Into the Kill Zone

by David Klinger

  Before I pulled the trigger, I started wondering about my decision again. I said to myself, “Pete, maybe you’re missing something here, because no one else is shooting. You just told Jeff to drop the guy, but he didn’t. Maybe I’m missing something here. Don’t shoot so quickly.” Then I told myself that the back of the car was not a good place to be thinking—that I needed to get some cover—so I moved around where Lieutenant Caldwell was because he at least had an engine in front of him. I told him to go to the back of the car and to move the officers back the next time the guy walked to where they would be out of his line of sight.

  I told the guy to give up, but he just stood right there and didn’t fucking move. As I was aiming my gun at him, I was thinking all sorts of stuff: “What’s going on? He’s already shot at the police, what if he starts shooting again? He’s standing in somebody’s driveway who doesn’t even fucking know what’s going on. What if the people inside the house come outside? What about all the citizens standing back where I left my car and all the officers in between?” They were all well within the effective range of his AR-15. I was also worried that the guy might run over to the next street, commandeer a car, and escape. Or that he might go into the house we were in front of and take a hostage. I was thinking all these things.

  When I stopped myself from shooting him the first time, I started going through my mental check list: “What kind of gun did he have? What situation did we have? What happened before I got here? What justification do I have to shoot him when fifty other cops are standing around and they’re not?” So I was running through this checklist again up at the car, but now I was also wondering if I should go back and get that cop’s AR-15 or keep my MP-5. His weapon was superior to mine, but I decided to keep my MP-5 because I didn’t know what the officer might have done to the gun when he was trying to figure out how to work it. Once I decided to keep my weapon, I thought about whether I should leave it on full automatic or click up to semi. I decided to leave it on full, thinking that if I ended up shooting the guy, I wanted to make sure that I killed him because I didn’t want him thrashing around firing off shots with that rifle. I wasn’t sure if the rifle was an AR or an M-16. If it was an M-16, the guy could dump a whole magazine in a few seconds on full auto and kill who knows how many people—me, other officers, citizens in nearby houses, citizens in passing cars.

  So I just kept my gun on the guy as he wandered back and forth in front of me.

  My MP-5 is sighted in for room distance—about twelve feet—because that’s the range at which I anticipate a deadly encounter on warrants and hostage rescue situations. Because I knew that the twenty yards between me and the gunman would make my point of impact four to six inches higher than my point of aim, I was aiming a few inches above his belly button so that if I did shoot, I’d hit him in the center of his torso.

  The guy wandered around for a few minutes, then turned away from me and threw something onto the car that was parked in the driveway of the house where this was taking place. I couldn’t tell what he threw, but when he turned back to face me, he didn’t have a gun in his waistband anymore, so I guessed that he’d just thrown his handgun onto the car. Then he walked over to the car and leaned against it. He was cussing, shouting at some other officers, “Get those goddamn lights off of me. I’m going to kill some people. You better get those fucking lights off me.” So the officers who were shining their spotlights on him turned them off.

  Then the guy got into sort of a relaxed posture up against the car there in the driveway and began to wrap his hand around the sling of the rifle, doing what we call harnessing the sling. When you harness a sling, what you’re trying to do is bring a weapon into your body so that you can control it better when you fire. As he was harnessing the sling, he grabbed the back handle of the rifle, put his finger in the trigger well, and started to lower the gun.

  When I saw him do that, I said to myself, “This has gone far enough.” I wasn’t going to let the guy kill me. I’d just come from lying in the living room with my kids and I wanted to go back. Dying was not an option for me, so I let go with a burst.

  I thought that I fired four or five rounds, and it seemed like the guy stood there for a second or two, then fell to the ground. It turns out I was wrong on both counts. The investigation showed that I hit the guy with nine rounds, so I was way off there. My sense of time was also off, because when I saw the news video of the shooting the next day, it showed the guy going down as soon as I shot him. It was like he was standing there, then he went down real quick. That defied what I saw when I shot him, but the tape doesn’t lie.

