Then the driver started yelling, “Come over here! Help me, brother! Get over here!” Stuff like that. Then one of the other guys came over and grabbed my legs. So now the driver and this other guy were holding me down, and the female was still standing above me holding this gun. I was yelling at her, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” My gun was pointed up at her, so she would jump back, then move in, then jump back again as my gun moved around as the driver pulled on it and I fought him. I was trying to shoot the female, but I couldn’t squeeze off a shot because the driver had his hands on the cylinder of my revolver.
What happened next went real slow. The female reached down, put her gun right down into my abdomen, and pulled the trigger. I just blacked out. I don’t know how long I was out, if it was a fraction of a second or what, but the next thing I knew, the driver was pushing me off of him like I was a dead weight. I realized that my gun was gone, so I jumped up.
The driver was still on the ground. He was sitting on his ass, holding my gun. He didn’t have a good grip on it, but he was trying to manipulate it in his hands to get to where he could shoot me. At that point, I pulled my baton and started whaling back and forth at him with it. I don’t know how it is that my baton stayed in the ring all the time we were fighting, but it did. At any rate, as I was swinging at him, he was trying to get away from me, scooting back on his butt. He managed to get far enough away from me to where he could point the gun right at me, so I threw my baton at him. As I threw it, I turned, sort of ducked down, and moved away from him to get behind the patrol car. As I turned, he started cranking off rounds at me. He caught me in the left buttocks, and I don’t know if it spun me around or what, but I went down over by the front of the car. Then I dove to the other side of the car to get away from him.
I found out later that my partner was in a fight of his own the whole time I was fighting. When he went to the car to put out the broadcast, one of the other suspects managed to take his baton away from him. As he was putting out the assistance call, the suspect was hitting him in the head with the baton. After Jim got the broadcast out, he pulled his pistol. The suspect grabbed it as Jim was bringing it up, so Jim was in the same struggle that I was in for his weapon. They wound up fighting up against the other side of the car that was parked in front of the Cadillac where I was fighting.
After the suspect who took my gun shot at me, he stood up and fired a round at my partner. It missed and hit the car. Then the guy went up to my partner, stuck the gun into his abdomen area, and pulled the trigger again. So my partner received one round dead center from my gun; then he went down.
At that point, I heard somebody say, “Let’s get out of here!” I didn’t know if it was the guy who shot me and my partner, or if it was one of the other suspects, but when I heard that, I came around the back of the squad car and stood up a little bit to try to look through the windows to see where they were at. When I did this, the driver started firing my gun again. I didn’t know if he was firing at me, but after it was all over, there were bullet holes in the lights up on top of the police car. When I heard those shots, I just ducked back behind the car. A few seconds later, I heard the squeal of some tires.
At that time, I figured, “Hey, they’ve left,” so I ran over to my partner, who was lying in the street in a fetal position. I said to him, “Jim, are you OK? Jim, are you OK?” He was moaning in that fetal position on the ground, but he didn’t answer me. I could see blood all over his head. I didn’t know that it was from the baton blows, and I thought that maybe they had shot him in the head. I told him to hang on. Then I went over to the police car and started pulling on the shotgun. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t get the shotgun out of the rack. I was just struggling with it. Then I went to grab the radio mike to put out a help call, but I couldn’t find it. I thought to myself, “Where the hell is the radio?” I was pretty desperate now, and I realized I needed to get my composure. I told myself, “OK, you can’t find the mike, start at the base where the cord is. Get the cord.” So I reached down, grabbed the base of the mike cord, and went hand over hand looking for the mike. All I came up with was a couple of wires on the end. The cord had been severed in the middle someplace, and all there was was a couple of wires. It turns out that during the fight with Jim that the door closed on the wire, and one of the guys he was fighting ripped the mike off.
When I saw the mike was gone, my heart just sunk. I knew I was shot. I knew I was shot several times. It was getting difficult for me to breathe. I was starting to feel kind of faint. I knew I was in trouble. I didn’t want to sit down, so I moved to the back of the police car and stood there, just kind of leaning against the car.
