Into the Kill Zone

by David Klinger

  I pulled my pepper spray so that when I got to where they were fighting, I could hop the fences and help Dan get the guy into custody. I was running full speed through the yard—I couldn’t see how the fight was going because of the six-foot wood fence—and as I got parallel to the camper, I heard, “BOOM,” a gunshot, loud as can be, right in the area where they were fighting. I figured Dan had shot the guy because he pulled the screwdriver and tried to stab him. I jumped up on the chain-link fence to look over the wood fence to see what was going on. I dropped my mace as I was coming up and drew my gun ’cause I figured Dan might need me to cover down on the guy while he cuffed him up.

  When I looked over, I saw a whole different scenario from the one I was expecting. The suspect was sitting upright on his butt, legs spread. Dan was sitting between his legs in front of him. The suspect had Dan from behind. He had Dan in a headlock with his left arm, and he had Dan’s Smith & Wesson 5903 in his right hand. He was trying to turn it toward Dan’s head. Dan had grabbed the gun with his left hand and was trying to push it away from his head. With his right hand, Dan was reaching down, trying to pull his backup gun from his ankle holster. Because one round had already been fired, I was thinking that Dan had already been shot once. I was about twelve feet away, standing on the chain-link fence, looking right at them. They were facing right at me. I saw the whole picture in detail. I saw Dan reaching for his backup gun. I saw that it was a Walther PPK, just by the handle of it. I saw Dan’s 5903. I saw the suspect’s hands. I saw the three fingers and thumb of his right hand around the pistol grip, and I saw his finger on the trigger. I saw that it was Dan’s left hand on his 5903, and I saw fear in his eyes. Dan’s head was centered on the suspect’s chest, so all I could see of the suspect was his head and his gun arm.

  He looked up, saw me, and said, “Oh, shit.” Not like, “Oh, shit, I’m scared.” But like, “Oh, shit, now here’s somebody else I gotta kill”—real aggressive and mean. Instead of continuing to push the gun at Dan’s head, he started to try to bring it around on me. This all happened real fast—in milliseconds—and at the same time, I was bringing my gun up. Dan was still fighting with him, and the only thought that came through my mind was, “Oh, dear God, don’t let me hit Dan.” I fired five rounds. My vision changed as soon as I started to shoot. It went from seeing the whole picture to just the suspect’s head. Everything else just disappeared. I didn’t see Dan anymore, didn’t see anything else. All I could see was the suspect’s head.

  I saw four of my five rounds hit. The first one hit him on his left eyebrow. It opened up a hole, and the guy’s head snapped back, and he said, “Ooh,” like, “Ooh, you got me.” He still continued to turn the gun toward me, and I fired my second round. I saw a red dot right below the base of his left eye, and his head kind of turned sideways. I fired another round. It hit on the outside of his left eye, and his eye exploded, just ruptured and came out. My fourth round hit just in front of his left ear. The third round had moved his head even further sideways to me, and when the fourth round hit, I saw a red dot open on the side of his head, then close up. I didn’t see where my last round went. Then I heard the guy fall backwards and hit the ground. He was still holding Dan’s gun in his right hand when he hit. A second later, Dan jumped up, holding his backup, reached down and took his Smith & Wesson back from the suspect.

  I got on the air, put out a broadcast that we’d had a shooting, and hopped the fence. The guy was obviously dead. I asked Dan if the suspect had fired his gun, and he said, “Yeah, he tried to shoot me.” I said, “OK, let’s inspect you.” So as we were waiting for people to show up, we looked at his arms, looked at his legs, making sure he hadn’t been shot. As we were inspecting Dan, Dave came running up. He’d had the windows rolled up and air conditioner on, so he hadn’t heard any of the shots. All he’d heard was my “shots fired” broadcast. He looked over at me and asked, “Was this you?”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  He said, “Go ahead out front. The sergeant will be here in a couple of minutes.”

