Into the Kill Zone

by David Klinger

  After that, a supervisor came up to me and asked me to give him my gun. I was expecting that because we’d been told in the academy that it was department policy to hold the guns from officers who get involved in shootings as evidence. They told us that the gun would be taken away at the scene and that the officer would be given another gun right away, and that’s what happened that day. The supervisor took my gun and gave me another one to put in my holster.

  Then my sergeant showed up, we walked back to his car, and we drove to Homicide to talk to the detectives.

  More from Patrol

  Both of the preceding shootings have unusual features besides the fact that the officers involved were so short in experience when they occurred. For example, although citizens attack police officers on a regular basis, one thing that crooks hardly ever do to officers is kidnap them. So when the officer in the second story found himself in the middle of the woods living something worse than his worst nightmare, he was involved in an event that occurs only once in a blue moon. It is therefore no wonder that he experienced such a strong sense of incredulity.

  The first shooting included two unusual features. First, for obvious reasons, robbers rarely stick up victims who are standing only a few yards from a marked police car with two officers in it. The second unusual feature of this shooting concerns what happened after the smoke had cleared. Even though police gunfire has sparked many a riot in the last few decades, the vast majority of police shootings do not prompt any sort of civil unrest. So when a brand-new rookie witnesses a robbery that leads to a shooting that leads to a riot, he has indeed had quite a baptism by fire.

  The lion’s share of the five-dozen-plus other shootings that happened when the officers I interviewed were on patrol were, in comparison to these two rookies’ shootings, ordinary events. But a few, in one way or another, were highly unusual. The stories in this section include shootings of both sorts, providing a more complete sense of the range of deadly circumstances that patrol officers can find themselves in, and highlighting some of the things that most police shootings have in common.

  The first point of commonality across most shootings has to do with the distance between police officers and suspects. Although fictional portrayals of police shootings often place officers a substantial distance from the citizens with whom they do battle, the vast majority of real-life shootings involve a separation of a few yards or less, and in many cases less than an arm’s length. So the two-lane distance separating the first rookie from the suspect he shot was near the outer range of what typifies police shootings, and the extremely close quarters in which the second rookie fired was not at all unusual. Similarly close distances are involved in most of the shootings in this section (and in most of the shootings that make up the rest of this chapter as well).

  Another thing that is common to most shootings is that officers usually fire only a small number of rounds. Although patrol officers occasionally shoot gobs of bullets, they usually fire fewer than a handful, and a single shot is quite common. In a related vein, most shootings happen quite quickly. Quite obviously, the time spent shooting when firing a single shot is quite brief, but human beings can pull a trigger multiple times in a single second, so officers can—and usually do—fire all the rounds they shoot in just a second or two.2 It is important to keep this in mind when considering the stories in this section (as well as the other stories in this chapter), because the pace of narratives is often much slower than the pace of the action as events unfolded in real time.

  At this point, it is worthwhile to briefly revisit our second rookie’s shooting, for there is one aspect of it that deserves some mention—the fact that the suspect took his kidnapped partner’s gun from him. Although suspects almost never kidnap officers, they do try to disarm them on a fairly regular basis. A decent number of suspects succeed, but when they do, they typically shoot the officer in short order. Indeed just under 10 percent of officers murdered with firearms in the decade ending in the year 2000 were slain with their own guns, usually within moments of being disarmed.3 Because officers know that they are liable to be killed if they are disarmed, they often shoot suspects who try to take their weapons. Because suspects attempt to disarm officers on a regular basis, a sizable minority of police shootings occur in situations in which suspects try to take officers’ guns from them. In order to provide some sense of what a more typical disarming case looks like, this section includes a shooting in which the officer in question shot the suspect before he could complete his potentially lethal theft.

  This chapter also talks about mistakes. The rules that govern officers’ use of deadly force do not require that an actual deadly threat be present before officers fire, only that officers have a reasonable belief that this is the case. The standard of reasonable belief allows officers to make what the law calls good faith mistakes in their use of deadly force. One sort of good faith mistake that officers sometimes make is shooting people who wield objects that appear to be deadly weapons, such as toy guns. Another sort of good faith mistake officers sometimes make is shooting unarmed individuals whose actions immediately prior to being shot led the officers to form the reasonable belief that they were in fact armed with a deadly weapon with which they were about to harm the officer or others.

  Incidents in which officers mistakenly use deadly force against nonthreatening people are quite different from those exceptionally rare cases in which a brutal officer purposely shoots someone without cause, and readers should be careful to note the difference. This may be difficult, however, as many people have a hard time understanding shootings in which the person shot posed no actual deadly threat to anyone—particularly those cases in which the person was unarmed—because they believe officers should be able to easily discern real threats from innocuous action. But in many cases, it is not in fact easy for officers to determine whether an individual confronting them is armed or whether what an armed individual is carrying is a deadly weapon or some less harmful object. The nature of the problems that officers must deal with often is unclear: lighting often is poor, circumstances often are evolving (or devolving) rapidly, and officers often have to make decisions about whether to shoot in split seconds, before they have a chance to obtain all relevant information. So officers sometimes shoot when the facts established in the aftermath of incidents indicate that they really didn’t need to.4

  The stories in this section shed light on this matter by relating two shootings in which officers came to believe they were in imminent peril when the people they shot, in fact, posed no deadly threat. Together, they illustrate how officers’ interpretations of citizens’ actions during tense, fast-moving, uncertain circumstances can lead them to believe that they must shoot to protect themselves or others from deadly threats that do not really exist.