Then I heard some sirens in the distance. I was hoping they were coming to me. A little bit later, a car pulled up and two guys in uniforms got out. They were security guards. I immediately gave them some information, and they told me to sit down. So I kind of did what they said. A few seconds later, some police officers arrived. As soon as I saw some people I recognized, I gave them the information. I said, “Hey, the guys who shot us just left. They are in a Cadillac, a black Cadillac.” The other officers broadcast that immediately. Then they started pumping me for additional information. I was giving it to them, and they were putting it out on the air.
After a while, an ambulance finally arrived. They went to my partner first. I kept asking them, “How’s Jim? How’s Jim?” They told me that he didn’t look real good, and my heart sank again. Then they loaded us both up into the ambulance, and the next thing I knew, we were at the hospital.
I was having difficulty breathing, so they put a chest tube in me. The first thing that they did was cut my clothes off. Then I remember seeing the scalpel. They poked a hole right into my chest while I was still awake. I’m sure they numbed it first, but I remember watching the tube go into my chest and then, whoosh, blood just shooting out the other end. I just remember looking at that tube and then being able to breathe again. The next thing I remember was them stuffing another tube down my throat. As they were doing that, I started vomiting. I just leaned over the side of the table, and when I was finished, I lay back down.
Jim was on a table right next to me, and a friend of mine named Danny Schroenburger was standing there between us. I asked Danny, “How is Jim?” He told me that they were working on him now, but that he was going to be OK. Hearing that kind of put my mind at ease because I was really worried about my partner. Then they took me into X ray, brought me out, said they were gonna take me into surgery, and the next thing that I remember was waking up the next day.
When I woke up, it took a little while for things to start registering with me. I remember that I looked down at my abdominal area and saw a mess of meat on my stomach. That’s what it looked like. They had just kind of loosely stitched together the incision they made over the contact shot, so I could see all this meat from my abdomen. When I saw that, I realized that I was alive. Then I saw Rob Johnson, the guy I had for officer survival in the academy, standing on my right side. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, you did a good job.” Then I remember Danny Schroenburger coming in and giving me a message that some guy had called to wish me luck. Then my wife came in, and everything was starting to register.
I don’t remember too much after that except that I asked how my partner was doing. They told me that he was doing OK, that he was next door in the intensive-care unit we were in. I was really concerned about Jim because he was my responsibility. He was a probationer and I was the trainer. Here was somebody that was in my care, and he got shot with my gun. I assumed the responsibility for him getting shot because it was my fault. I knew it was.
There were things I could have done to prevent him from getting shot because I saw the warning signs and I didn’t react to them. I was going to call for a backup unit as soon as I saw the guy was getting a little bit belligerent with Jim, but as I started to use the radio, I heard another car calling for assistance. So I thought about what I had—I figured that this is pro
bably not gonna be a problem; maybe we’d just be kicking them loose, maybe just taking the driver to jail, no big deal. If I called for backup, all these units would be rolling down to me when there was this other assistance call. So I decided to let the other units go assist the guy who had already called for assistance. I shouldn’t have done that. I should have put the call out. I needed the assistance. If we would have had a show of force with other officers, the situation never would have escalated into a shooting.
One other thing I could have done differently was handcuff the driver right away. He was very challenging. It would have been reasonable to put the handcuffs on him. If nothing turned up on the warrant check, we could have dusted him off and sent him on his way, or if we needed to, we could have called for a supervisor to the scene to explain to the guy why we did what we did. We could have dealt with that easily, but the driver needed to be neutralized. He needed to have handcuffs on him. I realized that at the time, and I didn’t do it, so I could have done some things differently. I didn’t, we got shot, and it’s my fault. I decided that when I got back to work that I wouldn’t make any more mistakes like that.
