I was the point man on the entry team, and our plan was for me to slide to one side when I got to the top of the stairs, so the guys working the two-man ram could breach the door. They’d then step aside, and I’d be the first one through the door. The guys behind me would follow me in, and the ram guys would bring up the rear. We were moving up the stairs, whispering, walking slowly, trying not to be detected. But when we got right to the top, this older fat guy who didn’t fit the description of any of the suspects came walking out on us. He turned out to be a taxicab driver who was in there scoring dope. Well, one of the breaching guys let go of his side of the ram and grabbed the cabdriver and pulled him out of the way. As he was doing this, I heard him yell, “Shotgun! Shotgun!” While it was probably not the best idea in the world, I just continued on like a normal entry ’cause the door was open. I entered the room, and the rest of the guys followed me in.
As I went in, I saw a guy running across the room away from me. He had something in his hands. The room was real dark, no lights on, so I couldn’t get a real good look at the guy. But he was about twelve feet away when I spotted him, heading toward the kitchen. I kept moving along the wall perpendicular to the guy and screamed, “Police!” The guy started to spin around on me. I saw that what he was holding was a shotgun, so I fired.
The muzzle blast from my shotgun blinded me for a split second, and when I got my sight back, the guy was no longer there. I started scanning the room, looking for him, and I spotted a clump on the floor on the other side of the room. As I had come into the room initially, I had noticed someone else off to the left of the guy I ended up shooting. I thought that he might have a gun too, so I scanned left and saw him lying on the ground. Then I started scanning the rest of the room, looking for other suspects. One other guy from the team stepped in with me and started screaming, “Who shot, who shot?!” I said, “I did, I shot the guy over there.” I pointed at him and started screaming, “He’s got a shotgun! He’s got a shotgun!” because he had fallen into the darkness, and I really couldn’t see what he was doing at this point. I didn’t know if I hit him, or if he was repositioning himself to return fire, I didn’t know.
I positioned myself around to another part of the room, thinking that if this guy jumped up, I didn’t want to be standing in the same place that he last saw me. As I positioned myself around to another part of the room, I was covering down on the clump and shouting directions. The other guys were flowing into the room now, so one of them went over and checked the guy to my left. He immediately handcuffed the guy and spotted a pistol underneath a nearby couch. Then he started working his way around the couch to the area where the suspect I shot was lying. I was continuing to cover down on the darkened blob over there when I started to hear him moan and groan. It sounded like he was hurt, but I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t bluffing. When the other officer got there, he prodded him a few times with his foot. As he was doing this, he told me that he didn’t see a gun. I told him it was there, that I saw him holding a shotgun. He replied that he didn’t see it. Then the guy I shot really started to moan and groan, almost screaming from pain.
I was worried that some of the guys might relax prematurely, so I kept saying the guy I shot had a gun. The officer over by the suspect I shot told one of the other guys to move over and cover down on the suspect. When this officer did so, the first one holstered his weapon, reached down with both hands, and rolled the guy over. He saw that the guy was bleeding pretty bad from a chest wound and that the shotgun had been lying right under the guy. He said, “OK, I see it, I see it. It’s here, I got it.” At that point, I felt somewhat safer, but I was still concerned about the possibility of additional suspects in the location. Some of the other officers went ahead and cuffed the guy. Then someone got on the radio and told dispatch we’d had an officer-involved shooting, that all officers were OK, but that we needed an ambulance for the suspect. After that, we continued to clear the rest of the location. We found a third suspect back in the kitchen hiding, but no one else.
We cuffed the third guy up, brought him into the living room, and stood by for the ambulance to help the guy I shot. He was still moaning and groaning. I really didn’t think the guy was going to make it. It was an upper-right torso shot. He had a sucking chest wound, and blood was oozing out of his chest like nobody’s business. He had a thick leather jacket on, it was wintertime, so we just bound the leather jacket up to make it a tight fit and cut down on the bleeding a little bit. Then just told the guy to hang on, that the ambulance was coming. He ended up surviving, but I still don’t understand how. A full load of 00-buck from twelve feet away, I couldn’t believe the guy made it.
While we were waiting for the ambulance, we started chatting about the deal. The other guys were saying they couldn’t believe how fast it all happened. In fact, the third guy in the stack kept telling me, “Man, that gun went off so fast. You were no sooner in that room and, ‘boom,’ the shotgun went off.” But it didn’t seem fast to me at all. It seemed like forever. Like slow motion.
When I first went into the room and saw him moving away from me, I was just thinking, “Does he have a gun, does he have a gun? It looks like he’s got a gun but I’m not sure.” I mean, the ram guy said he had a shotgun, but I wasn’t sure. As I moved away from the doorway and down that wall, I was aiming my shotgun at him. I took my finger from an index position and put it on the trigger, intending to shoot the guy if he did anything other than just continue to run away. I decided that if he spun around and I could confirm that what he was holding was a weapon, or if he did anything else in a threatening manner, I was going to shoot him. Well, when he spun around, I could see the perfect silhouette of a shotgun. Even though there wasn’t much light in the room, I could clearly see the shotgun and both his hands against the white Sheetrock wall on the other side of the room from me. I could tell the shotgun had a pistol grip on it, that it was sawed off. I could see everything about it. He had his right hand back on the trigger and his left hand up on the foregrip. As he continued to bring it around, I was thinking, “That’s a shotgun. Yeah, that’s definitely a shotgun!” I thought that two or three times in probably less then a tenth of a second. Then I told myself, “Shoot! Shoot, damn it!” It just seemed like forever before my shotgun went off.
