Into the Kill Zone

by David Klinger

  Ben turned around, told us that the jig was up, and told us to get down to the house and surround it. The next thing we heard was radio traffic going crazy, cops on the perimeter telling us that our bad guy had run out the back door. At that point, I figured we were gonna be in a foot pursuit through the neighborhood with this idiot any second. We talked about that later, and almost every guy said that they thought that was what was going to happen. At any rate, Sammy and Ben and I kind of looked at each other with looks that said, “Let’s get the house. Let’s secure the house first,” so we took off on a dead run toward the house. My thinking was that I wanted to make sure that this guy couldn’t get back in the house where he could threaten the family. So we bypassed the front door and went straight to the back door where he’d come out.

  Our containment and our snipers were still moving into position when we ran into the house. Sammy and I were the first two through the door, and as we came through, I heard a male voice yelling at us, and I heard a woman screaming. That didn’t click right off because we had been told the guy was gone. So I broke to the right, and Sammy broke to the left with a couple of other guys who were following us. They went into this area that was a kitchen with a breakfast nook, and I went into this little hallway that led to the living room area. When I got to a spot near this butler’s pantry that was between the kitchen prep area and the living room–dining area, I heard guys yelling on the radio that the bad guy had gone back into the house. I said to myself, “Oh, fuck!”

  I had one of the other guys, Cal Fuller, on my butt, and as I advanced down the hallway, he turned into the butler’s pantry. A couple of more steps and I turned this corner and came to a common doorway between the kitchen, the butler’s pantry, and the living room. There was an archway in front of me that led into the formal dining room, and I could see movement in there as I started to move into the area in front of the archway. What came into view as I got in the middle of the archway was a little boy, a little girl, a mom, and an asshole wearing a ski mask, who was holding the family in front of him and pointing his pistol at me.

  I was about three feet away. I was so close that if I hadn’t had to move out of the way of the gun, I could’ve reached out and grabbed for it. But I couldn’t, so I just scooted right past him into the dining room. As soon as I saw that gun, I decided I was going to shoot the guy if I had the chance, so what I was hoping for when I broke into the dining room was that there would be a door leading back to where the guy was, so I could just move in behind him, put my gun up against his head, and drop him. Well, there was no door, so I hooked the wall and just spun around, hoping that he’d come around the corner, because if he came around the corner with all these people, there was no way he’d come around tight, and I’d be able to stick my gun right in his ear and take him out.

  Now prior to this incident, I met a guy named Ron McCarthy, who had been an assistant unit commander with LAPD SWAT, and I’d had an opportunity to be involved in some training with him and pick up some of the philosophies that Ron and the other guys from Ron’s squad have about dealing with hostage situations. His emphasis was to go hard and fast if the opportunity presents itself. Some other teams like to negotiate until the bad guy kills all the hostages, and they wait another week till he surrenders. They count that a success because they didn’t shoot anybody. Ron’s attitude, which I adopted, is, “Who cares about the bad guy?” The mission is to save the good guys, and you take the bad guys however they want to be taken.

  So I was ready to shoot, but instead of coming around the corner toward me, the guy backed up. He backed up past the opening to the butler’s pantry before Cal could get a shot on him. Then he backed up into a corner in the kitchen; had the woman and the two kids right in front of him. He was stuck in the kitchen because all the guys in the house had all his avenues of escape blocked. Cal and another guy were in the butler’s pantry. Sammy was down behind a little serving-area counter on one side of the kitchen. We had a guy standing at the back door. We had two other guys down the hallway from me, and I was at the other end, so we had this guy pinned.

  Sammy got on the radio and gave a synopsis of what was happening to the commanders. Lieutenant Bittner moved a sniper into position because the bad guy was exposed to a huge window, but he didn’t have a shot because the window had an easterly exposure and he couldn’t see through the glare of the morning sun. As I was listening to all this going on, I moved out of the dining room, back across the mouth of the archway and to a spot at the bottom of the stairs that headed to the second floor, which ran in between the butler’s pantry and the hallway I’d originally come down when I ran into the bad guy.

  I kept my right foot on the ground, put my left foot up on the second step, and positioned the gun against the vertical edge of the archway so that the front sight was lined up just off the edge of the kitchen doorway at the height of the bad guy’s head, which was a good foot above the top of the mom’s head. I braced the front of the weapon up in my hand in a comfortable position so I could hold that position for a long time, because I thought I might be there for a little bit. Then I just concentrated on the sights. I didn’t say a word.

  As I was standing there, the bad guy was screaming, “Get out of here! Get out of here.” The woman was screaming, “Help! Help!” Sammy, the other team leader, gave an order to clear the house. He said, “Let’s get out of here! Clear the house!” And I can remember thinking, “No fucking way.” So I just held my position as the guy and the mother kept screaming. This went on for probably about a minute, minute and a half. Then the bad guy, as bad guys will do, started getting curious and tried to find out where everybody’s at. Now he had on a blue ski mask, and as I was concentrating on the front sight, a blue blur came around the edge of the kitchen doorway at the height where the bad guy’s head should be. When I saw that blue blur, I just popped two shots. Full-auto burst.

