Next thing I knew, I felt this impact on the right side of my head. It felt like somebody had taken a brick and hit me with it or just punched me in the right side of the head as hard as they could. When the knife hit, I released the child. My gun fell out of my hand. I was stunned. I was feeling this dull pain with a lot of pressure on the right side of my head—not a real sharp pain like you think you’d have if you got cut or stabbed. It took me a couple of seconds to get my bearings, then I started looking around. I saw my gun on the ground, so I picked up my gun. I looked at the house, but the suspect had gone inside and shut the door, so I put my gun back in my holster. I knew the knife had hit me, so I started looking around on the ground for it.
I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find it. Then I looked up at my partner. He looked at me and said, “Holy shit!!” I asked him, “Where’s the knife?” He just repeated himself, “Holy shit!!” Then I noticed that he was looking a little bit off to my right side, so I raised my hand up, and I felt the knife sticking in my head. Then I said, “Holy shit!!”
My partner and I got on the radio and put out an assist the officer call. Then my partner told me to walk the rest of the way down the driveway and get next to the patrol car in case the lady came back out of the house. A citizen who was passing by came up the driveway and then helped me walk to the patrol car. I was thinking, “God, I hope this isn’t it. I’m just twenty-five years old. I hope I’m not dying here in somebody’s driveway at twenty-five.” I mean, I could feel the knife, I knew I was stabbed in the head, and I wondered, “How far in did it go?” So I was real worried there for about ten or fifteen seconds, thinking it was all over for me, until I got back to the patrol car and sat down next to it.
My mom’s a nurse, and she’d told me more than once—I don’t know why—but she’d told me several times that if I ever got stabbed and had something stuck in me, don’t yank it out. She told me that you never know what it has hit, what it hasn’t hit, what kind of damage can be done if you pull it out. I knew not to try to take it out, so I sat there, and I held the knife to try to relieve the pressure I was feeling. It wasn’t just from the fact that I had a knife sticking in my head. It was also from the way it was stuck in there. It turns out that the knife went into my head about seven-eighths of an inch, so the other almost twelve inches were just hanging down from my skull. With the pressure of the weight of the knife pulling down, it felt like someone was taking a crowbar and trying to pry my skull open. So I held the knife to kind of relieve a little bit of that pressure as I was sitting there by the patrol car.
After a little while, some other officers started to arrive. They just looked at me with amazement: like, “Oh, God!” Then one of the veteran officers, who’d been on about twenty, twenty-five years, came over and talked to me. He told me some stuff about how he’d been shot in Vietnam and that from his experience he could tell that I was going to be OK. He said, “You’re still talking, you’re awake, you’ll be fine.” As he was talking to me, this other officer came up, looked at me, and said, “I’ve got a first-aid kit in my car. We’ll pull the knife out and bandage it up.” I thought, “Oh, my God, no,” and told the veteran officer, “Keep that guy away from me! Keep him away from me!” He told me, “Oh, yeah. Don’t worry. We’re not doing anything.”
Then the ambulance got there. They got there even before Life-Flight could get off the pad. As they were working on me, the lady who’d stabbed me kept coming to the door—back and forth, back and forth. The scene still wasn’t under control. We didn’t know what other kind of weapons she had, whether she had a gun. The ambulance was still working on me, so the other officers decided to try to get the lady into custody next time she came to the door. Well, next time she came to the door, my partner and three or four other officers rushed her. She got the door partway closed and was bracing herself against this little half-wall right behind the door, trying to keep the officers from forcing the door open. As the officers were making some progress pushing the door back, they could see her arm coming around. She had another knife. My partner yelled, “Knife,” and ended up shooting her through the door before she could stab this one officer who was closest to her. I heard that happen, and then they loaded me up into the ambulance and took me to the hospital.
When they brought me off the ambulance, there were about fifty officers waiting outside the hospital, all looking at me. Now I was still hurting pretty bad, but I wasn’t thinking, “I’m hurt bad, I could die,” or anything like that. I was thinking, “This is the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever been in.” I mean, everyone there was staring at me, and I’ve got a knife in my head. I felt like Friday the 13th or something.
So the medical people got me into the emergency room, where they took some X rays. They couldn’t get me into the CAT scan because the knife was sticking out. The ER doctors and a couple of the neurosurgeons who were there decided from the X rays that the knife hadn’t penetrated into my brain. It went all the way through the skull, and later on, through angiograms and MRIs, they concluded it came one-sixteenth of an inch from going into the brain. But that day, they decided it was OK to remove the knife and that the best way to get it out was to simply pull it. So a bunch of people just braced my upper body, my head, my neck, and they pulled it out.
It actually hurt more when they pulled it out than when it went in. I was wide awake. The doctors didn’t give me anything for the pain for thirty-six hours. They told me that medications like that could have a similar effect of hemorrhaging in the brain. They wanted to make sure I was awake and alert so they could keep track of my vital signs and everything.
I recovered just fine. Then, just over a year after I got stabbed in the head, I was working with a different partner when we got another call involving a nutcase with a knife. It came out as a family disturbance just before dusk on a Tuesday evening. Radio told us that the son was going crazy with a knife, threatening his family, threatening some neighbors, destroying the house he lived in.