  I hopped the fence, then Dan hopped the fence, and we just went out and sat on the curb while Dave stood over the body. Then my boss came, same sergeant who had been at the other two shootings. He separated us, and after a few minutes we went down to headquarters to talk to the detectives one more time.

  • • •

  It was back in ’86, and I was working the area around Sherman Park, which the FBI said was the most violent three-square-mile area in the United States. There were more homicides and more police activity and more police shootings in that area than any other area in the United States for three years running in the late ’80s, so it was pretty heavy at that time.

  We’d just arrived in our patrol area after clearing midnight roll call when we saw somebody lying down on the sidewalk. Looked like he was a drunk down. When we got out of the car, I saw that this drunk guy had a hole in him about the size of my fist from the back to the front and that there was a shotgun shell laying next to him. We called an RA unit in, a supervisor showed up, and we started setting up for a homicide scene when another round went off, probably about a hundred yards away. It sounded like it was probably another shotgun round, because it was real loud and it wasn’t a sharp crack like a rifle round.

  I was working with a probationer, and I told the sergeant that we should head to the area the shot came from because we had no units over there, and I thought that maybe the shot was related to the scene we were sitting on. So my partner and I went down there, and lo and behold, there was another body on the ground. So we put out the information that we had some clown running around shooting people. After that, we could hear shots being fired down the block, going to the west and coming back up north again.

  We got some more units there, and we got the whole area basically cordoned off. We got RA units in there, taking care of the people who were shot, and set up for Homicide for those that were killed. We talked to a couple of civilians, who were telling us that they saw a guy with a black coat walk up the right side, the east side, of the street a little ways from us, and it looked like he went into one of the apartment buildings up there. So we decided to take a team of four, maybe five, officers and clear the street as far as we could in order to make the perimeter smaller and more manageable.

  We were walking, clearing the area house by house as we went along. Even though it was real early in the morning, a lot of people were out in the neighborhood. With people all over the place, it was going pretty slowly. Then, finally, we heard some screaming and saw somebody running up the street about four or five houses in front of us. Three of us ran up there—me, my probationer, and a guy named Greg Davis. It turned out to be a fistfight, where a friend of one of the people who was shot was beating up on this other guy who he thought was the guy who shot his friend. Turned out the beating victim wasn’t involved in the shooting. He was just one of the people standing out there watching.

  So we were breaking up the fight when Greg Davis saw somebody standing in an alcove of this nearby apartment building. The alcove was all brick and concrete, with a walkway going through it and a roof overhead—it looked like a bunker. When he saw the guy, Greg said, “It’s him, he’s got a shotgun!” Then the suspect came up on Greg with a sawed-off, pistol-grip shotgun. He had a bandoleer of 00-buck under his jacket, which I could see as he raised the shotgun. Greg was about twenty-five feet from the guy. I was probably fifteen or twenty feet from Greg and probably about thirty feet from the suspect. I didn’t have a real good view of the suspect, but I could see the bandoleer, and I could see the shotgun come out between the sides of the little entry to the alcove.

  Greg had a shotgun, and he fired two rounds real quick—“boom, boom”—at the suspect, but the way the suspect was in this little alcove, he was pretty much protected from the rounds. The rounds were gonna hit the concrete; they weren’t gonna penetrate where he was. The other officers and I were out in the open, and I thought Greg had some protection from this b
rick wall next to these bushes he was standing by, so I told him to slow down his fire and let us get some cover, to keep the suspect pinned in the alcove. Greg did that, but his shotgun jammed after he fired his third round. It turned out that there was no wall next to the bushes he was standing by, so he was out in the open when his shotgun jammed.