  But in the vast majority of cases in which officers fire, they do so to defeat real threats. In fact, only three of the officers I interviewed shot unarmed individuals, and fewer than a handful of others were involved in cases in which they mistook objects such as toy guns for deadly weapons. Consequently, most of the stories in this section (as well as the vast majority of those in the rest of the chapter) deal with shootings in which officers’ opponents in fact had deadly weapons, including one in which the suspect was armed with arguably the most unusual deadly weapon officers ever faced in the history of American law enforcement: a stolen army tank.

  • • •

  I was working a ten-hour shift that started at 9:00 on Halloween night when I got in my first shooting. I had taken my kids trick-or-treating, dropped them off back home, grabbed my gear, kissed the wife and kids good-bye, and went into work. I was working with my regular partner, and we figured it would be a busy shift, but it was cold out, and that really put a crimp on the trick-or-treaters. We had some calls at first, but after about 11:00 it was just dead. We couldn’t find anything—nobody walking around, nothing at all. Then, about 3:00 or so in the morning, we spotted something. I was driving. We had the heat
on, but the windows open. I was going eastbound down this four-lane road real slow, five or ten miles an hour, just kind of daydreaming, looking around. We were coming up on some apartments when I noticed an open door on a car facing us on the other side of the street. I kind of gave my partner a shot in the shoulder ’cause he was fading in and out and said, “Hey Dave, there’s an open car door. Let’s check it out.”

  As I was making a U-turn to come up behind the car, our headlights went across the open door. I saw two guys there, one in the seat of the car with a screwdriver, working on the steering column, and the other one squatting down next to him. The second guy was holding something I couldn’t make out in one hand and a lighter in the other that he was using to light up the interior of the car. The guy squatting was kind of tall and thin. The guy behind the steering wheel was really big, a real muscular-looking guy—I could tell by the size of his jacket. There wasn’t enough room to complete the U-turn, so we actually ended up facing the side of the other car at a slight angle, like a K minus the bottom leg, with our spotlights and headlights shining on the side of the car.

  The guy who was squatting stood up real quick. We were both expecting these guys to beat feet out of there, so we were ready for a foot chase. Dave went to run around to the rear of the car to pin them in, and I was going to pin them the other way so that we could catch them before they ran. The thin guy, who had his back to me, dropped the stuff he was holding. I shouted for him to stop, and he kind of put his hands out to his side.

  The other guy started to get out of the car, and I could see that he was wearing jeans, but no shirt under his big, black, 1950s Fonzie-style leather jacket. As he turned, I could see that he was a big, muscular, weight-lifter-type guy. As soon as I saw his build, I said to myself, “This guy is a parolee.” The other guy I wasn’t so sure about, but I was certain the big guy had done some time. I was thinking, “He doesn’t want to go back to the pen,” so I figured we had a fight on our hands.

  I started to move around my open door to grab the thin guy ’cause I was pretty close to him. As I was doing this, the big guy took two quick steps toward the back of the car—where Dave was heading to cut him off—and he reached back to the rear of his right side, which was facing me. This movement caught my eye, and I saw the outline of his hand going onto the grip of a pistol—some type of semiautomatic—that was tucked in the waistband of his jeans. I start yelling, “GUN!!” to let Dave know what was going on. As I was yelling, I started to draw my gun, and the big guy started to pull his gun out. I could see that it had a long slide on it, and I thought, “Holy shit! This guy’s got a .45!”

  Everything started to slow down at that point. I was really worried that he was going to shoot Dave, and I wanted to shoot him before he did, but I couldn’t seem to make my body move fast enough. He seemed to be moving slowly, too; his gun was coming out slow. I fired a round as soon as I got my gun out of my holster. I saw the muzzle flash and some smoke. The shot sounded real muffled, not like a regular gunshot. Then I heard my casing hit the windshield of my squad car, slide down, and hit the windshield wiper. I brought my gun up to eye level to take a second shot, but before I could pull the trigger, Dave ran into the guy at full speed. He grabbed the gun as it was coming up, pushed it down, and tackled the guy into the trunk of the car that they were trying to steal.

  Dave and the big guy fell off the trunk and onto the ground. As they were fighting, I heard the gun hit the ground and slide on the cement. The other suspect then started to turn and face toward me. I had closed the ground between the two of us as I was shooting, so I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and shirt and slammed him onto the hood of the car. I put my gun in the back of his neck and told him not to move or I was going to shoot him. At that point, time started to return to normal. The slow-motion stuff stopped. Then I got on the radio and called for help.