It took a few months for me to get back into shape and get back to work, but I made it back to my old slot as a training officer in the same division where the shooting went down. Same watch, same car, same everything. About three months after I got back to the field, I got a brand-new probationer from the academy. This particular officer had a background in law enforcement. He had worked for another agency, so I felt real comfortable with him.
We were out on patrol, real late in the shift, the sun was just starting to come up, when I spotted this Chevrolet. It was still dark out, and the guy didn’t have his lights on. We were heading toward the guy, so I flashed the lights on the police car to get the guy to turn his lights on, but he didn’t, and it seemed like he sped up to get away. I told my partner, “Say, something is wrong here. This guy is rabbiting on us, so be prepared.” So I made the U-turn to get behind the guy, and he turned off the street and pulled into this subterranean parking area. I pulled in behind him, so now we were chasing this guy around the parking lot. We went around and around the lot several times. Then the guy turned back onto the street and took off. I figured the car was stolen, so I told my partner to get ready for a foot chase if the guy bails out. So now we’re chasing this guy up the street, red lights and siren on. He went a few blocks, then hung a left and lost control of the car. It was fishtailing, then it jumped the curb and crashed into a building.
The car bounced back off the building and started to roll back a little bit. Then the door popped open, and the suspect fell out onto the pavement. I stopped the police car, and we jumped out to take him into custody, but he jumped up and started to run down the middle of the street. He got a good head start on us, because we were just in the process of getting out when he took off, so we jumped back into the car and started following him down the street. He made a right onto a side street, then a left into an alley. Then he ducked behind this one building. I told my partner to jump out and wait where he was while I circled around to the front of the building to pin the suspect between us. So he jumped out, I went to the front of the building, parked the car, put out a broadcast for more units to come to where we were, got my flashlight and drew my gun, then went to look for the suspect.
I went through some bushes, then spotted the suspect hiding under this car parked up against the building. I stopped about fifteen to eighteen feet from the car and told my partner to come to the front because I had the suspect. When Fred got up there, I started telling the suspect to put his hands where I could see them and for him to get out from under the car. As he was moving from under the car, Fred moved up to him, and the next thing I knew, the suspect and my partner were in a fight. Now this suspect was a real muscular guy, and Fred was small in stature, so I was sizing this up in my mind real quick: big suspect, little partner. What happened several months before flashed in my mind, and I thought, “No way is this going to happen again.”
At that point, things started to slow down just like they did when I got shot. I knew I couldn’t let the guy overpower my partner, so I ran up to the suspect and—“boom”—hit him over the head a couple of times with the butt of my gun. That knocked him down, but he reached up and grabbed my gun. I wasn’t about to let this guy get my gun. I wasn’t about to go through what happened before again, so I immediately pulled the trigger. I shot a hole through the suspect’s hand and he let go. Then my partner jumped up and shouted, “I’m shot!” I wasn’t sure what had happened, but the suspect was still struggling, so I had my hands full. I put my gun away and got the suspect handcuffed, then stood on top of him while I asked my partner where he was shot, how he was doing, this and that. I was really worried about him. I was thinking, “Oh, my God, here’s another partner, another probationer, shot.” The only shot I heard was mine, but the suspect hadn’t been searched, so I thought maybe somehow he had shot Fred. Fred told me he was shot in the hand, so that put my mind at ease somewhat. Some other units showed up pretty soon after that; then an ambulance came and took the suspect away. Then another ambulance came and took my partner to the hospital.
I found out later that the suspect had raped a woman just before we spotted him. The car wasn’t stolen. He was just trying to get away from the alley where he’d raped this woman. He was on parole for some other things, just out of the joint, so he was a real bad guy. The investigators also told me what had happened when I shot the guy. The bullet went through his hand, hit him in the head, ricocheted off his head, and lodged in my partner’s hand. So that explained how my partner got shot. After it was all over, some of the guys gave me a hard time about it, kidding around. They said stuff like, “Hey, second probationer? You’re kind of hard on rookies, aren’t you, Carl?”
