About an hour or so later, my mom made it to the hospital, and she started yelling at me, “You’re not a quitter. You’ve never been a quitter, so don’t quit on me now!” Stuff like that. She and other family members then started telling me to do things like move my fingers if I could hear them. So I moved my hands, and they ran out and told the doctor, “Hey, she’s going to be OK. We told her to move her fingers and she did.” The doctor told them, “No, what’s happening is her body is shutting down, and she’s doing involuntary muscle twitches. You think she’s responding to you because you hope she’s somehow going to make it.”
My mom said, “No, it’s not spasms, you try it!” So the doc did the same thing. He asked me some questions, and I moved my fingers. He did a few other things, I responded, and he told my family, “You know what? You’re right. I don’t know why, but she’s fighting back.” I slowly started to recover, and they started to take the tubes out. I think they started with the femoral tubes because I was now holding blood. Then they took out some of the zillion tubes in my arms. During that second day, they took the trach tube out to see if I could breathe on my own, without the ventilator. I guess I gasped a little bit at first, then I breathed OK after that. A little bit later, I woke up.
After I got out of the hospital, I was off work recuperating for about eight months. Early on, they had to do lots of testing and stuff. I had a lot of pains in my chest and back, and they had to drain my lungs a few times from the back, and—let me tell you—that was a real joy. After about the third month, I started getting some sharp pains every now and then, like someone was sticking an ice pick in my back. When I asked my doc what it was, he told me that they had left a few bullet fragments inside me because it was more dangerous to cut them out than to just leave them there. Every now and then, they would shift, and I’d get little sharp stabs. The doc just said that was normal. They’re still there. They just float around and poke my ribs and my back every now and then. It’s a pain, but to me, it’s just like a trick knee or a trick ankle; you just gotta shake it off, just move around a bit and it goes away.
• • •
After completing my probation, I did a year in communications, then got wheeled out to a pretty busy division. The radio was always hopping, so it was a fun place to work after spending a year answering phone calls. I was working with my regular partner when we got a call of a family dispute with some fighting going on. It was at some apartments on the north side of the street, so I pulled up on the south side.
There was a long driveway that led up to the apartment in question that went alongside of the building all the way to the back of the lot. As I was getting out of the car, I saw these three people: this man, this woman, and a little kid—maybe two or three years old—between them coming down the driveway toward us. I figured this was our disturbance because the adults were shouting at each other, and there was some kind of hustle and bustle going on between them. As I walked over toward them, it looked like they were arguing over the kid, like they were playing tug-of-war with him. They were almost shoulder to shoulder, just kind of fighting back and forth over the kid as they walked along. When I got about two-thirds of the way across the street, they stopped on the sidewalk at the end of the driveway. They hadn’t spotted me, but I was watching them real close.
At that point, the guy pushed the kid away, grabbed the woman, and coldcocked her right in the face, which sent her right down to the sidewalk. When she hit, he reached down and pulled this big old fourteen-inch butcher knife out of the waistband of the baggy blue jeans he was wearing. To this day, I’m amazed that he didn’t cut his dick off when he pulled that knife out of there. I don’t know how he did that. That was a pretty good trick. He must have been a magician in a past life or something.
Anyway, this thing was going to shit in a hurry. She’s down on the sidewalk, the kid is screaming, “Mommy! Mommy!” and the guy is standing over her with a huge butcher knife. Then it got worse. He jumped down on her and brought this knife over the top of his head like he was going to just plunge it into her chest. He had his knees on her arms, pinning her down on the sidewalk, getting ready to do her.
I started running as soon as I saw the knife, so I was pretty close when he jumped on her. I had my nightstick in my left hand—I hadn’t even been out of the car long enough to put it in the ring on my belt. I didn’t feel like I had time to draw my gun, so I just grabbed my stick with my right hand. It happened so fast I didn’t even have time to grab it by the Uwara handle. I just took it and smacked the guy across the back of the neck and shoulders, just as hard as I could on a backstroke. I was aiming for just his neck, but I missed by a little and ended up hitting him right on the big vertebrae where the neck joins the torso. But I still caught him pretty good.