  However long it really took for the guy to drop, I started walking up on him as soon as he hit the ground. I probably should have stayed behind the cover of the patrol car for a little longer and evaluated things before moving up, but I didn’t. When I got up to him, I heard him kind of moan, and then he didn’t make any more sounds or move at all. Another officer had gone up with me, so we rolled the guy over and handcuffed him behind his back. The EMS people came up, threw the guy on a stretcher, started doing chest compressions, and carted him off.

  At that point, I realized that I had killed him and I said to myself, “Pete, you’ve been involved in another shooting.” Then this strong sense that I didn’t want to be left alone came over me. I don’t know where that feeling came from, but I didn’t want to be alone out there. Jeff, the sniper, had come up to where I was. I looked at him and said, “Jeff, don’t leave me. Stay with me.” He replied, “Don’t worry. I’ll stay with you.” Then he said, “Let’s go sit in my car.” So we went and sat in his car and waited for the investigation to start.

  • • •

  I hadn’t been on the SWAT team very long—maybe six months—when we got called up on a barricaded suspect holding a hostage at the Redwood Medical Center. We were down at the gym working out about nine in the morning when all our pagers started going off. The guy was a crack user with a $600-a-day habit, who bought a .25 automatic from a pawnshop that morning, went over to Redwood Hospital, walked into one of the offices, pulled the gun on a lady, and basically said, “You’re my hostage and I’m gonna kill you.”

  When we got there, the patrol officers on the scene had already secured the area. They gave us the layout of the hospital, how to get in and around certain areas, showed us where the bad guy was, and all the different hallways leading up into the area. We asked about whether or not the ceiling in the area had crawl holes in it where you could go from room to room. We were also concerned about what to do to secure the area. You can’t shut a whole hospital down. They can shut down certain portions, but you obviously have sick people, so there were a lot of people trying to get in and out of this place. The patrol officers that responded did a real good job of securing what they could and getting us all in the right places.

  The guy was in a small room, maybe twelve by twelve feet, at the end of a long hallway that was basically in a T-design. The long hallway ended where the room was, then branched off to the left and right for a ways, then turned again around past the room. We had officers set up around the corner on one side of the door, and my partner, a guy named Alan Sholton, and I went to set up in the long hallway so that we could watch directly onto the door. We were in the X-ray department, so we took some of their lead plates and set them up about twenty-five or thirty feet in front of the door on the left side of the hallway and got down behind them. The door to the office was shut, so we couldn’t see much, but we could see shadows moving back and forth through the crack underneath the door because the guy had the lights on inside.

  I had an HK-91 .223, and I believe that Alan had an M-14 .308. We were a little concerned about those weapons because of the possibility of overpenetration if we had to shoot the guy. The biggest issue was all the oxygen in the hospital; what was gonna happen with that? We were wondering if we should get some guns that fired slower rounds, whether we should get some MP-5s. We felt good about the weapons we had if he came out, because
the door was solid wood and the frame was metal, but if we had to make entry, it was a different story.

  Alan and I would rotate positions about every ten minutes so that one of us would by lying down with his gun pointed around the side of the plates, and the other would be crouched down with his gun pointed over the plates. The negotiators would tell us what the suspect and the hostage were saying, and they would communicate with us from time to time about his state of mind. The guy had told the negotiators, “I don’t want to hurt this lady. All I want you to do is do your job.” That was his phrase, “All I want you to do is do your job. I want you to do your job right.” The negotiators would say, “OK, you need to come out and talk to us,” but he wouldn’t. Then they asked, “Let us talk to her.” When she got on the line, she said, “Get me out. I’m scared. He says he’s gonna kill me.” Things like that. Then he would get on the phone and say, “I don’t want to hurt her. I just want you all to do your job.”

  He was pretty active, moving around a lot. He came to the door several times, and when he did that, we would call it on the radio, “He’s standing by the door.” Then, when the shadow would leave, “He’s not by the door anymore. We don’t know where he’s at, but he’s not by the door.” All this time, the negotiators were still talking to him, and he would tell them, “I’m gonna come out, but I want you guys to do your job.”