  It turns out the round I fired went through the big guy’s right forearm, into his stomach, traveled around his hip bone, went into his colon, and ended up somewhere near his scrotum. He was injured pretty bad, but at the time I wasn’t sure I’d hit him because he was still fighting with Dave. They were on the ground. The suspect was on his stomach, and Dave had him from behind in a choke hold. He was holding on for dear life. Just riding him, basically. He had one arm around the suspect’s neck, and he was trying to pin the guy’s arm down with his other one. He had his legs wrapped around the suspect’s waist and thighs, and they were sort of rolling around. I looked at Dave and asked him if he was OK. I thought maybe I shot him by mistake because he was so close when I fired.

  He said, “I don’t think I’m hit,” and started to look at his legs as he was fighting the guy.

  I kept asking, “Are you OK? Are you OK?” He said he was OK, so I asked him where the gun was. He told me he thought the guy had fallen on top of it, and I thought, “Oh, my God, he’s still got the gun!”

  I leaned down and put my gun into the suspect’s side to put a couple of contact shots into his ribs. I’d seen a training tape during lineup one night about doing contact shots to the head and the ribs. It explained how you can be pretty sure that when you press the barrel against the bone that the bullets will go right in where you press, so in close quarters you don’t have to worry about bullets flying around. So that’s what I was thinking—put my gun in this guy’s ribs and put a couple of shots into him sideways so no rounds would come through and hit my partner.

  Just as I was about to pull the trigger, Dave spun the guy over and the suspect’s arms came free. There was no gun in his hands, so I held my fire. I could see that the suspect was bleeding from his arm and stomach. There was blood all over the place. That’s when I realized I’d hit him with my first shot. The guy was still fighting with Dave, but Dave was holding his own. I just held onto the thin guy until the rest of our squad arrived about a minute later. They took the thin guy from me, cuffed him, and helped Dave cuff the guy I shot. He kept fighting, even after they got the cuffs on him. He didn’t even know he’d been shot until one of the other officers told him, “Quit fighting. You’ve been shot!” Then he looked down, realized that he had been shot, and gave up.

  After the guy finally gave up, my attention turned to finding the gun. I looked everywhere around where he and Dave had fought, but I couldn’t find it. I was really, really afraid because I knew I saw a gun, but I was worried that maybe I saw something that wasn’t there. I was thinking, “The media is going to love that,” and worrying about how I was going to explain my actions to the detectives. As I was thinking this stuff, one of the other officers found the gun on the other side of the car the suspects were trying to steal. It was on the street by the sidewalk. It had gone across the trunk and landed on the other side when Dave tackled him. When I saw that gun, I had a sense of relief like you wouldn’t believe.

  My emotions changed pretty quickly, though, because it turned out the gun was a Crossman air pistol. Damn replica of Colt .45. It even says “Replica .45” on it. You can go to K-Mart and buy them. I thought, “Why did this idiot pull a BB gun?” After it was all over, Dave and I discussed what he was planning on doing with the gun. We were thinking maybe he was going to try to bluff us and escape. Maybe he was going to try to throw it because he was on parole and didn’t want to get caught with it. Who knows? Whatever he was thinking, he’s obviously not the brightest guy in the world.

  Thirty days later, Dave killed an ex-con who attacked him, and seven months after that we got in another shooting. We were working day watch when a call came out on a disturbance at a house that we knew. Dave and I had been there numerous times. We had arrested a guy there who was a crystal meth user. He was an asshole, always doing something to get us called out there. He lived in a camper on the bed of a pickup in the driveway of his uncle’s house, a beautiful home. The house is in the area we usually work, but we weren’t working that beat that day. The call went out to some other units, but we decided to respond because we knew the guy. So Dave drove like a mani
ac. I mean, he broke a thousand vehicle code sections. The guy can drive. He went ninety-some miles an hour. He was flying. The dispatch said the suspect was armed with a screwdriver that he was using to pry the bars off the window to get into the house. It gave his description, said he was wearing a red shirt and blue jeans. We knew who it was.

  We worked out a plan so that when we got there, Dave would drop me of in front, then take the car around back in the alley. That way, if the guy took off when he saw me, we’d have him trapped. We’d take him to jail and put an end to these repeat calls for a while. Unbeknownst to us, a few days prior he’d threatened some other cops with a knife. They had to mace him. He spent a couple of days in custody, talked to some mental health people and such, then they released him. Since getting out, he’d been talking about how he was going to kill the next cop he came in contact with. All this stuff had gone on the last couple of nights, but nobody put anything in the books about it or anything, so we didn’t know about it.

  When we got there, we saw that one of our K-9 guys, Dan Franklin, was already there. Dave let me off by Dan’s patrol car, which still had the dog in it, and he took off to get to the alley. When I started walking up the driveway, I saw Dan fighting with the guy in the backyard of the house. He had him by the neck from behind like he was trying to put a carotid on him or just hold him, and they were banging against the side of the house. There was no easy way for me to get to him because there were some fences between us. The people who let Dan in weren’t there anymore, so I took off running along the side of another fence that went back to where they were fighting. There were actually two fences—a six-foot wooden fence and a three-foot chain-link fence—that were up against each other.