SWAT: Call-Outs to the Kill Zone
As previously noted, many of the individuals I interviewed were SWAT officers. The myriad sorts of operations that these officers are called upon to handle fall into two general categories: call-outs and preplanned operations. Call-outs happen when patrol officers, detectives, or officers working some other assignment find themselves in special-threat situations that crop up unexpectedly—almost always barricaded-suspect or hostage situations—and call for SWAT assistance to resolve the ongoing problem. Preplanned operations are those in which the SWAT team is brought in to handle some sort of high-risk operation from the start. The most common sort of preplanned SWAT operation by far is the service of high-risk warrants, primarily search warrants for narcotics. Among the other sorts of preplanned activities that SWAT teams sometimes engage in are stakeouts and serving as the arrest team in sting operations that involve unusually dangerous individuals.
The stories in this section give the reader a sense of the sorts of circumstances in which SWAT officers shoot suspects during call-outs. They include shootings that happened during both barricade and hostage situations, shootings that occurred during long-lasting standoffs and those that happened soon after officers arrived on scene, shootings in which the officer I interviewed was the only SWAT officer to shoot and those in which others fired also, shootings in which the officers were just a few feet from suspects and those in which they were a considerable distance away, and—in a classic example of suicide-by-cop—one shooting in which the suspect clearly wanted to die. Together these stories show what happens and how SWAT cops think, feel, and react when they are called out to deal with situations that are beyond the ken of ordinary officers.
• • •
I’d been on the team about nine years when it happened. We were getting together for training up at the academy about 9:30 one morning when all the pagers started going off. Soon after, our lieutenant, Tab Bittner, rolled up and said, “Don’t ask questions guys, I haven’t got time to explain it. We need to head to Miner Street and Canyon Boulevard. We need to get up there as fast as we can.” So we all geared up, and Bittner had all seventeen of us jump into the
raid van—an oversized Ford. He wanted us together so he could brief us on the way so that we would all know what we had when we got there. I tell you, it was quite a sight, seventeen SWAT cops in one van. We were stacked up in there like cordwood.
As we drove, Bittner told us that the previous evening there had been a home invasion up in a little ’burb called Claremont Hills, a relatively affluent area surrounded by lower-income housing. A guy—all cracked-up—came into this house armed with a .22 pistol, confronted the father on the first floor, and demanded money. The mother and two children were upstairs in a bedroom when this happened. The father, who’s an attorney, didn’t have enough money to satisfy the guy, so he said, “I’ll wait till the bank opens up in the morning and you’ll get more for me.” The mother barricaded the door in the bedroom, so the father stayed downstairs with this guy all night. The father couldn’t call the cops because the guy was right on top of him, and the mother didn’t have a phone in the upstairs bedroom.
Daytime came, and the bad guy told the father, “Go out and get me more money, you’ve got an hour. If you’re not back in time, I’ll kill ’em.” Dad went out, and the first thing he did was go to the bank and withdraw two, three thousand dollars. Then he called the Northwest Police Department, which at the time patrolled the area. Northwest Police went, “Oh, shit,” and called every available copper from the area and told them, “Get up there, get around this house, don’t move on it, we’ll call the county and get their SWAT team.” That’s when the phone call went out to our department and to us.
When we got there, Northwest had a staging area for us. I was one of two team leaders at that point, and it was my team’s turn to be on containment, but Bittner for some reason wanted me on the assault. So I got together with Sammy, the leader of the team that had the assault that day, and told him I was working under him. Now all the homes up there are red brick, and the streets all wind around, so our biggest fear was that we were gonna surround the wrong house. So Ben, our sergeant, grabbed one of the first officers on the scene and said, “You need to show me the house. I want you to point this house out to me.” So he walked out, and the guy kind of looked around for a second and said, “Shit! That’s it right there,” pointing one house over. And guess who was standing there in the window while they were looking? Shithead. And guess who was standing right out in the open? Ben in a set of BDUs and a plainclothes copper, going, “Duh!” There went the surprise.
Into the Kill Zone Page 20