Into the Kill Zone

by David Klinger

  A little while later, everybody started reemerging from underneath their desks and whatnot. Then I went outside to look around, and I saw a security guard. He was dressed in black, and I almost shot him. As I was pointing my gun at him, he said, “No! No! No! I’m a security guard.” I saw his hands were clear and that he was with the Westside Mall Security. After that, I went back inside the bank and collapsed. My right leg gave out from under me. I thought I’d got shot, because they say sometimes you don’t feel the one that hits you, so I started feeling myself, looking for bullet holes.

  I found some pieces of glass and brick embedded in my skin, plus one bullet fragment in my arm that hit me when I first engaged the guys. It came from whoever was shooting through the wall, and I remember that it stung when it hit. That was the only part of the whole thing that happened in real time. Everything else from the time they came in to when it was all over was in slow motion. I was amazed at the speed and the intensity of that little piece that hit my right arm.

  After I finished checking myself, I sat down in a chair and called my family because I didn’t want the media to make them think that I was severely injured. After that, the cavalry arrived, including my brother, who is also an officer. When he got there, I was on the verge of tears. I don’t know what the tears were for, though. I was ready to explode, but I didn’t know what for. I don’t know if it was relief, fear, or what.

  A while later, the homicide investigators showed up. They told me they understood that I needed my attorney there before they talked to me. When my attorney showed up, we walked the crime scene with the investigators, but I don’t really remember any of it. They told me afterwards that there was a big old pool of blood where I shot the guy, but I don’t remember that. I just remember walking through broken glass. I also remember that there were a lot of people congratulating me, saying things like, “Good job!” but I was just numb. It was a real hollow feeling.

  After we walked through the crime scene, the investigators took photos of me. Then we walked outside, and I was greeted by this entire parking lot full of media people. They were shouting questions at me, and my hollow feeling turned to anger because I felt like they were making a circus out of what happened. I felt like the situation belonged to me; they were intruding. What happened was very personal to me. Those people didn’t know what I went through, and I was very angry at them. I just ignored them, got in a squad car, and went to the hospital.

  • • •

  It happened in August. It was warm, really warm, and it was a long call-out. A patrol unit had gone to do an eviction, and the suspect confronted the deputies with a rifle. They thought better of it, made the right decision and backed out, then called for the tactical unit, which was us. The suspect was a meth-head who had a lot of weapons, had threatened people before, and had been arrested several times for weapons and narcotics. It ended up being a long, protracted incident—seventeen or eighteen hours in all.

  The location was a large warehouse area, maybe twenty or thirty thousand feet. I had recently moved from entry team leader back to shooting the long rifle, so I was in a containment position most of the time. We surrounded the place and tried to talk to the guy for quite some time, but he never responded. After several hours, there was an initial confrontation, when a team of deputies breached one of the entry doors and the guy shot out at them. He was firing an SKS, and one of the deputies got hit, took a piece of jacketing in his wrist. It eventually needed to be surgically removed, but at the time he didn’t even report it. It was no big deal. He let it slide.

  My partner and I were behind a short block wall adjacent to a bunch of large tanks made of quarter-inch steel plate that were empty at the time. One of the rounds the guy fired at the deputies who tried to breach the door penetrated one of those tanks. I remember seeing the hole and thinking that we probably needed to utilize some better cover.

  Anyway, the entry team retreated, and we fired a lot of gas into the place. We kept trying to contact the guy, but we got no response. Then another team went up to breach some of the other exterior doors, just to give alternate entry and exit points. The guy fired a couple of more rounds when they pulled one of the doors, but nobody was injured or anything. After that, there was no more contact for quite some time, so the decision was made to make entry.

  Because it was such a large area, they used several different entry points and several different clearing teams. There was an office area, but the bulk of the area was an open warehouse with large, floor-to-ceiling metal storage racks. The teams cleared the open areas using the dog; then they cleared the office area. That left a bathroom that was at the end of this narrow hallway. We hadn’t found him yet, so everybody was thinking he was probably in there. I was outside, and the guys inside said, “OK, what we’re going to do is we’re going to stake out the bathroom and set up some containment, and we’re going to attempt to get him to come out.”

  So a team went down this hallway and tried to breach the bathroom door. The guy fired through the door with his SKS and wounded two of them. One of them took a shot in the shoulder, through and through. The other one took a shot to the wrist. Some of the other guys laid down suppressive fire, and the team ended up having to back out.

  Once we got the wounded deputies out, we said, “OK, let’s think about this for a while.” We tried the bullhorn some more, tried to call the guy, but no response. Then the decision was made to fire some gas into the bathroom. They saturated this bathroom area, which was fairly small, but didn’t get a response, just some more gunfire. Some of the guys returned fire in hopes that maybe they would be able to keep him down and stop him from firing out. Then there was another lull, and that’s when I came inside. The guys inside said, “Hey, why don’t you go over there and take this position opposite the door. We want some experienced guys in there.” So I took a position directly in line with the doorway, about twenty-five feet from it, along with two other guys, one to my right and one to my left. We all had CAR-16s—eleven-and-a-half-inch-barrel M-16s—and there were three or four rows of racks between us and the door, so we really had a limited window where we could shoot if the guy came out. I was behind some tires. One of the guys had a shield, and the other one was behind an old engine block, so we had fairly good cover. It wasn’t great cover, but it was good enough for the time.