Now I go about six foot two, 225 pounds, and I hit him as hard as I could, but it didn’t faze him much. But it did get his attention and get him to stop his attack on the lady. It also pissed him off. He jumped up real quick, spun around with the knife, and slashed me on the inside of my left forearm. Just like that, I was cut before I knew it. I felt the knife hit my arm, but I didn’t even feel it slice me. In fact, I didn’t know I was actually cut until I looked down afterwards and saw the blood.
As soon as the knife hit, I took a couple of steps back to put some distance between me and the guy, and I drew my gun. The guy was faceup on me, about five or six feet away. I didn’t want to be cut again, so just as soon as I cleared leather, I fired my first round from the hip. It hit him in the lower abdomen. He was still standing there, so I decided to shoot him in the head because the first shot hadn’t dropped him and I didn’t want him to slash me again. So I brought my gun up, found my sight picture, put it square on his face, and popped him between the eyes with my second round. I squeezed it off just as soon as I got that sight picture on his face. So it was real quick—clear leather and “boom,” first round in the gut, then continue up with the gun and “boom,” second round in the face. Caught him right on his nose. Then he was down. I don’t remember seeing him fall or anything, he was just lying there on the sidewalk.
As soon as he’d cut me, I felt something change. Everything came into clearer visual focus, and it seemed like time sped up. Then, when I fired, the rounds didn’t sound loud at all. I saw the muzzle flashes real clearly, but the rounds didn’t bother my ears at all. Not like they would if I fired my gun right now. I was also thinking how weird it all was as I was shooting. I was thinking this can’t be happening. Like most cops, I’d pictured circumstances in which I might become involved in a shooting, and this wasn’t one of them. As I was walking across the street, I was thinking that this guy was just going to let me put the handcuffs on him, and we’d sort things out. Then it went so sideways, so quickly, that I just couldn’t believe it. I’d been on a lot of family disputes that were a lot more contentious when we arrived, and they turned out OK. This looked to be an easy one, and it just went to shit. I was thinking that this was just too weird. Guys shouldn’t be pulling out knives to murder their wives in front of me, and when I try to stop them, they shouldn’t hurt me. It was like things weren’t adding up. There was something illogical going on. It was Twilight Zone stuff.
Once he was down, all that strange stuff receded, and I noticed that my side was getting wet. So I looked down and saw I was bleeding like a stuck pig from my left forearm, that I was standing in a pool of my own blood. It was really bleeding a lot. I started thinking, “Oh, man, this isn’t good.” The blood wasn’t spurting out, so I knew he hadn’t caught an artery. But it was coming out pretty good, like somebody had a hose on with a serious trickle coming out. I hollered to my partner at that point. Told him I was cut. He didn’t know what the hell was going on because this had all happened so fast. He was on the radio putting us out at our location when it went down, so he didn’t know why I fired the rounds. That’s why I told him I was cut, to let him know why I just shot this guy.
He put out a help call and requested
an ambulance. As we were waiting for the other units to show up, my partner went up and cuffed the guy. He wasn’t moving at all, but we weren’t going to take any chances. In fact, I thought he was dead. The woman must’ve thought so too because she was screaming, “Adios, mi hijo,” and other stuff like that in Spanish. She had gotten up and grabbed her kid. Had her arms around him. Just standing there holding the kid and screaming stuff in Spanish as I was trying to figure out how to stop the bleeding.
I took a deep breath, told myself not to panic, that I was going to be OK. I felt myself to make sure that the knife hadn’t hit me anywhere else. I looked at my shirt and didn’t see any cuts besides the one on my sleeve. I had my vest on, so I was quite certain I wasn’t cut on my torso. I didn’t feel any pain anywhere besides my left arm. I figured from all that that I wasn’t cut anyplace besides my arm, but I knew I was going to be in trouble if I just let the blood keep coming out. I had to get the bleeding stopped.
