Even though it lasted just a split second—it was so quick—it seemed like it took forever. The entire thing was, like I said, real quick. Door swings open, door hits the wall, and comes back, but it seemed like everything happened slowed down to me. I mean, I can almost visualize every single little detail of what happened down to the point where I remember seeing pant legs pop as the round went through Bob’s legs. It was definitely weird.
When the door swung open, my vision tunneled in on the threat. I knew I had people to the left, people to the right, but they were no longer in my vision. All I saw was the door frame and this guy with a street sweeper. I didn’t even see his face. I saw the immediate area of the gun, his hands, and his chest. I didn’t see Bob’s legs until they came into the field of fire. I never saw them coming up, but when they hit the area I was tunneled in on, I saw them. Then I saw that right pants leg go up in the air and I knew I’d hit him.
After I stopped shooting, the other guys backed up off the porch while I held my ground for about forty-five seconds till all the other officers got behind cover and Bob was evacuated. After they evacuated him out, I then backed up, and we started yelling negotiations with the guys inside. The other two guys both came out and surrendered. Neither of them had any guns. We cuffed them and asked them some questions about what was going on inside the house. They told us that they had been on the main floor doing a thousand-dollar dope deal. When the dog started barking, the bad guy jumped up, looked outside, said, “Fuck! It’s the cops!” and grabbed his gun. They told us that he was lying on the living room floor and assured us that nobody else was in the house. Between their statements and what the detectives had observed when they had the house under surveillance, we knew that they were probably telling us the truth.
We had to go back inside—A, to secure the house, and B, I knew that I’d hit the guy, and we needed to get him out because he was probably injured and needed first aid—so after about three or four minutes, we went back up onto the porch. When we got up to the door, the guy’s dog was there. It was a pit bull who was obviously upset, and he was refusing to let us into the front door. We had to dispatch the dog, so I gave him a three-round burst through the chest. That stopped the dog and we went in. The guy was lying on the floor bleeding from the six rounds that I fired that hit him, one in the leg and the rest in the abdomen and chest. Fortunately for him, several of the rounds passed through the edge of the door as it was closing. It was a solid wooden door, one of the old types that was real heavy, so that slowed the rounds down before they hit him. That, and the fact that he was a very large biker guy—very fat, very large—saved his life. In fact, after we got him out to the hospital, that’s what the doctors said. They said that they thought he was going to be dead on arrival from six .223 hits and that it was his layers of fat and the door slowing the rounds down that saved him.
Well, after we got him out and cleared the house, we found ninety-eight guns besides the street sweeper inside. He was trading guns for drugs. He had a big metal cabinet in his closet with thirty-eight guns in it, and I’d say about every three feet in the house we found a loaded weapon. He had AK-47s in two of the corners of the bedroom. He had .45s under the mattresses, .45s under his pillows. He had a gun in the refrigerator, guns in his shelves. Every seat cushion of the couch had a gun under it. It was like he was prepared for the worst-case scenario, and no matter where he would run in the house, he’d have access to a gun.
When we checked the street sweeper, we found out why he never got any rounds off when I shot him. He’d made a little mistake. He forgot to wind the magazine, which you have to do to get the rounds to feed. He even told the detectives that he had tried to pull the trigger, and when it didn’t fire, he couldn’t figure out what happened.
Where Bob is concerned, his worst injuries came when he hit the concrete driveway. He dislocated his right hip and broke one of his kneecaps. I only got him with one round. I think what happened was that he caught the last round. That’s the only thing that can explain it, because the rounds were coming out too quick not to have had more go through his legs. So it must’ve been the last round. It went into the right side of the calf, exited the left side—missed his bones, muscles, and tendons—and then went into the left leg between the shin and the skin. It missed his bones. The doctor told him later that when he got a call that an officer was shot with a .223 round in the legs, he was anticipating having to amputate the leg because generally .223s shatter bone, just destroy it. He said it was a mystery how the round was able to pass through both legs and not spread out but instead go between the shinbone and the skin. He said he just doesn’t know how it happened. Now, I always tease Bob that because he always wears a whole bunch of religious medals, there was an angel with him. Of course, the angel should’ve been a little quicker and got him completely out of the way. But still, he was lucky. Very lucky.
• • •
I knew the odds that I would get into a shooting would increase once I came over to SWAT, but I didn’t think it would occur so quickly. I’d been on the team for about two and a half years when we got an assignment to do a high-risk search warrant. Narcotics had hit the place—a single-family residence—before, and one of the guys there had supposedly stated that he was going to shoot it out if the police tried to hit him again. That’s why we got the assignment. I was going to be point on the entry, so Robert—the team leader—and I did the workup on it: the drive-bys, the videotaping, getting all the information on the suspect, who’s liable to be at the location with him, all that sort of stuff. Once we got the plan set up, we presented all the information to the rest of the detail, then went to execute the warrant.