  After we got into position, they decided to shoot in some hot gas, which is tear gas dispersed by smoke, which is caused by the burning pyrotechnic material. So they end up shooting a hot-gas grenade into this bathroom. One of the by-products of hot gas is that it can catch stuff on fire, and apparently that’s what happened in the bathroom. He started screaming and yelling, then he came running out with a .45. He was firing it, so we shot him.

  There was so much smoke in the hallway that I heard him shooting before I saw anything. I eventually saw the weapon as the guy moved forward, and it was pointed pretty much in our direction as he was firing. When he came out of the smoke, that’s when I had a shot, and I took it. I had a small area to shoot through with all the racks, but I had a pretty good target. So I shot and I guess everybody else did. I really didn’t hear anything. The short-barrel M-16 is very loud, it’s deafening, but I don’t remember hearing it. That’s one of the things that really struck me about the shooting, because in that contained environment it should have been even louder. I don’t remember ringing in my ears, and I would expect there would be some ringing, because it would definitely have been high decibels with all of us firing, but I don’t recall it. But then again, I didn’t hear a whole lot of anything. I knew that I shot, and I don’t remember the people next to me shooting, but I really wasn’t paying attention.

  At the time, I didn’t know how many rounds I’d shot. I assumed it was only four or five rounds, but it ended up being fourteen. I thought that was pretty significant. I’m a firearms trainer, and I teach officers to be aware of the number of rounds they fire, and I didn’t have a clue.

  At any rate, I stopped s
hooting when the guy dropped out of sight, but there was still some gunfire going on because there were several other deputies at different angles who still had a shot at him as he was going down. After the shooting stopped, I heard him screaming and yelling. Someone said that he was down, that he had no weapon, so some of the guys approached him with shields. He struggled and fought with the guys when they first got to him. I thought that was amazing, because there was blood all over the place. I realize that a little blood goes a long way, but it looked like an awful lot to me. But they finally got him under control and dragged him away from the hallway. Then our paramedics tended to him.

  He didn’t make it. It turned out that he had taken something like forty different hits. This is the funny part. Well, not funny, but interesting. Of the maybe forty rounds total that hit him, most were 9 millimeters from the MP-5s the guys off to the sides were firing, but none of them were terminal wounds. The terminal wounds were from the .223s. There were only, like, four terminal wounds, and they were all .223 wounds. I’m assuming they came from my weapon because I had the best shot at him. The other two guys with M-16s weren’t 100 percent sure if they even hit the guy. I’m pretty sure I got some hits because I had a good sight picture on my first few rounds. He was pretty much coming out directly at me. Because he was in a three-foot-wide hallway, he didn’t have much room for movement, so it was pretty much a channelized shot. That’s why I feel pretty sure that I hit him with my first few rounds.

  My other rounds went into the steel racks because I lost that little window that I initially had to shoot through when he made it out of the hallway and did finally move a little sideways. And that’s the other thing besides not hearing things that really struck me. You see all these movie shoot-outs with sparks flying everywhere, and I’d always thought that was bogus. Well, sparks were flying everywhere from bullets hitting these metal racks. That was one of the most significant things about the shooting that I remember. I was thinking, “Boy, there are sparks. It isn’t a bunch of garbage that they have in the movies.” I mean, this was real and there were sparks flying everywhere. The lighting wasn’t great in there, and a lot of the guys besides me were trying to shoot through racks and hitting metal. All these years, I’d been thinking the sparks in the movies was a bunch of crap, that it’s just Hollywood hype and special effects, but it was for real.

  Three from the Busy Cop

  The last section of the previous chapter focused on one of the more active officers I interviewed, presenting several of the more than two dozen close encounters in which he has been involved during his quarter century of big-city police work when he didn’t shoot. This section also focuses on this busy cop, presenting his accounts of all three of the situations in which he did pull the trigger—the first of which occurred when he was working an off-duty security job while still a rookie, the second of which happened during his stint in Narcotics, and the third of which took place during one of the hundreds of SWAT missions in which he has participated over the years. Taken together, these three shootings show how it is that an officer who almost always manages to resolve exceptionally dangerous situations without firing any shots handles those situations in which he has no choice but to pull the trigger.

  • • •

  My first shooting happened when I was still pretty new to the job. I was working an off-duty job at a Jack in the Box near downtown from 10:00 at night until 2:00 in the morning. I’d spent several months on patrol, then got sent to work a 2:00 P.M. to 10:00 P.M. shift at the jail, so I’d go right from the jail to the Jack in the Box. The Jack in the Box was in a high-crime area—lots of prostitution, lots of drugs, stolen cars, and whatnot—so they hired cops to work security from 10:00 P.M. until they closed at 2:00 A.M. Nothing much happened for the first hour and a half. Then, at about 11:30, I happened to walk outside and heard a lot of sirens. I was thinking that it was either the fire department responding to a multialarm call or a police chase. Why else would there be that many sirens?