About then, Jan Nelson, one of my classmates from the academy, came rolling up with his partner. He grabbed a handkerchief or something and started some direct pressure on my arm with that. It didn’t do shit to stop the bleeding. I knew that I couldn’t let much more blood leak out of my body, so I pulled out my cord-cuff restrainer from my sap pocket, wrapped that around my forearm just above the gash, and cinched it down real tight. That stopped the bleeding. Once the bleeding stopped, it was like, OK, whatever happens from here, at least I’m not going to die. I knew I was going to make it. So I just relaxed a little bit and watched as more units and some supervisors arrived while we waited for the ambulance. After about three to five minutes, we got word that the ambulance was going to be delayed for some reason, so Jan and his partner tossed me in their car and took me to Presbyterian Hospital.
After I got to the hospital, one of the sergeants came in and told me that they had sent another supervisor to get my wife and bring her over to the hospital. I had been worried that she might hear about it from someone outside the PD, so knowing that the other sergeant was going to get her set my mind at ease. He could tell her what happened and explain to her that I was OK.
After they numbed my arm up a bit, the doctor took a good look at the wound. The long side of the knife blade had hit about the midpoint of my forearm, moving from the wrist toward the elbow. It dug in, all the way to the bone, then came out, leaving about a three-inch semicircle wound. It was a pretty clean cut, wasn’t mangled at all. The best way I can describe it is to picture a turkey leg that you started to cut the meat off from the foot end, but you stop maybe halfway down. As long as the flap you just cut is laying flat on the bone, it looks like a thin semicircular cut, but once you flip the flap back, you’ve got a good hunk of meat exposed. That’s what my arm looked like. Just a thin cut until the doctor laid the flap back to work on it. I looked over, and I could see bone and nerves and all the vessels in there. The doctor was amazed by the wound. He said it looked like a surgeon had gone around the nerves and blood vessels, except for that one big vein that had been cut open. He also said that the long sleeve of my shirt had probably prevented some serious damage. He said the thickness of the wool likely kept the blade from going a millimeter or two deeper. If that would’ve happened, it would have almost certainly cut some of the nerves leading to my hand, and I would have lost motion in a few fingers. It would also probably have snapped an artery, in which case there would have been a real good chance I would have bled out and died before they got me to the hospital.
It was pretty interesting watching the doctor work on my arm and having him explain all that stuff to me. As I was lying there, the ambulance showed up, and they wheeled the guy who cut me into the cubicle next to me. I couldn’t believe he was alive. I knew I hit him real good with both rounds, one right between the eyes, plus he wasn’t moving one bit when he was lying on the sidewalk. I figured he had to be dead, so I was curious about how badly he was hurt. They told me that he was hurt very badly, that he probably wasn’t going to survive because his blood pressure was way down. He ended up surviving after a long hospital stay, so we all guessed wrong about him.
The supervisor who drove my wife and me home after they were done with me at the ER filled us in on what led up to the shooting. The guy I shot had almost killed somebody else at this party that was going on at the apartment we were sent to. He had gotten drunk and gone completely fucking bonkers at this party on the second floor of this apartment. He just went completely ape shit and pushed this other guy through a plate glass window. The other guy was damn near dead when he hit the deck down below.
None of this information got relayed to Communications Division and on to us because none of the people at the party spoke English—they were all El Salvadorans. Plus whoever called didn’t communicate exactly what had happened, and the operator who took the call didn’t get all the info. The caller just told the operator that Louise’s husband, Joe—or whatever their names were—was on a rampage. So the operator just assumed it was a family dispute. So we didn’t know this guy had just gone completely ape shit, violent bonkers before we got there.