When the round went off, it sounded real soft, like a pop. It didn’t hurt my ears at all. That seemed odd because I know that if I was standing on the range and fired a shotgun without ear protection, it would hurt my ears. I was in an enclosed room, so it should have been even louder and hurt even more. But it didn’t.
Another thing that was weird was before I shot the guy, I was thinking that I couldn’t believe what was happening. I couldn’t believe this guy was turning on me with a gun. I mean, here is this whole Narcotics raid team in our raid jackets and whatnot, he’s got to know that we are the police. Later on, I thought that maybe he didn’t know we were cops. Maybe he thought we were drug dealers trying to rip him off. But at the time, I was thinking, “Why? Is this guy crazy? What’s he doing? I’ve got the drop on him. He’s running away from me, and now he’s going to stop and engage me?” I just couldn’t believe he was doing something that stupid.
I had similar thoughts when I was waiting for the ambulance. I was standing over him, looking down on him while some of the other guys lit him up with flashlights. He looked like he was a young kid. I was wondering if he was going to die. I was also thinking, “You stupid idiot, you did it to yourself.” Because he looked so young, I was hoping he wouldn’t die. But I still thought he was a stupid idiot for making me shoot him.
The last guy I shot also did something pretty stupid. I was working SWAT, and we got a call-up that came out of a home invasion robbery that went bad. These guys had done a series of capers in cahoots with another guy who provided home care for invalids. The caregiver would find wealthy elderly folk, and the other guys would go in and rob them. In this case, patrol got a call about a robbery at this one residence. When they got
there, they surrounded the place. Well, the three robbers started running around inside, freaking out because the police were outside. While this was going on, the victim crawled out a window and escaped. Then two of the other crooks decide to surrender. The third crook, the worst, the leader of the gang, refused to give up. His last words to the other two before they surrendered were something to the effect that he was going to climb into the attic with his gun, that he was never going to surrender, that the cops were going to have to kill him, that he was going to take some cops with him, stuff like that. So the other two guys walked out, gave up to patrol, and told them what the third guy had said. By the time we got there, the standoff had been going on for thirty minutes to an hour.
So we set up and tried to talk the guy out. We tried the bullhorn, tried to call him on the phone, all that stuff. We got no response. After about four hours of this, the commander decided we needed to go in and get the guy. We decided not to use gas first because we didn’t want to ruin the victim’s house. It was a very large house, so we’d have to put oodles and oodles of gas in there to have any effect. Also, if the suspect was in the attic like he said, the ventilation would probably just send it out before it had any effect on the guy. We also didn’t want to use gas because the masks would make it more difficult to operate in this big house; we were likely going to have to be in there for a long time, and those masks can get real uncomfortable.
My squad had the assault that day, so we did a covert entry from the door the suspects had gone in because that was the easiest point for us to sneak up to and not be observed from the house. I put Paul Riker at point and had Matt Johnson covering him. As team leader, I was in the third position, with Skip Patterson working rear guard. Then I pulled about four or five other team members to supplement my squad in order to hold a presence in each room as we cleared the house. Anyway, the clearing was pretty much uneventful. We’d clear a room, stop, leave one of the other guys in there, then move on to the next room.
We were working our way to the attic, because that’s where the suspect’s buddies told us he said he was going to be. But he could easily be anyplace in the house, so we wanted to clear everything before going into the attic. That way, we’d have a secure base for going up.
The house had two attic entries, one that we found fairly quickly. It had one of those spring doors with a ladder on it that you pull down. We just left it up, posted somebody on it, and went on with the clearance. After a while, we found the other attic entry, put somebody on it, and then finished clearing the house. It took us about an hour and a half to do all the rooms. We’d clear a room, stop, do a secondary search, put somebody in to hold it, then we’d go on again. After finishing off all the rooms, we felt confident that the living area was clear and that the suspect was, in fact, in the attic.
At that point, we stopped and took a break. We geared down for a little while to cool off. It was pretty hot in there because we had cut off the electricity when we were trying to talk him out, and we left it off because we wanted to be able to hear him walking around if he was moving while we were inside. We didn’t want any AC noise to mask any movements. We also got a little something to eat because we’d been out since the wee hours of the morning. Nobody had eaten since the afternoon before, so we ordered in some breakfast. We were down a good forty-five minutes.
We just relaxed for a little while, kind of critiqued our initial clearing a little bit, but mostly just relaxed for a little while because we had been going real intense, real real intense, for an hour and a half to two hours. Even though we thought he was likely in the attic, we thought he could be downstairs. The downstairs clearing was intense because, based on what the other two guys had told us, we figured that if we found him downstairs, we were going to draw some fire. We knew that clearing the attic was going to be even more intense if we had to go up there, if he didn’t give up, so we just took it easy for a while and had some breakfast.
