Into the Kill Zone

by David Klinger

  All this was going through my mind as I was getting the rest of the way out of the car and moving toward the trunk. It couldn’t have taken more than a couple of seconds to get to the back of the car, but it seemed like I was moving in slow motion. I felt like I couldn’t move fast enough. It just seemed like I was being a slug, not getting my ass out of the car fast enough. I wanted to get to the back of the car that instant, but it just wasn’t happening quick enough.

  When I finally got to the back of the car, I considered shooting at him, but I thought that maybe he had dropped the gun. I couldn’t see it in his hand. He was a real dark black guy, and he was wearing dark clothes. There were no streetlights where all this went down, so all I could really see was his outline; he looked like a shadow.

  Then he suddenly stopped and turned toward me. Like a dumb ass, I stepped out from behind the car so that we were facing each other in the middle of the street, just like an Old West showdown. Then I saw a muzzle flash, and I knew he still had the gun. I thought, “Man, that son of a bitch is shooting at me.” Then I remembered some training I’d had that if you get caught out in the open in a gunfight that it’s a good idea to try to make yourself a smaller target, so I knelt down and commenced to let loose. I fired three rounds, the guy went down, and I stopped shooting.

  I took my eyes off the suspect for a second to look over and check on Johnny. He was holding his arm, so I figured he wasn’t hurt too bad after all. I still had to secure the suspect, so I started moving up to where he went down. He had dropped the gun, but he was reaching for it as I was closing in on him. I probably could have shot him again right then. I was ready. I still had my gun out, and I had my sights right on the back of his head, but I figured I could reach him before he grabbed the gun. So I just ran up and kicked him as hard as I could. Then I got his arm back, got the gun secured, and handcuffed him.

  I left him there in the street and went back to the squad car. We put out some broadcasts to let everyone know we’d been in a shooting, that one officer and one citizen were hit, that we needed two ambulances. Guys were all over the air saying they were going to respond. We didn’t want anyone to get hurt in an accident trying to get to us, so Johnny got back on the air and told everyone to slow down, that we were OK. A crowd started to gather as we waited for the troops to arrive. Every time another unit arrived, they wanted to know what happened and if we were OK. I told them we were OK, that Johnny got shot, I shot the guy, that it looked like the guy was going to be OK. After a while, the detectives arrived, Johnny and the suspect went to the hospital, and I stayed behind to tell the dicks what happened. They told me that some Housing Authority security officers had caught the other guy, and I gave them the lowdown on the shooting. It took a couple of hours to get that taken care of. Then I went to the station to write up my formal statement.

  On the way to the station, my big toe on my right foot started to hurt, so I took my boot off to figure out what was going on. I didn’t look at the boot, but I noticed that my toe was sticking out of my sock. When I looked at my toe from the top and I could see a little scratch at the tip, I said to myself, “Goddamn, look at that,” and figured that it might be the boots. They were kind of old, needed to be resoled. I thought that maybe one of the nails was sticking up in there, and when I kicked the suspect, it split the sock open and cut my toe. I put my boot back on and we went on to the station.

  My toe still hurt, so I took my boot off again once I got inside the Homicide office. Some guys came in, looked at my foot, and asked me what had happened to my toe. I said, “Well, I kicked this guy who shot my partner.”

  “That all you did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He didn’t shoot you?”

  “Well, he shot at me. It looked like he was shooting for my head and missed.”

  They were like, “Are you sure?”

  I was like, “Well, yeah. I mean, it just hurts a little bit. No big deal. Just bandage it up. It’ll be all right.”

  They were looking at it from a different angle, where they could see that the whole bottom half of my toe was gone. They were saying, “No way,” but no one ever told me to look at the bottom of my foot.

  About a half an hour or forty-five minutes later, somewhere around two in the morning, I was talking with my mom on the phone, when this night sergeant came in and asked me what happened to my toe. I told my mom to hang on, then told him that I kicked a guy and cut my toe doing it. He asked me where my boot was, and I told him it was over there in his office. He left and I went back to talking to my mom. I told her that everything was fine, that Johnny got shot, that he’s OK, that I had to shoot a guy, that it was no big deal, that I wasn’t hurt—just scratched my toe a little bit—stuff like that. About five minutes after the sergeant left, here comes my boot, sailing across the office, followed by the sergeant, saying, “You stupid kid, you got shot. Get your ass to the hospital!” So I said, “Mom, change that. I got shot. I’ll be at the hospital. No big deal though.”

  She freaked out, said, “I’ll be right down.”

  I told her, “Don’t worry about it. It’s late. Come down tomorrow if you get a chance. It’s just a minor wound.” I was still thinking it was a little bitty cut. But when I got to the hospital, they showed me in this mirror that most of my toe was gone. I was surprised that it didn’t hurt more. In fact, the worst part was when they hit me with Novocain before patching up the toe. That hurt much worse than getting shot. That was painful.

  It turned out that the bullet the guy fired entered my boot near the outside, missed the first four toes, hit the big one, and fragmented into the sole of my boot. That’s why the sergeant was so ticked off; they had stayed out there an extra hour looking for the bullet the guy fired, when all along the fragments of it were in my boot.