  Then, about an hour to an hour and a half into it, the guy did something that really scared me. He opened the door, stuck his head out, looked around, and saw Alan and me down the hall. There’s no way he could’ve missed us. We got eye contact with him. He had the gun in his right hand, holding it up in the air by the side of his head. The barrel was pointed straight up in the air, and then he turned it sideways like he was showing us, “I have a gun.” He didn’t say a word. Just held the gun sideways so we could see the full view of it. When I saw that, my eyes probably got the size of silver dollars, and I called over the radio, “He’s got a gun.” Then the guy stepped out from behind the door.

  As soon as he was in the open, he took off running toward Alan and me. As he started toward us, he started to move the gun down. He probably took a couple of steps when we started firing. I fired two rounds, but he was still coming. Now on television when you shoot somebody, they fall down, right? But this guy was still coming. I fired two more. When I fired that second time, the guy fell and slid along the floor. When he fell, some of his blood splattered and hit me and Alan. Alan had been up behind the plates, and I had been lying down, so when the guy fell, he slid right into me, face first.

  The gun was still in his hand, off to the side, so I jerked back, got up, and pointed down at him with my rifle. Alan did the same thing, and we got on our radios, said, “Shots fired,” and told the react team to come on around. The team came around, and I remember that Mike Church was the one who came up and kicked the gun away from the guy’s hand. Then the guy tried to push himself off the ground, but Mike held him down. The guy was dead; he just didn’t know it. It turns out our rounds blew his heart clean out of him, so he was DRT—dead right there—he just didn’t know it. As Mike held him down, someone called for a doctor. Doctor came over, and the guy was still trying to push himself up. The doctor looked at him and said, “He’s dead; he just doesn’t know it yet.” Within a minute or two minutes after that, the guy stopped moving.

  Immediately after that, we set the weapons down, and somebody came up and took mine. I don’t remember who it was. They also took Alan’s gun, and then they shuttled us out of there. As we were leaving, my sergeant came over to us, and I said to him, “We had to kill him. We had to shoot him.” That was all I could say: “We had to do this.” He shook me, and he said, “It’s all right. You did what you had to do. You did what you had to do.” I mean, we gave him every opportunity to surrender. He could have come out and put his hands up, or even run at us without a gun, and it would’ve been different. But he didn’t.

  In fact, I was really surprised when he started running at us. When he started coming at me, I was like, “What?” because I thought he was gonna put the gun down. I thought he was showing it to us like he did to say, “Here’s my gun,” then he was gonna lay it down to show us, “OK, the weapon’s out of the way now.” Then he’d surrender. That’s what we had totally expected because the lieutenant had come on the radio probably not two minutes before that with, “He’s probably gonna come out, be ready for a surrender process.” On all the other SWAT call-ups I was aware of, our negotiators had always done their jobs. The guys had always come out. Our team had never had any deadly confrontations, so I was basically in a state of shock when it happened. I was just in disbelief. I mean, I was like, “Wow.” I was also afraid that I was gonna get hurt and that Alan was gonna get hurt.

  When he started toward us, it was almost like it was in slow motion, and everything went into a tight focus. I had been trying to relax like I always do on call-ups because I want to be able to recall everything, to see everything, to make sure I get all my information accurately. This type of job is very stressful, and I feel like if I can relax, I can do a better job. If I can keep relaxed, I’ll be more mentally alert and have a more accurate read of events occurring around me. When he made his move, my whole body just tensed up. I don’t remember having any feeling from my chest down. Everything was focused forward to watch and react to my target. Talk about an adrenaline rush! Everything tightened up, and all my senses were directed forward at the man running at us with a gun. My vision was focused on his torso and the gun. I couldn’t tell you what his left hand was doing. I have no idea. I was watching the gun. The gun was coming down in front of his chest area, and that’s when I did my first shots.