When we got through eating, we knew it was time to get back to business. My team and I drew up a detailed plan for how we wanted to clear the attic. Then I went over and discussed it with two other team leaders, who were holding other areas in the house to see what they thought of the plan. They pretty much concurred, so we went to work.
First, we pulled open both attic doors, one at a time, just to see if we got any reaction. Then we gave some voice commands. You know, “Give up!” and all that. We got no reaction, so we flooded the attic with pole-mounted lights, one opening at a time. Then we stopped and tried some more voice commands. Then we pushed up the big pole-mounted mirrors to look around from below. It was a real large attic with blown insulation throughout. Lots of obstructions too. A lot of cross braces, a lot of air-conditioning ducts, a lot of piping, hot water heaters, stuff like that. It was also real cluttered with boxes and storage stuff. We inched up the ladders, moving more lights up and looking around with the mirrors. Once we cleared from both openings as much as we could with the mirrors, I used the SWAT-cam to make sure we hadn’t missed anything. All along, we gave voice commands. Just worked real methodical, step-by-step, trying to get a reaction from him at some point.
We never got any response, so we had to go into the attic. I stayed at the foot of the ladder and sent my point and cover guys up the ladder back-to-back, one step at a time, pistols in front of them. That way, they could cover each other. It was a real small opening, and they didn’t feel comfortable taking shields up there. We had talked about using shields, but they didn’t feel like they could maneuver well on the rickety ladder with the added bulk. I was a little concerned that they didn’t want to use shields, but I didn’t want to force them. My thinking was that the shields would only protect them from one angle of fire, but they were going into a 360-degree threat area. If I made them use shields and they took a round from an unprotected angle, I’d feel bad because I told them to use the shields. They were experienced guys, so I decided that if they felt more comfortable going up without shields, I was going to let them.
As they were going up the ladder, I was fully expecting to hear gunfire. I even thought that I might be watching one of them die pretty soon. I was pretty nervous. Pretty nervous. I was shaking a little bit. I was really worried about Paul and Matt. I thought that one of them might take a head shot as soon as they poked their heads above the entrance, that I might possibly see one of their heads explode right above me. I was also really busy mentally, trying to make sure I’d covered all the possibilities; running back over everything in my mind to make sure that I hadn’t forgotten anything.
Fortunately, they got up with no problems. I went up behind them, and the three of us took up positions in a sort of semicircle facing the big part of the attic. Then I had the guys at the other opening reposition their lights a little bit, so we could see different areas of the attic a little bit better. Both Paul and Matt spotted areas that they thought the suspect might be hiding in. They both identified large mounds of blown insulation that were big enough for a body to be underneath. I figured he could be almost anywhere, with all the obstructions up there, but I was especially concerned about those insulation piles. When I looked at the mound Matt had spotted, I saw the tip of a boot sticking out. I figured that was him, but I was also worried because that’s an old trick we used to pull in training. We’d take some shoes and place them so that just the tips were sticking out to sucker the guys searching into a trap. So I was concerned that the shoes could be a trap, and I was still concerned with the rest of the attic.
I decided to address the insulation mound with the shoe sticking out first. I told my rear guard to come up and cover our backside when we moved toward the pile with the shoe. It was about thirty feet away from the opening, almost at the other side of the attic. We moved up to within about fifteen or twenty feet from the mound. From there, it definitely looked like someone was hiding under that pile. We stopped so that if the guy’s feet were twelve o’clock, I was in the two o’clock position, Matt was at straight-up twelve, an
d Paul was at about eleven o’clock. We all had our weapons with the lights on pointed at the mound.
Matt started to try voice contact. We knew the suspect’s name was Larry, so Matt was trying to talk to the guy. He said stuff like, “Come on, Larry, give it up. Give it up, Larry. We see you there. We know you’re there. Come on, nobody’s hurt. Just show us your hands, OK?” No response. So now I started thinking that maybe the guy’s dead. Maybe he covered himself up and shot himself. Some of the things we’ve heard about him in our intelligence portion of the operation indicated that he might be suicidal. Matt just kept trying to get the guy to respond, “Come on, Larry, give it up, man,” and so forth. This went on for about forty-two, forty-three seconds. We found the time out later when we listened to the audiotapes we keep of our SWAT operations.
Then, all of a sudden, the mound moved and the guy popped up holding a shiny, semiautomatic pistol in his right hand. It looked to be a .40 or a .45. I wasn’t sure, but I could tell it was bigger than a 9 millimeter. The light was glistening off it. I could tell it was a stainless, because it wasn’t shiny enough to be chrome. When he popped up, it surprised the hell out of me. I had relaxed a little bit because I figured he was going to give up. I mean, he didn’t have anywhere to go and he knew we were the SWAT team. In fact, that was the first time in all my years in SWAT that when I had the drop on a guy like that, he didn’t give up. They always gave up. I never had one stand and fight. I couldn’t believe it was happening.
Into the Kill Zone Page 27