  I shot that way because another thing that I got from training with Ron McCarthy was that in L.A. they fire two-round bursts with their MP-5s because if you’re gonna have a flier, it’ll be the third of a three-round burst that will go. So we had been training two-round bursts since we got MP-5s, and that’s what I did. The bad guy was looking to his right, and the first one hit him just under his left eye, and the second one hit him just above it. He went down immediately.

  Another thing that I got from my training with Ron McCarthy came into play here. During the advanced SWAT school I went to, Ron and another guy from LAPD SWAT named Al Preciado had explained the dynamics of a head shot with both rifle and pistol rounds. They had explained that when you shoot somebody with a pistol round like the ones in our .40-caliber MP-5s, it’s not like shooting them with a rifle. There’s no way to predict an immediate stop like you can get with a rifle shot to the medulla oblongata. Once a pistol round enters the body, there’s no predicting where the hell it’s gonna go. There’s no direct line to this magical spot that’s gonna turn ’em off.

  Al told us that LAPD SWAT had had several capers where they took head shots on suspects who were holding guns and that about 50 percent of the time the suspects fired a round at the moment the bullet hit them. But he had also told us that whether suspects fire a round doesn’t matter, because they had never had a hostage killed with a reaction shot. He said this was because when you fire a round into the head, the head moves, the gun follows the head, and if they fire a round, it will miss what they were aiming at. That’s exactly what happened here. When I shot the guy, he had his gun pointed at the woman’s head, had it right up against her temple. He fired a reflex shot, but it went three feet over her head and into the Sheetrock above the doorway.

  At any rate, right after I fired my shots, there was half a second of dead silence as everybody else in the house came to terms with what just happened. Then I came off the step and followed our standard drill when you’re going to go through an area where you might be exposed to another officer’s gunfire. Our drill is to yell your name and “Coming through!
” So I yelled, “Wilson, coming through!” stepped through into the kitchen, and straddled the guy. At about the same time I was moving into the kitchen, the little boy ran right into that butler’s pantry and right into Cal Fuller. As Cal scooped him up, the kid was going, “Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.” Cal was just looking at him going, “I’m the police,” as he took the kid out of the house. Mom and the daughter didn’t waste any time getting out of that kitchen, either. They bolted right to the back door, where the guys there secured them, then hustled them out.

  As this was going on, I was standing over the bad guy, getting ready to hammer him again because I couldn’t find the gun. I was looking around, and I couldn’t see the gun. I didn’t have control of him. He was flopping around and there was a lot of blood. It was literally spraying around, so I really couldn’t see everything. His hands were going under him as he flopped around. I couldn’t see the gun, thought it might be under him, so I was getting ready to shoot him again. About then, Ben came charging through the door, spotted the gun, kicked it out of the way, and said, “We got it. We got it.” Then Ben took my cuffs off my vest, cuffed the guy up, and we cleared the rest of the house.

  We called for the paramedics, but they wouldn’t come up right away, even after we told ’em, “OK, the house is secure.” Firemen aren’t stupid. They’ll burn to death, but they ain’t gonna get shot, so I had to get on the radio and request them again. I said, “We have a wounded suspect here; we need paramedics right now. Get ’em up here.” They still wouldn’t come up right away, but they finally did come up.

  The guy was still flopping around when they arrived. I couldn’t believe that he was still alive, because there was blood everywhere and brains smeared on the wall behind where he’d been standing. We also found one of the rounds. We were shooting Black Talons, and we found a slug sitting on the sill of the big window. It was just sitting there, and the jacket from it was on the floor, just peeled back. It looked like an advertisement for Black Talons. So he took one round that fragmented in his head and one that went through and through, taking a good bit of his brain with it.

  As we were waiting for the paramedics, Lieutenant Bittner, our commander, came into the kitchen. He’d been involved with a fatal shooting a few years prior. He had killed a guy one-on-one, shot him three times with a 12-gauge, killed him deader than hell. The only time that I felt really any emotion on the thing was when he showed up. He came through the door, grabbed me by the shoulders, and said, “You did what you had to do.” That was it. We kind of stood there, and we looked at each other for a minute. Then we shook that off and we went about our business.

  • • •

  I was sitting at home with my family on a Saturday night when my pager went off. We’d just come back from eating some veggie burgers at my neighbor’s house, and I was real tired. I was thinking of heading upstairs for bed, but the page put an end to that. The call came out as a barricaded subject with shots fired at officers. I got the address, asked my wife to make me a cup of coffee, and ran upstairs to get my SWAT gear.

  When I got back downstairs, my wife met me at the front door with the coffee, I grabbed it, went out to the car, and turned the police radio on. As I was backing out, I heard a broadcast that the suspect was getting out of the car with a rifle. That struck me as kind of strange because barricaded subjects are usually in houses, not cars. Then someone broadcast that the suspect was walking around the car. When I heard that, I rolled my window down and told my wife, “Don’t worry, honey, I’m not going to get a block away before I’ll be making a U-turn to come back. They’re gonna kill this guy.” I figured that a guy who had already shot at some officers who was walking around in the open with a rifle was going to be shot pretty quick.