  Officer Down

  Although the injuries suffered by the two officers we just heard from were relatively minor, many other officers who are struck down in the kill zone do not fare so well. I pointed out in the Introduction that each year some five dozen or so officers don’t survive the wounds they suffer at the hands of criminals and that scores of additional officers are maimed or otherwise grievously wounded. In this section, we hear from some officers who were very seriously injured, as they talk about their brushes with death: how the incidents went down, what they were thinking when Death came knocking on their doors, what they did to stave off his call, and—in two cases—how what they endured influenced their actions in subsequent situations.

  The stories underscore several things already addressed about the dangers of police work. One is that people armed with sharp objects can be very dangerous: two of the officers we will hear from were felled by knives (one in a shooting that was eerily similar to mine). Another is that officers are at extreme risk when they are disarmed: we see in the starkest of terms what typically happens when officers have their guns taken from them. On a different tack, this section also shows how training, lessons officers learned long before coming into law enforcement, mental preparation, determination in the face of danger, and the will to survive can help officers overcome the most harrowing of circumstances.

  The stories begin with the tale of the officer who suffered the most severe injuries among those I interviewed, a woman who very nearly didn’t make it out of the kill zone.

  • • •

  My shooting happened real early in the morning. I played softball the night before on a team with my partner and his wife, went out for pizza afterwards, then over to their house to watch a video of that Tom Hanks movie Big. On the way home from their house, I swung by the police station and dropped off my request for days off for the upcoming month because it was now Saturday morning and they needed to be turned in that day. After visiting a bit with the officers at the station, I took off for home at about 1:30 A.M. I wasn’t really thinking much, just heading home on autopilot for the thirty-mile drive. I pulled up in front of my house somewhere around 2:00. My roommate had parked in the driveway
, so I parked on the street. Like I usually do, I drove with my gun slid in between my seat and the center console. That way, when I get home, I can grab it with my right hand, step out of my truck, tuck it under my left armpit, grab my ball bag, and head into the house.

  Well, as soon as I stepped out of the truck, I saw the barrel of a .357 Magnum pointed right at me. What had happened is that a carful of gangsters had followed me home to rip off my truck. Apparently, the fifteen-year-old girlfriend of the fourteen-year-old boy pointing the gun at me had seen my truck, liked it, and wanted him to steal it for her. So these two characters, along with three of their buddies, had followed me home. When I pulled up, the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old jumped out while the other three waited in their car.

  At any rate, when I opened the door and stepped out, there was this fourteen-year-old standing there with this gun pointed at me. Now I never saw him. All I saw was the gun. I had no idea who was holding it. It could have been an eight-foot-tall transvestite or a ninety-year-old lady for all I knew. All I saw was the barrel, the cylinder, the trigger guard, and the trigger. The barrel looked really big. It looked like a cannon.

  I hadn’t yet tucked my gun under my arm, so it was still in my hand when I saw the barrel of the .357. I began to raise my gun, and I was getting ready to say, “Police officer—drop the gun!” because that’s what I had been programmed to do from training. I about got “police” out of my mouth when I saw a muzzle flash and heard a loud “BOOM!” The bullet hit me square in the chest, tore right through it, and went out my back. I was dumbfounded. I truly thought that if I said, “Police—drop the gun” that he would drop it, so I simply couldn’t believe that he had shot me. I was so programmed from watching TV and from all the training in the academy where we would tell people to drop their guns and they do it that I was certain that he was gonna drop it. Boy was I wrong.

  Well, right after he shot me, the kid turned and ran toward the back of my truck. As he was turning, I cranked off a round at him. I remember thinking, “You little coward, you’re gonna just shoot me and run away?” I was pissed. He fired a few more rounds at me as he was running away. Then he disappeared behind the back of my truck. I started to chase him ’cause I needed to stop him. I figured that if he’d shoot me, he’d shoot anybody, and I couldn’t let him do that. It only took a few steps to get from my door to the back of my truck, and I stopped at the bumper to kind of hide out because I knew that if I went straight out behind my truck that he could light me up because I’d have no cover. I was peeking around the corner when I saw him coming back around with his gun. He started firing, so I fired. I put three rounds into him, and he went down.

  At that point, I realized that I needed to get into my house and get some help because I was bleeding out pretty good. I also figured that this guy wasn’t acting alone, that someone had dropped him off, so I was concerned that there might be other suspects in the area. Because I needed to get help and because I was worried about other threats, I just left the kid there and headed toward my house. I made it to my driveway, when I started to pass out from the loss of blood. I was thinking that I had to get to the house, but I was too weak to make it. I grabbed my chest with my right hand and could feel blood running down my side. I remember thinking how warm it was and that it wasn’t sticky. For some reason, I was thinking that blood was supposed to be sticky, but it was real smooth. I was also a little bit pissed off because other people had told me that when you get shot you go numb, but I wasn’t numb at all.