After he shoved the other guy through the window, the guy I shot wanted to leave the party before the buddies of the guy he almost killed could kill him or the cops came to put him in jail. His wife wanted him to stay because she figured that he was safe with their friends at the party. So what I saw when I spotted them was him trying to drag her and their kid home, not a fight over the kid. Because the guy was unconscious back at the hospital, the sergeant couldn’t tell me why he decided to try to kill his wife. I didn’t care. I was just glad that I was able to stop him.
• • •
I’d been on the job about five and a half years when we got a kidnapping call that came out as a kidnapping-neighborhood disturbance. When we got to the call, a teenage girl—probably about sixteen or seventeen—met us and told us that her child had been taken by a lady that lived in the house we had come up to. We asked the girl some questions, and she told us that the woman supposedly had some kind of mental impairment, that she sometimes baby-sat the child, but she had taken the child from the girl and told her she wasn’t gonna give it back. She was really afraid. She kept saying that the lady was crazy, that she could kill the kid, that she was going to kill the kid.
We didn’t really know what we had, so we started walking up to the house to see what the woman had to say about what was going on. As we were walking up the driveway to knock on the door, this female—I think she was in her late twenties—came out of the house. She came down the driveway toward us, and I started talking to her, just some nonsense chitchat, trying to make conversation with her, trying to figure out what was going on and what her attitude was. So we were standing about five feet from each other in the driveway, talking for a bit. I finally got to the point where I asked her, “Do you have this young lady’s daughter?” She said, “Yeah.” Then I told her, “You’re going to have to give the child back. It’s not your child.” She replied, “No, I’m not. I’m not giving her back.” I tried to explain the situation to her, but she just continued to say, “No, I’m not going to give the child back.” Finally, I said, “Look, we’re going to have to take you to jail if you don’t give the child back.”
When I said that, she pulled a box cutter out of her pocket. I already had my nightstick out, so I hit her arm with it, and she dropped the box cutter. Then she stumbled back, and before I could grab her, she made it to the front door. As she went through the doorway, I could see this little baby, this two-year-old child, standing just inside it. Then the lady shut the door and locked it. So now we had this lady who was extremely upset—much more so than when we were talking in the driveway—locked inside this house with the child. We had a real problem now.
I stayed at the front of the house, and my partner went around to the back to make sure that she didn’t get out that way. As I was looking through the front window, I could see the woman standing in front of the little two-year-old, screaming a
t her. She was hysterical, and I was thinking, “Oh, this is not good.” I was worried that she was going to hurt the child. Then she started dumping over furniture. The baby just stood there screaming—crying and screaming—while the lady was going ballistic. So I knocked on the window to get her attention, and she looked at me. I said to her, “Let us have the baby and we won’t take you to jail.” I mean, at that point I was willing to tell her anything to get that child out of there.
She said, “No.” I kept telling her we wouldn’t take her to jail if she gave us the kid, but she kept saying, “No.” After a couple of minutes of this, she came to the door, opened it a little bit—just kind of flung it open—then took off running back toward the kitchen. Well, the baby was standing just inside the doorway—about six feet away from me—so I went in, grabbed her, and headed back out.
I radioed my partner and told him that I had the kid. So he came around front, and we started walking down the driveway. When we got about halfway down the driveway—maybe twenty-five feet from the front door—the lady came back to the front door with a knife in her hand. It was a big deboning knife—about thirteen inches total, with an eight-inch blade. Then she started shouting at us, “I’m gonna kill you! I’m gonna kill you!” She had the knife raised above her head, but she wasn’t moving toward us. She was just standing in the doorway.
Both my partner and I drew our weapons at that point. I was still holding the kid, and I was thinking that if the lady started to come at us that I was going to shoot her. My partner and I yelled for her to put the knife down several times, and she finally lowered it from above her head and moved it down by the side of her leg. The child was still crying and screaming and wiggling around in my arms, so I decided to set her down. As I was bending over to set the kid down, the woman brought the knife back up over her head and threw it.
Into the Kill Zone Page 18