  I was standing out there listening and sort of reminiscing about when I was on patrol driving a squad car. The sirens kept winding through the neighborhood a little ways away, so I figured it must be a car chase. It sounded like it was going in two or three different directions, when, all of a sudden, the sirens started getting louder and louder. I walked out to the intersection and looked down Pine Street. The chase was heading my way, so I just stood there and watched. Now Pine comes into First and it dead-ends. So if they kept coming, they were going to have to go left or right at the T-intersection where I was standing.

  When they got closer, I could see that patrol was chasing this red pickup truck. It tried to make a right but lost it and hit this telephone pole. Two of the police cars come screeching up to a halt. I took off running up behind them ’cause I was thinking the driver was going to bail out and run. I was real young, and I liked to chase people when they ran. I always kind of got a kick out of it, just to see if I could catch them. Anyway, the driver bailed out just as I was getting up to one of the squad cars. He came swinging out, looking a little disoriented or intoxicated, I wasn’t sure which. He was a big, barrel-chested Mexican guy with a scruffy beard. Looked to be about forty or so. As he finished swinging around toward us, I saw he had a pistol in his hand, a big six-inch blue steel revolver. That surprised the heck out of me because I was thinking that he would run. When the door came open, I was fully expecting to see some tennis shoes running off into the darkness, not some guy with a gun.

  I was about a car length away from him. I had positioned myself on the right front quarter panel of one of the patrol cars. It was a one-man unit, and the driver was positioned on the other side. The other car was a two-man unit. They stayed behind their doors, lit the guy up with a Q-beam, and started shouting for him to get out of the truck. Because they had the Q-beam on the guy, we could see him clearly. Some other units were starting to pull up when the guy started to swing his gun in our direction. I was thinking that this guy needs to be shot, that I needed to shoot this guy. I had my sights lined up on the center of his chest, and I was in the process of pulling the trigger when I heard a gunshot go off to my left—it sounded like a shotgun blast. I fired one shot, then heard two other pistol rounds go off almost simultaneously, and the guy went down.

  It happened real fast. Milliseconds. I saw my muzzle flash, started looking for my front sight—I was thinking I needed to get back on target in case I needed to fire a second round—but by the time I found my front sight, he was already out of sight. One of the other officers started screaming, “He’s down, he’s down, I got him!” I could see his body laying underneath the driver’s side of the truck, so I went up to the passenger side to see if there was anybody else in there. There wasn’t, so then we all kind of positioned ourselves in a semicircle around the guy to make sure that he was, in fact, down. He was bleeding profusely, so we figured he was no longer a threat. In fact, it was pretty obvious that he was dead.

  Then I just sort of started backing away from the guy. I really didn’t want to look at him. Plus I was thinking that I was a rookie officer, not even on duty, not even supposed to be involved in this crap. I was worried that maybe I was going to get in trouble—not for shooting the guy, because I had ample cause to shoot him—but because I might have violated some department policy by getting involved. At one point, I even thought that maybe I should just go back into Jack in the Box and act like nothing happened. But I knew I couldn’t do that, so I just stuck around talking to the other guys, waiting for a supervisor to show up. We were talking about what had just happened, and then one of the guys asked me who I was and what I was doing there. I’d never met any of these guys because they worked a different beat. Everybody started laughing when I told them that I was a rookie working an extra job at the Jack in the Box. They thought it was pretty funny.

  When the sergeant got there, I told him what I did. He thought how I got involved was pretty funny, too. Then the homicide detectives started showing up. T
hey told me I had to go downtown and give a statement. I was really scared because I was still worried that I might get in trouble for getting involved, but when I gave my statement to the senior homicide detectives downtown, they thought it was comical how I got involved. Because of their response, I figured that there wasn’t any problem with what I did, and that gave me a big sense of relief. I bounced it off my attorney when he showed up, and he told me not to worry about it. Several other people I talked to said the same thing. All those responses gave me a sense that I wasn’t in any trouble, that what I did was OK.

  The investigation determined that the guy I shot was a three-time loser. He had a substantial load of marijuana in the bed of the pickup; I don’t remember how much, but it was all bricked up. A lot of pot. I guess he just didn’t want to go back to prison.

  The next guy I shot was a dope dealer, too. I was working Narcotics at the time. We went to serve a warrant on this apartment where the guys inside were known to be armed constantly. Every time the informant went over there, the guys came to the door with shotguns or pistols on them. They always pointed them at the informant. We got our briefing, went out, made our plan, and went to the staging area to stand by for the informant to go in and make a final attempt to buy dope. That way, he could tell us who all was in there, a last-minute update while surveillance was watching. He came back, told us what was up, and we went to go do it. The location was part of a four-plex apartment. It was an upstairs unit with one or two bedrooms. We didn’t have a floor plan because the crooks would never let the informant past the front door. We knew the general floor plan of four-plexes in this area, and by looking at the windows and sewer vent pipes and things like that we had the general idea of where the different rooms were, but not the specifics. We knew there was at least two people inside, but not much more than that.