It was about nine or ten at night, and we had some problems on the approach. First, after I and a few of the other guys had gotten out of the raid van, the armored vehicle pulled up right next to it, so the rest of the guys in the van had trouble getting out. Then, as we were making our approach to the front door, I heard this loud “BOOM!” Now we found out later that it was a damn basketball lying in the front yard that the armored vehicle had rolled over. But at the time, I didn’t know that—I thought it was a gunshot—so I just had to trust that the guys behind me were engaging whatever it was. When we got up to the front door, we opened up the burglar bars, which were unlocked, but our MOBY man, who was supposed to breach the door, wasn’t up there yet because he’d gotten tied up back at the van. Well, we were standing there for what seemed like a long time, counting off, waiting, when one of the other guys showed up with the Hallagan tool. I was thinking, “Jesus, is that all we got?” He hit the door with the Hallagan tool, but it stayed put. So I reached up, kicked the door, and it flew open.
The first thing I saw was a guy sitting on a couch that was directly in front of me. As I came through the door, he got off the couch. I saw him glance over at me, and I started hollering at him, “Police! Get down! Get down!” He ran around to the other side of the couch, then started running to my right, down this little bitty hallway toward an area that had two bedrooms with a bathroom in between. I followed him, probably ten feet behind, hollering at him, “Stop! Police! Police!” At that point, things started to move in a little bit of slow motion. I was thinking that I couldn’t believe the guy was running. Given the statements we were told he’d made about how he was going to shoot it out if the cops hit his place again, I figured that he was probably going for a weapon in one of the back bedrooms, but I couldn’t believe he was going to do something that stupid. The next thing I thought was, “Should I follow him?” There was a doorway to my left that opened into the kitchen, so if I’d needed to, I could’ve ducked into it and barricaded right there. That was my first instinct, to barricade right there, but I never lost my visual on the guy, so I stayed with him as he ducked into the bedroom to the left side of the hallway. Had he gone straight into the bathroom at the end of the hall, or had he gone to the right into the front bedroom, I’d have barricaded right there in that doorway, and it would’ve be
en a barricaded-suspect situation.
You can ask twenty of these guys on the team about what they’d do in that situation, and you might get twenty different opinions about it. So as the guy was running, I was thinking, “Do I follow him or do I stop?” If I would have lost sight of him at any point, I definitely would have barricaded up, but I never lost a visual on him, so I stuck with him.
When he ducked into that bedroom on the left, he stopped in front of this dresser that was against the wall that separated the bedroom from the hallway. I was still in the hallway, looking into the room, when I lost sight of his arms and his hands as he started to reach over the top of this dresser. At that point, time started to move really slow. I was still hollering at him, but I stopped advancing and held up in the hallway against the wall opposite the bedroom the guy was in. I was about five feet from the edge of the bedroom doorway that was closest to me, which put me about ten feet from the guy.
Because the guy was up near this dresser that was against the wall separating the bedroom from the hall, I was bladed off at a fairly steep angle to the doorway. So I was looking into the bedroom at this severe angle, hollering at the guy to freeze, waiting to see what he was going to come up with. I knew from my training that most likely he was going to come up with a weapon, but I didn’t know whether it was going to be a knife, a gun, something else. I had no idea, but I couldn’t believe he was reaching for something. I was actually thinking, “I can’t believe this. Here I am sitting on him with the light from my shotgun on him. He knows that we’re the police. He saw us coming in the door. The living room was so well lit that he has to know it was us. I’m yelling, ‘Police!’ I can’t believe he’s still going for a weapon with me right there on him.”
Then the guy started turning to his right, pivoting toward me. As he turned, I was looking for his hands ’cause that’s where the weapon was gonna be. So I was looking for those hands. When they came into view, I could see he was holding something black in one of them and that he had his other hand on top of the black object. At that point, I couldn’t see anything but that black object in his hands—it was like everything else disappeared. Matter of fact, I couldn’t even tell you which hand was on top of which. I just remember really concentrating on that black object he was holding. I couldn’t see it clearly because it was dark in there; the only light in the bedroom was from the flashlight mounted on my weapon. At first, I thought he was holding a videocassette tape because I could see that the object was black and bulky. Then I realized that there was a hole at the end of the cassette. Now I knew the hole wasn’t supposed to be there, so I realized at that point that he was holding some sort of gun and that the reason he had one hand on top of it was that he was trying to rack a round into it. At that point, I just instinctively shot where I was looking.
Now, like I said, my sense of time slowed way down when he started reaching over the dresser. So even though everything happened fast in real time, my mind was working real deliberately. It was like, “OK, he’s reaching for something. I see his arms, but I don’t see his hands. OK, here come his hands. There’s something black in them. OK, that’s a gun. Boom!”
