As I started to pull the trigger, I was thinking, “How do I need to shoot this guy?” It was really weird. I wanted to keep the rounds on center mass, and I’d trained to fire two-round bursts, but this guy had a friggin’ shotgun at point-blank range on me. I was thinking, “Do I just need to hose him till he goes down, or do I need to give him two-shot burst, two-shot burst, two-shot burst?” I knew I couldn’t control the MP-5 on full auto—especially trying to move sideways—and I was worried about misses because of the other officers on the scene. So all that was going through my mind as I started pulling the trigger, and I thought, “No auto. Two-shot bursts.” I ended up firing two two-shot bursts, and the guy went down in a heap onto a pile of clothes on the floor. He didn’t get a round off.
I thought he was dead because I saw his T-shirt jump in my sights when I fired.
I didn’t see the bullets hitting, but I saw the shirt jumping as they hit. I thought I’d hit him center mass because all I could see in my sights was T-shirt—like deer hunting with a high-powered scope and all you can see is fur—but I was wrong. It turned out that I discharged one round early as I was bringing my MP-5 up. That one caught him in his right knee. The next two rounds—the rounds I saw hit his shirt—caught him in the upper-right quadrant of his chest, and the fourth one went over his shoulder and into the wall. The bullets that hit him in the chest severed his brachial nerve, severed his brachial artery, and broke his shoulder.
As he laid there on the pile of clothing, I covered down on him because I wasn’t sure that he was dead. His arm was lying between his legs. His fingers were slightly off his gun. There was blood running down his arm and blood all over the front of this shirt. He was bleeding real bad.
One of the first things I thought of while I was standing there covering the guy was that the media’s going to crucify me on this deal. My agency hadn’t had a shooting between my first one and this one, and I thought the press was absolutely going to toast me, because they sure tried to the first time. I was sure they were going to have a field day with this. Fortunately, it never happened. This one was a lot easier for them to understand, I think. The bad guy points a gun at a cop; the cop shoots the bad guy. The first one they looked at from the perspective of TV drama. You know, T. J. Hooker never shot a guy with a knife in the back. John Wayne would never shoot anybody who had a knife in the back.
As I was thinking about the press crucifying me, Bill—the team leader—stepped in behind me. He looked at the kid and me. I told him, “I still got guys behind me!” because my back was now to the bathroom door, where I heard the people when I first stepped in the bedroom. I could still hear them moving around in there, and I thought, “God, do they have guns too?” Bill was standing there, looking at me, so I yelled at him, “Behind me, behind me!” Then he turned, went to the bathroom, stepped in there, and got the two people who were in there.
As Bill was taking care of the other two guys, the guy I shot kind of swiveled and looked up at me with these big pancake eyes. Then the guy looked down at his arm. He couldn’t move it. It was just laying there, and he said, “Man, help me. Don’t let me bleed to death!” I told him, “Don’t worry, there will be some guys here in a minute to help you. Just don’t touch the gun again.” He said, “Don’t worry, I won’t.” He was the nicest kid, turned out he was seventeen. He was like, “Yes, sir. No sir. I apologize. I’m sorry.” Just apologizing all over himself like some kid you would run into on the street who realized he had done something wrong and was trying to make amends for it. As I was looking down at him—looking him straight in the face—I thought, “That kid’s not a threat anymore. He’s just some innocent kid.” That same type of thought went through my mind in my first shooting. When I looked at that first guy and realized he was dead, it was just like total innocence, like a baby. Like this guy can’t hurt anyone ever again, so he’s completely innocent. I don’t know how to explain it, but that’s the way I felt in my first shooting, and that’s what I felt in this second one. Even though the guy had just tried to kill me, once the threat was gone, he was just some innocent kid lying there.
When Bill came out of the bathroom, we called the medics up, two guys on our team who were EMT-trained. Before they got there, Chuck—one of the other guys on our team—stepped into the room, and I told him to get the shotgun because it was laying at the guy’s feet. So Chuck took the shotgun and moved it far away from the guy. Then the medics came in and dragged the kid up on the bed. One of the medics—Frank—found the entry wounds on the guy’s chest and put the pressure on them right away because the blood was coming up like a fountain, like a water fountain just bubbling straight up. No break in the stream, no nothing, just a straight fountain coming up out of his shirt. That was the first time I saw where I had hit the guy.
When Frank started working on the guy, I said, “Has everybody got this?” One of them said, “Yeah, we’ve got it.” And I said, “OK, I’m out of here,” and I left. I was thinking, “He’s going to die, and I don’t want to watch it.” I was thinking that even before the medics got there. I was looking at this guy, thinking, “He’s hit hard. That’s an artery hit, and I don’t want to sit here and watch this guy die.”
So I left the room, walked outside, sat down on the porch, took my helmet off, and started bawling. After a little while, some of the guys came up to me and told me that I needed to move because the ambulance was going to arrive in a minute. So I got up off the porch. The main thing that I was thinking about then was that I did not want to go through killing someone again.