  He yelled out, “It’s jammed!” and the suspect stepped out into the open a little bit. As he fired a round or two, I fired three rounds. I knew I hit him good—because I could hear the rounds hit, like a “smack” on the skin, and he went down instantly—but I also knew I had hit him low, maybe the pelvis area, because I was looking over the top of my sights when I fired. I ran toward Greg and told him to get rid of the shotgun and draw his handgun. Then we went over to where I thought this wall was. Like I said, it turned out to be bushes, so we really had no protection at all, but from the bushes we could look straight into the alcove opening and see the suspect clearly. Around that time, there was another round fired from my left side. Came from my probationer who basically fired into the alcove where the suspect was. He didn’t hit anything—it just bounced off the concrete.

  The suspect wasn’t moving anymore, so now somebody had to go up and check him out. By that time, other officers had arrived, and we were putting together a plan for two of them to slowly move up on the suspect. But before we got the plan squared away, another officer started going up there by himself. As that officer got to the opening of the alcove, I could see that the suspect was obviously not out of commission, because I saw him start to move the shotgun. He was holding the pistol grip in his left hand, and he had his right hand on the pump handle, and he was starting to lean forward. He was doing that just as the officer started to lean around the wall to check him out. I yelled for the officer to move back, but he didn’t hear me and continued forward. When the officer looked around the wall, the suspect brought the shotgun up. I thought he was going to shoot the officer in the face, so I fired one more round. It hit the suspect in the chest, knocked him back, the shotgun went off, and the officer fired one round from the shotgun—almost a contact shot—into the guy’s side. He died at the scene.

  The other officer was upset with me for firing that last shot—thought I fired too close to him. He didn’t realize that the guy was trying to shoot him because even though he was on top of the guy, he never heard the suspect’s shotgun go off. We couldn’t find where this guy fired—into the wall, across the street, or anything like that. We couldn’t figure out where the round went. I was saying that he fired, Greg said he fired, but the officer that was up there was upset, saying the suspect didn’t fire. So everybody was a little tense about that.

  After everything was secured, they transported us back to the station, where we gave our statements to the shooting team. We found out what happened to that last shotgun blast when we came back to the scene for the walk-through. Some detectives from the shooting team asked the officer, “Where were you standing?” then put him where he’d been. He told them that the guy couldn’t have fired a round when he was there because he’d have heard it. Then they pointed up to the ceiling of the alcove and showed him a bunch of pellets in this crease where one part of the ceiling overlapped with another. Turns out the blast went over his head by about a foot. When he realized that, he said, “Oh, my God!” Kind of a rude awakening for him.

  When it was all over, it turned out that the guy had killed two people—shot five total—before we found him. We knew he’d shot at least two when we caught up to him, and that gave a bit of a sense of fear because it was obvious to me that this guy wasn’t finished killing people and that he was waiting for us. But there was also something humorous about what happened. It was when Greg Davis’s shotgun jammed. After telling us that it had jammed, he said, “Goddamn shotgun. I knew I should’ve changed that damn ammo,” as he threw it to the ground. We had old ammo, and what had happened was we had gone to the sergeant before the shift started and asked him for some new shotgun rounds.

  We’re supposed to trade our rounds in if they’re old or scuffed up, and some of Greg’s were. Greg had gone to the sergeant that night and asked him for some new shotgun rounds. He looked at Greg’s rounds, and he said, “Oh, your rounds are good enough.” What occurred during the shooting was that the brass on the fourth round that was in there was oblong, and it jammed the shotgun. So that was the remark that I remember Greg saying: “I should’ve got some new ammo.” Right in the middle of a shoot-out, he threw the shotgun down and said, “Should’ve got some new ammo.” So after it was all over and we were talking about what had happened, I thought that was sort of humorous.

  • • •

  I was at home nursing my daughter right before the shooting. She was about four months old, so I would take my dinner breaks at home in order to nurse her. I finished up about nine o’clock, gave her to my husband, and went back on patrol. Right after I told dispatch I was back in service, I was driving through a parking lot, and this Hispanic lady came running up to my car. She was in a big panic, screaming something about her husband chasing this guy who didn’t pay for his dinner at their restaurant. I got her calmed down a little bit, and she told me that she and her husband owned this Mexican restaurant next to where we were talking and that the guy her husband was chasing had a gun. She was terrified that her husband had gone after this guy who had a gun because he didn’t have one himself. I got descriptions and the direction the guy and her husband were running in, broadcast what I had over the air, and went looking for her husband.