Now I’d had some calls involving knives in the year since I got stabbed, but most of them turned out to be nothing. Most of the time, nobody had any weapon, and in the others it was just a knife on the kitchen table or something like that. But every time calls about knives dropped, I’d be thinking, “Holy Christ,” on the way there because I knew that I could get hurt even if I kept my distance; twenty-five feet away from that woman meant nothing. She wasn’t moving, and she still got me. So when I got that call about the son going crazy with the knife, I thought, “Oh, great.” Just what I needed.
A one-man unit checked by with us. Then the three of us went to the scene. When we pulled up, there was a big group of people outside in the yard of the house where the call came from. We stopped one house away and got out. We could see that the windows in the house were all smashed and that the windows of the car parked out front were all smashed. As we walked up to the location, the guy’s mother started yelling at us, “Shoot him! Shoot him! Shoot the son of a bitch!” When I heard that, I was thinking, “Lady, shut up. Come on, this is your kid here.” So I told her that we’d handle it, and we continued up toward the house. As we went up, the guy came around the side of the house holding a three-foot-long machete. When I spotted him, I thought, “Great, here we go again.”
So we drew our guns and kept our distance. We were behind a car about thirty feet from the guy, so we started talking to him. I said, “Hey, man, put down the machete.” He just started cursing at us, using every word in the book. “Screw you, motherfucker. You want this? Come get it.” Stuff like that. As he was carrying on, he was smashing stuff in the yard, so we asked for some more units to check by.
By now, the whole street was filled with people—families, kids, all in the street watching what was going on. As we were talking to him—I was doing most of the talking—he left the front yard and started walking down the street. Now, luckily for us, there were a lot of cars parked in the street, so we could keep some cars between us and the guy as we tried
to contain him as best we could. While he walked down the middle of the street, we were walking through front yards next to the curb, keeping the parked cars between us. When we got three or four houses down, we ran out of cars. We were coming to a point now where we couldn’t let him go any farther. There were people all over the place. He was going crazy, threatening to kill everybody, and telling us that if we came near him he was going to kill us.
When we ran out of cars, I was in the open, about twelve feet from him. I knew I was too close for safety—I mean, I knew from getting stabbed the year before that twice the distance wasn’t safe—but I couldn’t move farther away because I needed to be able to protect all the people that were milling around. I knew we couldn’t let the guy go. Well, he stopped in the middle of the street, and I just kept my twelve-foot distance with my gun drawn while he held the machete in his right hand. My partner was about ten feet behind me, trying to keep the people back there away, and the officer from the one-man unit was in the street off to our left, trying to keep the guy from going back down the street where some other people were. I was closest, so I kept talking to him, repeatedly telling him to put the machete down. The officer from the one-man unit got on the radio and told them we needed a supervisor, we needed a TASER, we needed those other units we requested, stuff like that.
I could tell the guy was reaching his boiling point. The tone of his voice and his behavior became more aggressive. I wasn’t gonna stand there for a substantial period of time twelve feet away from this guy holding a three-foot machete when I knew what a one-foot deboning knife did at twenty-five feet.
The next time I told the guy to put the machete down, he said, “You want this? You want this? Here you go. You got it.” Then started to move toward me. When he took his second step, he drew the machete over his head. I wasn’t gonna let what happened before happen again, so I fired at him. I saw him sort of dip after the first or second round, but he was still coming at me, so I kept shooting. The next thing I remember was seeing him on the ground a few feet in front of me.
I had heard from other officers who’d been in shootings that things slowed down for them, and they didn’t remember how many rounds they fired. That’s what happened to me. Everything slowed down when he started coming at me—then, when he hit the ground, everything went back to regular speed. I had no idea how many rounds I’d fired. I just kept shooting until he fell down, until he was no longer a threat. It turned out that I fired four rounds—all hits—but I had no clue how many rounds I was firing as I was shooting.
When he fell, the machete was still partially in his hand, so my partner ran up and kicked it out of his hand. Then the other units got there. A little while later, an ambulance showed up. By the time they got the guy to the hospital, he was DOA.
The investigators started showing up not too long after the ambulance took the guy away. Homicide came out. Internal Affairs, the DA’s office, Civil Rights Division, they all came out, and I think almost everybody who came out to that scene had made the scene where I got stabbed. Nobody said anything about it, but a couple of guys just kind of looked at me like, “Good Lord, what is it with you and edged weapons.”
• • •
I was working morning watch as a training officer in February when I got a brand-new trainee fresh out of the academy. We worked a couple of shifts, and he seemed like a very good trainee. He was intelligent, had good common sense, would observe things. I took note that he was quick to notice things that were happening and that he paid attention to what was going on.
We were working an area that had a lot of criminal activity. A lot of prostitutes and pimps lived in the apartments there, so we had a lot of prostitution, a lot of narcotics activity, whatever. One night at about three in the morning, we spotted this Cadillac Eldorado that had no front plate and no current tabs on the back plate. The car was occupied by three males and one female. There were two people in front besides the driver—so three people in the front—and one person in the back. We’d been having a lot of Eldorados stolen in the area we were working. We’d find them up on milk crates, stripped, with their seats and whatnot gone. I told my partner that we should stop the car and check it out to see if it’d just been ripped off, so we did.