When my gun went off, I saw this big cloud of smoke being lit up by the light on my weapon, like fog just rolled in. I thought, “Damn, where did all that come from?” We hadn’t done any night fire with the shotguns—it had always been with the .223s, MP-5s, or pistols—so I wasn’t used to seeing that big cloud of smoke, and it took me a few tenths of a second to realize that the smoke I was looking at had come from my gun. When it billowed up, I lost my visual of the guy’s torso from about his shoulders down, but I could still see his upper shoulders and his head. I saw that he was moving away from me toward the corner of the bedroom, so I moved up closer to the doorway to try to get a better visual on what he was doing and stopped right near the bedroom doorjamb, peering into the bedroom at this steep angle to try to figure out what he was doing. It looked like he was trying to barricade back behind the far side of the dresser. I couldn’t see his hands, I didn’t know where the weapon was, so I started hollering at him, “Let me see your hands! Let me see your hands!” He didn’t show his hands, so I fired again. The time between the first and second shots was about two seconds: a second for the smoke to clear, then another second for me to move up, get a bearing on where he was and what was going on, and then fire. So a lot went on in a short time.
Now after the second shot, he came up with his hands. Then I started hollering at him, “Get on the ground! Get on the ground!” When he got on the ground, my sense of time returned to normal, and the first thing I thought was, “OK, where’s the gun?” I was sure what he had was a gun, but I couldn’t see it anywhere, so I was wondering where it was. Then I spotted a piece of the handgrip on the floor by his foot, and that gave me a little peace of mind. At that point, I realized that I had a door to my left, so I called for support. Robert came up and covered the guy while I cleared the rest of the room. Then we went back to deal with this guy. We cuffed him and called for the paramedics to come up. And that was basically it so far as the shooting goes.
One thing that was kind of odd was that I didn’t hear either of my rounds go off. In fact, I didn’t hear anything from the time I went through the front door until after I fired that second round and the guy finally showed me his hands. After it was all over, Robert told me that he had been hollering at me to follow the guy when he took off running, the other guys were hollering at other suspects, the sirens were still going off outside, all the regular noises of a drug raid, but I never heard anything. It was like my ears just shut down when we made entry. Then, when the guy finally brought his hands up, it was like somebody flipped the switch back on and I could hear again.
It turned out that my first round hit the guy in his hands. That probably saved his life because the weapon he was holding took the bulk of the shotgun blast. I hit what I was aiming at because, like I said, I was looking at his hands and I just instinctively fired where I was looking. Then, when he moved away from me and tried to get behind the dresser, he increased the angle between us, which decreased the space in the doorway that I had to shoot through. The bulk of the blast from my second round hit the doorjamb opposite of where I was standing. We found one of the shotgun wads in the hallway past the door, we could see where part of the doorjamb was torn out, and we could see that some of the pellets had gone out the window of the bathroom at the end of the hallway. We figured that what happened with the second round is that when it hit the door, the pattern expanded real quickly, so even though I was no more than six feet from him, he only caught a few of the pellets from that second blast. So he lived even though I shot him at close range with two rounds of 00-buck.
• • •
About three years after I killed this guy who pulled a knife on me, we went to serve a warrant on this guy who’d been selling sawed-off shotguns to one of our undercover officers. We hit the place about ten-thirty on a Thursday night. It was a little one-bedroom house, so there wasn’t much to it.
We were stacked up in the driveway because the porch was made of wood, and we were worried that if we tried to sneak up onto it that the people inside would hear us. I was point. Two other officers did a break and rake on this window on the other side of the house, and a third officer deployed a flash-bang into the house. The ram team breached the front door, and I entered into the living room. It was empty, so I went into the kitchen, which was to my left. It was empty too, but as I was moving through it, I could hear some noise coming from the bedroom, which was attached directly to the kitchen.
As I stepped through the doorway and into the bedroom, my attention was drawn to some commotion in this bathroom that was to my left, but I caught some movement in my peripheral vision off to my right. As I shifted my attention that way, I saw this guy pulling a shotgun down off this wall rack and turning to his right, toward me. The bedroom was only about eight by nine feet—we’re talking real small—so he was only maybe two yards from
me. When I first saw him, the barrel of the shotgun was pointed up at about a forty-five-degree angle. As the guy completed his turn, he lowered the barrel and brought the stock up to his shoulder, so that the shotgun was pointed right at me.
As I was watching the shotgun come around on me, my mind went into this mode of incredibly clear thinking, just like it did in my first shooting. I knew I could get shot. I knew it would probably hurt like crap because I was really close and it was a 12-gauge, but I wasn’t scared. It was weird—just really clear, cold, calculating thinking. I knew that the possibility existed for me to get shot and die, and I knew I needed to protect myself from that, but I wasn’t scared.
I was focused on the gun, and the first thing I saw on it was the adjustable choke mounted on the end of the barrel. I said to myself, “Look at the action.” So I followed the barrel down to the action, and that’s when I saw that it was a Remington. I actually thought, “That’s a Remington 1100.” Then I said to myself, “See whether his finger is on the trigger.” So I went to his hand. I saw the finger on the trigger, and I thought, “This is going to hurt like hell, but you gotta keep going.” So I was thinking that I was going to get shot, but I was also thinking, “Sidestep the barrel and try to give yourself some more time.” So I started to sidestep as I brought my gun up. Then I thought, “Here we go again,” looked through the sights of my MP-5, and fired.
Into the Kill Zone Page 23