The FBI case agent on this deal was a woman named Sally Ranch, who’d been in a shooting herself and did a lot of peer counseling for the feds. We had worked undercover together, so I’d known her for quite a while. As I was walking away from the porch, she came up to me, asked me how I was doing, and gave me a hug. I said, “I’m fine. I just don’t want him to die.”
She went, “But you’re OK?”
And I said, “I’m OK.”
I don’t remember how she put what she said next, but it was something like, “You know you did what you’re supposed to do.”
I said, “I know that, Sally. I don’t have a problem with what I did, but I don’t want the guy to die.” After that, I was OK. I quit crying.
It turned out that the kid made it. He didn’t fight the charges. He just stood up and pled guilty to attempted assault and some other stuff. One of the other charges had a mandatory five-year sentence, and that’s what he got. The guy did the five years and came out.
Extended Action
As previously noted, most police shootings are rather short affairs in that the involved officers typically fire a small number of rounds in a few seconds or less. Each of the several shootings presented to this point fit this pattern. In fact, the largest number of shots fired by any officer was the nine fired in a single burst by the SWAT officer who killed the angry, AR-15-armed boyfriend; and the longest time between the first and final shot was the several seconds that elapsed in the case of the patrol officer who helped kill the shotgun-wielding murder suspect.
The stories in this section deal with a different, less frequent, sort of shooting: those in which officers are actively engaged with suspects for an extended period of time. Like police shootings in general, more involved cases come in many shapes and sizes: the locations and circumstances in which they occur, the armaments and actions of suspects involved, how the police respond to the threat posed by suspects, and many other things can all vary substantially. This section presents a set of four stories that show what can occur in these more protracted shootings and how officers experience them. We hear from a SWAT officer whose team was ambushed when they attempted to serve a high-risk warrant, an officer whose day in court turned into a bloodbath when a gunman started shooting the place up, an officer who found himself in the middle of a wild shoot-out when a trio of robbers invaded the bank where he worked an off-duty security job, and a SWAT officer who was one of more than a dozen t
eammates who traded shots with a barricaded suspect over the course of a several-hours-long gun battle. Among the many things we learn from these officers is that Hollywood isn’t always all wet when it comes to their wild portrayals of police shootings.
• • •
We went to serve a warrant about eight o’clock one morning. It was something we had been working on for days because these guys we were after were bad news. It was a huge operation that involved several other investigative units and the hitting of three different locations by our office: two simultaneously and then a third immediately thereafter.
We were going after some suspects who had robbed the jewelry department of a major department store of over $300,000 worth of estate jewelry. They had done it in broad daylight with high-powered rifles—a CAR-style weapon and an AK-47-style weapon with a drum magazine—as well as pistols. It was a very aggressive, takedown-style robbery. The same crew was also wanted for a couple of other very aggressive daylight robberies in the county. We knew the guys we were going after were the right suspects because one of the investigative units had actually purchased a piece of this estate jewelry from them.
The people who were planning the operation assigned my team to the house where they thought the jewelry was being kept. They sent another team to the place where they thought the ringleader was hiding out. I was a little bit disappointed when I heard that my team wasn’t going after the main guy because I wanted to be involved in the takedown.
Our plan was to make a dynamic entry on the house we’d been assigned—basically get in there as quickly as possible so that whoever was in there could not destroy the evidence. There was a lot of discussion about this—a little before, a lot afterward—as to whether we should serve the warrant dynamically or whether we should just surround the place and call for the people inside to surrender. The investigators thought that the suspects might be able to destroy some of the jewelry if we got into a prolonged standoff, but some of us didn’t think that was a realistic concern. I guess they thought the suspects could somehow flush a-third-of-a-million worth of jewelry down the toilet. I don’t know. But anyway, they didn’t want the jewels to be lost or destroyed or anything like that, so the decision was made that we were going to take this place dynamically.
The house we were going after was in a residential neighborhood, with houses close by on either side. It had a garage that had been converted into a living area with a sliding glass door that ran perpendicular to the street, facing the side of the house next door. Our plan was to make entry through the sliding door with an eight-man entry team after a perimeter team and a canine officer had set up outside. We drove up in a few vehicles—the van I was in and then a couple of other vehicles—and everybody kind of scurried to their positions. I was the number-two guy in the entry stick.
As we walked up the driveway toward the glass sliding door, I noticed that there were kids’ toys all around. There was Big Wheel and other toys that would belong to kids from maybe three to five years old. As the number-two guy on the stick, one of my functions was to deploy a flash-bang prior to entry. The toys meant that I had to be extra cautious about where I put the flash-bang. I had to make sure I didn’t throw it in some baby’s crib, or bed, or something. So I was very cognizant of my responsibility as I took up my position next to the door.
There was a vertical blind with a bedsheet attached to it on the inside of the sliding door, so when the breacher broke the glass out, I had to move the blind and the sheet aside in order to deploy the flash-bang. I stuck the muzzle of my MP-5 into the doorway, moved the curtain material out of the way, and took a pretty good solid peek in—more than I normally would—because of my concern about children. Then I dropped the flash-bang right inside the doorway. As soon as it hit the ground, I heard a “pop,” which confused me, because it wasn’t supposed to go off immediately. At the same time I heard the “pop,” something hit me in the right side of my upper lip—right in my mustache—and it stung.