  As I continued to the location, it was apparent from the broadcasts that patrol was in some kind of a standoff with this guy. I already had the information that he’d fired at officers, and I was kind of confused about why they were letting this guy walk around with a rifle after he’d already shot at some patrol cops. I was wondering, “Why aren’t they shooting?” Then I heard one of the snipers report that he was en route to the location. I knew that he lived kind of close to that area, so I told him to go to another frequency. We both switched over, and I told him that when he got there that he needed to grab his rifle and get to high ground as quickly as possible. I told him not to worry about getting information, just get into a position to fire ASAP.

  Both he and another sniper got there before I did, so I was the third SWAT officer to arrive. The atmosphere at the scene was very strange. There were police cars all over the place, with their emergency lights on, so many that I had to stop about three hundred yards down the street from where the gunman was. Police officers were all over the place, the news media was already there, and there must have been fifty spectators standing around where I pulled my car up.

  A patrol officer came up to me as I was getting the rest of my SWAT gear out of my trunk, so I asked him what was going on. He explained to me that this guy had beaten the shit out of his girlfriend earlier in the day, then left. Sometime later, he called back and told her that he was going to come over and kill her. She called 9-1-1 and told the responding officers what was going on. They set up down the street to watch her house, and sure enough, the boyfriend pulls his car into her driveway a little while later. The patrol officers pulled in behind him, but he drove through the yard and back out onto the street. Patrol chased the guy until he rolled his car in this residential neighborhood and fired some shots into the windshield of the officers who were in the first car of the pursuit. None of them got hit by any bullets, but one of them did get glass shards in his eye and was on his way to the hospital. I asked the officer if he knew what kind of rifle the guy had, and he told me he wasn’t sure but that he thought it was an AR-15. When he told me that, I was thinking that if that was the case, then all of these citizens back where I was were within the effective range of that gun and that all the cops in front of me were in danger too, even if they were standing behind their cars.

  A K-9 officer arrived just as I finished getting geared up, so I told him to grab his dog and come with me. We moved up to a spot that was around a hundred yards from the guy. I knew that the two snipers were already there, and I wanted to find out where they were, but the radio was so busy that I figured it wouldn’t do any good to try to raise them. So I asked one of the officers where we stopped if he knew where they were. He told me that the one named Jeff was lying in some bushes about forty yards ahead of us. Then I asked the officer to tell me exactly where the suspect was. He told me to look about twenty feet to the right of the car that was overturned at the head of all of the police cars.

  I said, “OK,” then I crouched down and went over to where Jeff was. I looked down toward the overturned car, and I could see this guy walking around with a rifle. He wasn’t holding it in a shooting position. He was just holding it by the frame with one hand. He also had a handgun in the front of his waistband. After I spotted the guy, I asked Jeff, “Jeff, has this guy shot at people?” He said, “Yeah, he shot at a police car.” I said, “You need to put him down. He’s going to hurt somebody.” He said, “OK, OK.” Then I asked him, “Do you have a shot?” He said, “Well, I don’t right now, but as he walks around, he comes back into my sight picture from time to time.” I said, “The next time you see him, put him down.”

  Then I noticed about four officers behind the second car in the pursuit lineup. They were standing behind the open trunk lid, no more than twenty yards from the guy, so I decided to go up there and move them back because those guys were in a real vulnerable position. I was thinking that any time now I was going to hear the “BOOM!” of either Jeff or the other sniper’s rifle. But I never did. So I got all the way up to the second car, and these officers were crouched down a bit behind the trunk lid, telling the guy to put his gun down. They were saying, “We can talk about this. Come on. There’s no sense in anybody getting hurt. Put
the gun down.” Stuff like that.

  The supervisors in my agency carry AR-15s in their cars, and one of them had given his rifle to one of the officers up where I was at. Why he did that, I have no idea, because the officer he gave it to didn’t know how to use it. He told me, “I can’t figure out how to work the sights on this gun.” I said, “Jesus Christ!” and told him and the other officers that they were too close, that we needed to move the perimeter back and let the snipers contain the situation. I looked up, and the guy was standing right where Jeff had told me he had a clear view, and I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t shooting.

  Then the officers I was with told me that Lieutenant Caldwell was up on the side of the car and that we needed to get him back, too. So I looked over there at Lieutenant Caldwell and saw that he was in an exposed position between the door and the car. I still hadn’t heard a shot, so I decided to drop the guy. Then I thought, “Am I missing something here?” Then I decided, “No.” I mean this guy has shot at a police car, he was walking around in front of me with an AR-15 in his hand, just casually cursing everybody out, saying shit like, “I may die tonight, but I’m taking you son of a bitches with me.” He was armed, he’d already tried to kill some cops, he was making homicidal and suicidal statements, so from the back of the car I put my sights on him, and I said to myself, “I’m just going to take him out.”