  First off, when the bullet went through me, I felt a real bad burning sensation, and it really hurt when it tore through my back. Then, there in the driveway, I just hurt like crazy. But as I was thinking all this stuff, I was getting weaker. I remember thinking that I was about to pass out and that I didn’t want to smash my face on the ground when I lost consciousness. So I just dropped to my knees, rolled onto my back, and laid down there in the driveway. The last thought that passed through my mind before I faded to black was that I was really going to be sore when I woke up.

  I woke up in the hospital two days after I was shot. My partner and another friend were there in my room. The first thing I asked them was, “What happened?” My partner told me, “You did a good job. Get some rest.” That’s all he said. I was real groggy, so I went back to sleep. I woke up about an hour later, and my partner was still there. This time, when I asked him what happened, he told me that I’d been shot and that I’d been in the hospital for two days. I couldn’t believe it. I remembered the shooting, but nothing about what happened after I passed out. I asked him how I got to the hospital, and he filled me in.

  My roommate had heard the shots. She came out, saw me down in the driveway, ran into the house, called 9-1-1, called our neighbor who was a cop, and told him to hurry on over. Meanwhile the girlfriend of the kid I shot had dived into some bushes around my neighbor’s house when the shooting started, and the three who were in the car took off and left the other two there. When my neighbor got there, he saw the kid lying behind my truck on his back with the gun up near his head. He checked on the kid, then came over to help me. By the time the ambulance got there, my heart had stopped. They put the MAST suit on me, defibrillated me there in the driveway, loaded me up, and rushed me to the hospital.

  I also wanted to know what happened to the kid I shot. I knew he went down behind the truck, and I knew I hit him, but I just didn’t know if he had survived. I needed to know if he was alive or dead. I’m not sure why, but I just needed to know. My partner told me he couldn’t tell me because I hadn’t talked to the detectives yet. He just said, “Relax, you did good.” When he said that, I knew the kid had died. But there were still a few holes about the incident I wanted filled in. I wanted to know how he got there, if other people were involved, if anyone else got hurt, and whether I hit him with all four rounds. He told me that he couldn’t answer any of those questions either because I needed to talk to the detectives first. So I said, “Well then, bring ’em on.” I wanted all the blanks filled in.

  The detectives didn’t show up till the next morning, and in the meantime I started feeling better. The nurses asked me if I minded getting a couple of other visitors. I said, “Sure, I don’t care. Is there someone out there wanting to see me?” They told me there was about three hundred people outside my room who wanted to see me. So I said, “Well, send ’em five or ten at a time.” The nurses were all freaking out, but I said, “You gotta let them in.”

  After a few hours of that, they gave me a break, and I asked the aide who was in my room why there were so many people there to see me. I mean, I knew I was shot, but people get shot all the time, and they don’t get hundreds of visitors. I just didn’t understand why there were so many people out there. That’s when I found out what had happened to me after I passed out.

  The medical people told me that when I got to the hospital, they had cracked my chest open almost right away. Turns out the bullet had gone through the front rib cage; fragmented and nicked the stomach, liver, and intestines; cut some veins and arteries; shattered the spleen; and hit the diaphragm, while the main part of it passed through the base of my heart and cracked a rib as it went out my back. Blood was just pouring out of everywhere. They had to call in a specialist to handle the hole in my heart, and then the surgeons just sewed up all the other holes they could find. At some point, as they were trying to repair all this damage, I flat-lined again. They defibbed me again and kept on going. I was on some major life support. My heart was beating on its own, but I had a ventilator to help me breathe. I had blood being pumped into my system through my femoral arteries, a trach tube in my throat, and a line in my chest so they could directly pump adrenaline or something to my heart if it stopped again.

  About an hour after they closed me up, I started to bleed pretty bad inside my chest. I had come out of the anesthesia, but I don’t remember that. Fortunately, I don’t remember anything from the time I passed out until the time I woke up two days later. At any rate, t
hey told me that I was conscious and that the doctor came into the room to tell me about the bleeding. I had so many tubes in me I couldn’t talk, so the doctor told me to squeeze his hand if I understood what he was saying. He told me that I was going through a lot of blood, which meant that they must have missed something and that they were going to have to crack me open again. He asked me if I understood, and I squeezed his hand. Then he told me that because I’d only been in recovery for an hour or so that they were gonna have to do it without any anesthesia. I squeezed his hand to let him know that I understood, and they wheeled me in to the operating room. As soon as they opened me up that second time, my heart went into full arrest. They did a heart massage for about forty-five minutes, till it started working on its own. As they were working on me, they found what the problem was, where the bleeding was coming from. An artery along one of my ribs in the back had been hit, but some muscle spasms around it had initially prevented it from bleeding much. When I started to relax a bit, it just opened up and the blood started to pour into my chest cavity.

  After they repaired that and got my heart working again, I was still in real bad shape.

  I was on life support big time, machines keeping everything going, and the docs figured that because of the trauma that my body would shut down in about two hours. So they told my family to come in and say their last good-byes. In fact, one doctor took my brother aside and told him that I was already dead, that the machines were keeping me alive, and that they were giving my family a couple of hours so that they could deal with it however they wanted but that I wasn’t coming back.