I told Jim to get the driver out of the car and pat him down, because when I ran the plate, it indicated that there were outstanding warrants associated with the car. It was late at night, so I wanted him to get the driver out and pat him down for our safety. After Jim got the driver out and patted him down, the guy got very belligerent and began to challenge Jim to the point where it became more than he could handle. I decided to intervene, so I went up to my partner and got the driver’s license from him. I wanted to run the guy to see if he had any of the warrants that were associated with the car. After I got his license from Jim, I chatted with the driver and told him the reason we were stopping him. He started to get a little strong with me, so I explained to him that we just wanted to check on the status of the car, that we were just doing our job, and that if the status of the car was cool that he’d be on his way.
He calmed down somewhat at that point, but then I could see that something wasn’t right. There was a lot of rubbernecking in the car. The people in the car looked very nervous. I said to myself, “You know, this isn’t fitting exactly right,” so we placed the driver to the back of the Cadillac. My partner stood behind him, and I started calling the other people out of the car from the right door. I got the two males out, patted them down, retrieved their licenses, clipped them to my tie, and sent them over with the driver at the back of the car. That left the female in the car. She seemed extremely nervous. She had a purse that she picked up, then set down. She was looking around, rubbernecking back as if she was thinking, “What do I do?”
When I told her to slide out of the car, the driver said, “No, bitch, you stay in the car!” I told the driver, “Be quiet, she’s getting out of the car,” then started to call her out again. At that point, the driver pushed past the other two guys and moved toward the open passenger door. I grabbed ahold of him from behind in an upper-body control hold, and we went down onto the ground. I was trying to choke him out, but I couldn’t do it. It was cold out, and I was wearing what they call a Melton jacket, real thick, and the driver had on a crushed-velvet jacket with a big collar, so I couldn’t get enough pressure to get him out. He was talking to me as we were fighting. At first, I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Then he said something very distinctly. He said, “You don’t know what you’re doing. I’ll make you have to kill me.”
When I realized I wasn’t going to be able to get him out, I called Jim over to have him help me with this guy. He came over to my right side, grabbed the guy’s right arm, and helped me pull the guy’s arm back to cuff him. As I was trying to get the cuffs on, the guy yelled, “Brothers, come on over and help me!” The other two guys started moving toward us, and at that point I told Jim, “Get on the radio! Jim, get on the radio!” Things were turning ugly, and I figured we needed additional units. We didn’t have handheld radios back then, so Jim pulled his baton to push his way through the two guys in order to get to the radio.
As I was watching Jim strike out at the other two guys to get to the radio, I felt the driver tugging on my gun, trying to pull it from the holster. He was talking to me again, saying, “I’m gonna kill you, pig”—things like that. At that point, I felt my life was in danger, so I released him and pulled my gun out of my holster. But as I did, he grabbed onto it, so now we were in a life-and-death struggle over my gun. I heard some commotion over where my partner was. I couldn’t see him any longer, but I could hear him screaming, “Officer needs assistance! Officer needs assistance!” calling on the radio to get us some help. I could also tell from the noises that he was fighting back and forth with the other two suspects.
As he was putting out the broadcast and fighting with the other two guys, I was still in this life-and-death struggle over my gun. At one point, the guy had his
finger in my eye, trying to pull my eye out. He kept telling me, “Let go of the gun. Let go of the gun.” No way was I going to let go of the gun. I just kept fighting. I was biting his hands to get him to release the gun, doing whatever I could. We were on the ground. Then we were up, then back down on the ground, just fighting over the gun. We ended up on the ground between the two cars. I managed to roll up underneath the Cadillac and break the driver’s grip on the gun because he couldn’t reach in between the bumper and the ground as far as I could. So now I had the gun, but my body was between me and the suspect because he was behind me, kind of holding me in a bear hug.
He kept trying to grab the gun. Then he said, in a real deliberate voice, “Get the bitch out of the car with the gun.” Now I was trapped in this little space under the car with the suspect trying to grab the gun, and I was thinking that the female was gonna come up and just put the gun up to me and shoot me in the head. That’s what went through my mind. I wanted to have some mobility, so I rolled back out from under the car to where the driver was on his back, and I was lying on my back on top of him. Now that I was out from underneath the car, the guy reached back up and grabbed the gun again. Then he started yelling, “Shoot the fucking pig, shoot him!”
I looked up and I saw the female appear above my head. As I watched her, she reached into her bra area and pulled out a gun. I know she did it real fast, but as I was watching, it went real slow. The driver was screaming, “Shoot him, shoot him!” When she got the gun out, the female pointed it at me. I started kicking at her, rolling around, thinking that way if she shoots, maybe she’ll miss me and hit him. Then she fired—two, maybe three rounds. I could feel the pain in the right side of my upper chest. It was like maybe someone held up a cigarette and burnt me, but I just kept fighting. I knew I was hit, but I just kept on going.
Into the Kill Zone Page 19