took off looking for Mike.
I had my gun out. I was walking slowly. Being careful. Being real deliberate. Looking around, trying not to stumble upon them and make whatever the situation was worse. There was a lot of commotion on the radio as I was walking. Other units were checking out an equipment shed at a baseball diamond on the other side of the woods, thinking they might have made it that far. Someone called for the SWAT team, and a supervisor called for an ambulance to respond to the scene. The radio was abuzz with all sorts of chatter. There were sirens wailing all over the place. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I couldn’t believe someone had taken Mike hostage. I couldn’t believe I was walking through the woods looking for my buddy who had disappeared.
Then I came to a small clearing and saw something worse than the worst nightmare I ever had. Just on the other side of the clearing, I saw Mike standing there with his hands up and some guy standing right in front of him holding a gun to his head. I could see that Mike’s holster was empty, so I figured the guy had disarmed Mike and was holding his own gun to his head. Mike’s back was facing toward me, so the guy could look past Mike and see me. Then the guy said, “You better get out of here or I’m going to blow his fucking head off!” I was in the open, so I took about three or four quick steps to the right through a bunch of thorns and tried to get behind a nearby tree. As I did that, the guy kind of shifted so he could use Mike as a shield. Now I really couldn’t believe what was happening. I just couldn’t believe that I was looking at this guy pointing a gun at Mike.
I tried to get on the radio to advise the other units, but I couldn’t get through, so I just put my radio away and we had a standoff. I remember thinking at that point that I was in a no-win situation. The guy kept telling me to get away, to get back, but I wasn’t going to leave. I came there, I found him, and I was not going to back off. I was not going to give ground. We stood there for about a minute or two. Then I told myself that something bad was going to happen sometime soon if I didn’t do something. The guy was looking back and forth. He would look at me, then he would look at Mike. Me, then Mike, back and forth, with the gun pointed at Mike’s head the whole time.
The guy wasn’t moving his head, just his eyes. He was trying to keep Mike like a shield between us, staying where he could make eye contact with me and see where I was at. At one point, when the guy shifted his eyes toward me, Mike reached up and grabbed the gun. When he grabbed it, he grabbed it around the cylinder. It wasn’t cocked, so that made it real hard for the guy to pull the trigger.
As soon as Mike grabbed the gun, I tore out of the bushes like a rhino. I put my gun in front of me, thinking that I had to shoot this guy as soon as I could. As I was running up, I could see that the guy wasn’t trying to shoot Mike. He was struggling with Mike to get the gun pointed at me, and he was trying to pull the trigger. I didn’t know it at the time, but the cylinder was half rotated. The guy had pulled the trigger far enough to start the cylinder rotating, but Mike had a grip on the cylinder that was keeping it from moving a round into the firing position. So the guy was trying with all his might to shoot me as I ran up, but Mike’s grip kept him from doing that.
When I got there, I stuck my gun into what I thought was the center of his stomach and pulled the trigger. It was almost like an instantaneous reaction. I ran there so fast that we had a collision. Boom, I got there, my gun went off, and we all fell to the ground like a bunch of bowling pins.
When we fell to the ground, the guy dropped the gun and Mike said, “Get the gun, get the gun!” So I reached over and just kind of swept it to the side, put my gun away, and then we commenced to pummeling the shit out of the guy. He was resisting at first, then he quit fighting, and we got the handcuffs on him. Once we got the cuffs on, it dawned on me that the guy was still alive. I could see a big powder burn on his shirt, so I raised it up. He was an obese guy, and I could see two holes on his big belly, an entry wound and an exit wound. There was a little bit of blood coming out of the holes, but I really couldn’t tell how bad he was hurt. It turns out that the gunshot wasn’t that bad at all. The round had gone in at an angle on one side of hi
s belly, traveled between the dermis of the skin and the peritoneum, and went out the other side. It never entered his abdominal cavity, so it was basically just a superficial wound. Now I didn’t know any of this at the time. All I knew is that he was still alive and that sort of shocked me, given the fact that I’d just put a contact shot into his gut.
A few minutes later, some other officers arrived and one of them took the guy away. Then I remember saying something that was just totally stupid and irrelevant. I’d left the headlights on my car on from running code over to the scene, so I asked the other officers if they could send someone over to turn the headlights off. I don’t know why that thought even entered my mind. Why would I remember leaving my headlights on? I hadn’t even remembered leaving them on up to that point. I’d just been involved in a hostage situation and in a shooting, and I’m worried about the battery running dead on my car? Who knows?
But I was still pretty juiced up from what had happened. When I first spotted them in the clearing, I could feel these chemicals running through my body, like I’d just seen a lion or some other dangerous animal running loose. It felt like my body had just been charged with something, and it was very powerful. It wasn’t fear. I never felt any fear in the situation. That was pretty amazing because, like I said, what happened was worse than my worst nightmare, but I wasn’t afraid. It was like fear was not an option, like there was no room for the emotion of fear at the time.
I was so juiced up that I didn’t even realize that I was cut up pretty bad from running through the patch of briars to get behind that tree when I first spotted Mike and the guy. I had on a short-sleeved shirt, and some of the thorns tore my arm up, just scratched and lacerated the hell out of my right arm. It looked like shit, but during the situation, I hadn’t even realized I was injured, that I was bleeding. When I first spotted the cuts, I didn’t know where they came from. I said to myself, “How in the hell did this happen?” Then I looked around where I was at and figured out what happened.
Into the Kill Zone Page 13