My mind was going very fast, and I thought, “The fucking flash-bang didn’t go off right, and something blew up and some kind of flack hit me in the face.” Then the flash-bang went off properly, and I started thinking really, really fast: “OK, if that was the flash-bang going off properly, what was that little pop before that?” Just when I started coming up with the answer, I heard another “pop” just as a bullet came through the wall right in front of me. It missed me by inches. At that point, I realized what was going on: the pops were rounds going off, and I knew that we were under fire. Somebody inside was shooting at us.
When that second round came through, what I saw was the explosive opening of a bullet hole in the doorjamb, literally a foot or so in front of me. It happened in kind of a slow motion, as I watched the fragments of wood coming off the jamb. Not super slow, but slower than it was actually happening. Then I saw some other rounds coming out in that same explosive way. I found out later that some of the other guys in the stick couldn’t believe what was happening. One of them told me that he saw my ghost leaving my body as I was standing there; another said he couldn’t believe that I wasn’t going down because he saw bullets just flying right by my head. At any rate, it was pretty weird watching those bullet holes appearing in slow motion.
At first, I was surprised when I realized that we were being shot at. Then I got pretty pissed and started returning fire with my MP-5 through the opening in the glass and through the doorjamb. I took three or four bursts of five or six rounds each. As I was firing, the number-one guy in the stick stepped back and started returning fire into the target house also. As I was firing, I heard several more “pops” from inside. Then there was a transition to some very aggressive “BOOM, BOOM, BOOMs.” The investigators told us after it was all over that there were two suspects shooting at us—the main suspect, who was supposed to be at the other location, and his girlfriend—and that two guns had been fired at us—a pistol and an AK-47. From that, we figured that what had happened is that one of them started shooting the pistol at us, then the other one grabbed the AK-47. It was like a whole new world when that thing started up.
The whole entry stick started to back away from the door as the suspects continued to fire through the door and the jamb. We kind of slid around to the left to the front of the house. There were three palm trees out there, and most of the entry element ended up in that area. The rest of the guys backed down the driveway and got on the other side of this four-foot fence that separated the yard of the target house from the sidewalk. Those of us at the palm trees started firing into the converted garage–bedroom area. We didn’t have a specific target; we were just putting suppression fire into the area.
I could hear the guns going off inside the house, and at first it sounded like rounds were hitting the palm trees where I was positioned. I remember thinking, “My God, they’re shooting at the palm trees.” Then I ran my MP-5 dry, so I changed magazines and shot some more into the wall. As I was returning fire from that second magazine, I realized that the people inside weren’t shooting at the palm trees. They were shooting out where we had been when the gunfight started, so their rounds were going parallel to the road and into the house next door. The reason I could tell that’s what was happening was because there was a big old yucca plant between the door and the house next door, and rounds were just slicing through it. It looked like Edward Scissorhands was trimming that thing. It was really an awesome sight to sit there and watch that thing disintegrate because it was happening in slow motion. Shit was flying everywhere. It was an incredible experience.
Then our team leader started calling for us to fall back to the rally point, which was the van that we had parked in the street. He was right beside me, and he started shooting some suppressive fire from his shotgun. The barrel was right next to my head, and he was shooting slugs. That was the loudest thing in the whole shoot-out. Up to that point, the sound of the rounds had been muted. But that shotgun put out some definite noise.
I don’t know exactl
y what the team leader was thinking when he called for us to fall back to the rally point, because we had a pretty good position of cover right where we were. Rounds were still coming from the house, and I was not ready to leave that position at the trees. It wasn’t that I was afraid. I felt very comfortable and very calm. I just didn’t think we were ready to go back because we didn’t have containment on the left side of this place because all of our containment people had run up the right side just prior to us getting in this gunfight. So I was sure that nobody had gotten around the far side of the building to provide containment on the east side of this house. I was trying to tell the team leader that we needed to make sure we had containment on the east side and that we were not ready to go back, but I didn’t get all that out. What I said was like, “Have we got somebody on the side?” Then there was a lull. The suspect quit firing.
I put my gun on safe, climbed over the four-foot wall separating the yard from the sidewalk, and headed for the rally point. As I was moving to the van, another slow-motion episode happened. Somebody had thrown a flash-bang up to the front of the house, and it detonated right by the front door. I watched it, plain as day, go off and fly into the air, coming our way. We were clear out in the street at that point, so I was like forty feet away, and this thing almost hit me. It came that far, flying at chest to head level—whoosh—and I just calmly sidestepped it. I was thinking, “Jesus, I’ve never seen one of those fly before.” After that happened, I got back to a position behind the van. Then I helped throw some more ordnance, a couple of flash-bangs and sting balls and whatever else we had there to try and distract the suspect from continuing to fire at anybody. Then we started putting chemical agents in the place.
Into the Kill Zone Page 24