  I didn’t hear a thing, not one thing. Alan had fired one round when I shot my first pair, but I didn’t hear him shoot. He shot two more rounds when I fired the second time, but I didn’t hear any of those rounds, either. We stopped shooting when he hit the floor and slid into me. Then I was on my feet standing over the guy. I don’t even remember pushing myself up. All I know is the next thing I knew I was standing on two feet looking down at the guy. I don’t know how I got there, whether I pushed up with my hands, or whether I pulled my knees up underneath. I don’t know, but once I was up, I was hearing things again, because I could hear brass still clinking on the tile floor. Time had also returned to normal by then, because it had slowed down during the shooting. That started as soon as he started toward us. Even though I knew he was running at us, it looked like he was moving in slow motion. Damnedest thing I ever saw.

  It turns out that it was a suicide-by-cop, that he wanted us to kill him. That’s what he was talking about when he said, “I want you guys to do your job.” The gun wasn’t loaded, and he left a suicide note in his car, which he’d left in the hospital parking garage. I wasn’t concerned much about the gun not being loaded. It bothered me, but I wasn’t really that concerned because I didn’t know that at the time I fired. It’s not like he said, “Hey look. My gun is unloaded, and I’m gonna run down the hall, and I want you to kill me.” None of that took place. We saw a gun. That’s all I was concerned about. But I got mad when I heard about the suicide note. It said, “I don’t have the balls to do this myself.” I was really angry then because I realized that I had had to do somebody else’s dirty work. I was mad because he was a chicken shit. He wasn’t gonna do it himself. So this guy ruins somebody else’s life because he doesn’t want to live, because he was a crack head who didn’t care about anything anymore. So he ruins somebody else’s life rather than just go pop himself in the head, or go hang himself, or go stand out in the interstate and get run over. He didn’t do something like that because he was too chicken shit to kill himself. That bothered me. I was mad. I wondered, “Why did he do this? Why did he put me in this position?”

  SWAT: Preplanned Operations

  As one might expect given the predominance of narcotics warrants among preplanned SWAT operations, most of the SWAT shootings that happened d
uring preplanned operations occurred when officers I interviewed were serving narcotics search warrants. Consequently, all three of the shootings I have chosen to present in this section went down during the service of narcotics search warrants. We hear first from an officer whose story shows just how dangerous serving narcotics search warrants can be for the SWAT officers who do it—sometimes in unexpected ways.

  • • •

  Our team went to serve this dope warrant at about eight o’clock one evening. We knew that the subject was highly violent and that he was trading guns for drugs. The house was a one-story house on a hillside in Brittany, where the garage enters into the basement, so when you pull in the driveway, you actually drop down to go onto the level with the basement. The front porch is above the driveway, about fifteen to eighteen feet up. We had the house under observation, and we saw him come home with two people. Our detectives who were up closer to the house told us that it looked like the guy went to the basement, so we figured that it was a good time because we were figuring most of the guns were probably upstairs on the main floor.

  We knew the guy had a dog, and as we started to sneak up on the house, the dog started to bark. My ram men snuck up onto the porch while another guy went to the side of the porch and popped open the screen door. My two ram men were directly in front of me, approximately twelve to fourteen inches apart. I was on the first step, covering them through the middle with my HK-53, making sure they had a safe area to operate. The dog was barking. I was yelling, “Go, go, go!” Some other guys yelled, “County police!”

  Meanwhile, unknown to us, the guy heard the dog barking, went over to his closet in the living room, pulled out a street sweeper—a short-barreled shotgun with a twenty-round drum magazine that’s made for one purpose, and that’s for shooting humans—and went to the door. That precise moment that he arrived at the door, my guys rammed it. From the time it took for the door to swing open, hit the wall, and come back, that’s how quick the incident happened. It was over. In that time, the guy came up with his street sweeper, my ram men yelled, “Gun,” and dropped the ram, and I fired two bursts on full auto—a three-round and a four-round burst. As I was shooting, the ram man on the left, a guy named Bob Jeffers, leaned back to get out of the way and lost his balance on the porch rail. He fell backward to the ground fifteen feet below, but as he was falling, his legs swung up in front of me, and I saw his pants leg jump as one of my .223 rounds went through his right leg, his left leg, then down range. Then the door swung back shut. The entire incident lasted maybe a second and a half, two seconds.