  I hadn’t gone very far—maybe two blocks—when some citizens flashed their headlights and flagged me down in front of this car dealership. When I pulled into the front end of the parking lot and stopped, I could see a commotion about a hundred feet away at the back. One of the citizens, a Mexican guy, pointed to the back of the lot and said, “They’re in the back, they’re over there, they’re over there!” When I got out of my car, I saw two other Hispanics in restaurant outfits fighting on the ground with this guy who matched the description given by the woman who flagged me down. He was a white guy wearing a jacket.

  It was obvious that these were the guys I was looking for, so I broadcast what I had, drew my gun, and started to move toward the back of the lot. Normally, I would have waited for some backup before doing anything in a case where I had a guy with a gun, but I was worried that the guy might hurt the other citizens if I waited. When I got to a position about thirty or forty feet from where the fight was, the two Mexican guys let go and started to move away from the white guy.

  Then the white guy stood up real quick. Not all the way, but in a low crouch. I yelled at him to get back down on the ground, but he didn’t move, so I kept yelling, “Get on the ground! Get on the ground!” Then, all of a sudden, he stood straight up and started sprinting toward me. As he was running at me, he started yelling, “Shoot me! Shoot me! Shoot me!” over and over.

  When he started to run at me, I started backpedaling as fast as I could go. I kept yelling, “Get on the ground! Get on the ground!” as I was moving back with my gun pointed at him. He kept yelling, “Shoot me, shoot me, shoot me, shoot me,” as he was closing in on me. I don’t have a clear memory of what happened next, but the citizens who where right there all told the investigators that the guy reached across his body and into his coat with his right hand. All I remember is that I thought that he was going to kill me, so I shot him. I wanted to go home that night, that was all that mattered.

  I thought that the guy was about eight to ten feet away when I pulled the trigger, but the citizens said we were almost touching, that we were close enough to shake hands. They even remember that I had the trigger indexed as I was backpedaling. Part of their statement was that they thought I was going to die if I didn’t put my finger on the trigger and shoot, that the guy was going to kill me. At any rate, right after I fired, the guy fell to the ground, holding his stomach. Then another officer who had arrived just as the shooting went down ran up, patted the guy
down, and handcuffed him.

  I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to stand there and watch the guy bleed to death, so I backed away and walked down this little driveway toward where some other officers were coming in. My lieutenant came up and asked me to tell him what happened. I briefly told him, then I gave him my gun because I knew that was part of the procedure. He told me to go sit in the car with one of the officers on the scene, who had been in a shooting before. I talked with him a little bit about what I could remember. Then the lieutenant told me I could go, and the other officer drove me back to the station.

  About an hour or two later, somebody told me the guy I shot didn’t have a gun on him. That made me feel pretty bad. It turns out that the guy’s a drunk and mentally ill. He’d been sitting around the restaurant that night, looking at a picture of his dead nephew lying in a coffin. He kept reaching into the pocket of his coat as if he had a gun in there and telling the workers that he was going to shoot them. I think the guy wanted to die. That’s why he ran at me shouting for me to shoot him, but hearing that I had just shot an unarmed man made me feel shitty.

  • • •

  I was supposed to get off at seven o’ clock that night, so about 6:45 I was in the locker room taking my gun belt off. I still had my radio turned on, and a call came out that an army tank was running things over not too far away. I thought, “You know, that’d be a pretty cool call to go to,” so I put my gun belt back on and jumped in my car. Another officer jumped in the passenger seat and off we went. I started driving through some streets where the tank had already been, and I couldn’t believe what I saw. There were crushed cars, knocked-over fire hydrants, and telephone poles down. I was just like, “Holy cow!” I remember thinking it looked like something you’d see on CNN out of Bosnia or something, not here.