Into the Kill Zone

by David Klinger

  • • •

  I never really had a problem with shooting the guy—I mean he was holding a gun, trying to chamber a round when I shot him—but I was a little worried at first about how the department was going to handle it. The department has a reputation for dropping guys over shootings, and one of our snipers had shot a guy just a few weeks before my shooting, so I was worried that the investigation was going to uncover some technicality, like the date or the address typed on the warrant was wrong, and that the city was gonna use that as an excuse to try to distance itself from me. Some of this came from the fact that some of our supervisors were real indifferent after the shooting. It was like, “Oh, we had a shooting. There could be some liability. We don’t want to know anything about it, don’t want to have to testify.” So I had some concerns about that kind of stuff early on. Then I went to the grand jury. They asked me a few questions, and I told ’em what happened. They came back four hours later and told me they didn’t have any problems with the shooting. At that point, I felt like it was over, and my concerns about the city disappeared.

  The one other thing I did feel was some regret that the guy I shot was injured, but he made the choice to go for his gun. I would’ve rather taken him down without him being injured, but I also look at it that he didn’t die, that he didn’t make me kill him. I don’t know for sure that I would have felt any different if I had killed the guy, but I’d rather not kill someone. I think that’s because of my religious upbringing, the “thou shalt not kill” type stuff. So if I got a choice between killing and not killing somebody, I don’t want to kill ’em. If I have a choice between hurting somebody and not hurting ’em, I don’t want to hurt ’em. But at the same time, I’m not gonna be hurting, so I did what I had to do. But I wish it hadn’t happened.

  • • •

  The guy I shot robbed a bank and pointed a gun at me as he was trying to get away, but I was still a little fearful of the legal stuff with the grand jury. I knew that I had done the right thing, but I didn’t know what to expect in a grand jury. I didn’t want to lose my job because the grand jury decided I wasn’t justified in shooting. I had thoughts that this could ruin my career. I guess I was just worried somebody there might have the thought that this was not justified. I just had that fear. It turns out I didn’t even have to go in and testify. They “no billed” me without me having to go in and talk. Got there with my attorney, sat there for twenty to thirty minutes, then the DA came out and said there was no need for me to go in. I guess it helped that there were a lot of people who saw what happened. They didn’t need to have me tell it.

  I felt really relieved when I got the no bill. That thought and fear of legal problems went away. Now I still had in my mind that there could be a civil problem. People can always sue. But I was like, “I got this no bill here, and I know it’s right and everybody else knows it’s right, and if there was gonna come a civil suit, I could handle it. I can go through that if I have to.” But I knew I was gonna keep my job.

  • • •

  I was worried about getting sued. I wasn’t so much concerned about the criminal part of it. I knew we were clear there. I mean, he shot the two of us. It’s just that I’d heard a lot of horror stories coming out of California, where officers get sued after they shoot some guy who shoots them. I realized this wasn’t California, but it still put me on edge, wondering if I was going to have to go through the civil stuff, wondering what happens if the judge favors this guy I shot. But all those thoughts ended when the criminal case got rolling. The guy had hired a pretty good law firm to handle his case, but they sent this first-year attorney, fresh out of law school, to handle some pretrial, look-at-the-evidence-type hearing. Well, the guy ended up confessing on the stand, and his attorney didn’t stop him. The DA couldn’t believe it. She was like, “So you intentionally shot Officers Dotson and Morales?” He replied, “Yeah, I shot them. I wanted to get away from them. I was going to kill their ass if they didn’t let me go.” So out the door went the civil process, and I breathed a sigh of relief. We never got sued, and I wondered what happened to that first-year lawyer. After he screwed that up, I’m sure he got fired.

  • • •

  The only thing that bothered me about the whole deal was the guy’s trial. First off, I couldn’t believe it when I got the subpoena. I figured the guy was dead. Turns out that the round I put in his abdomen didn’t do too much damage, but the one that I hit him in the face with did. It entered alongside his nose, hit the bone at the base of his eye, ricocheted upward, ricocheted back down off of the frontal part of his skull, stayed under the skin, and went around and lodged alongside his spinal cord. He was paralyzed and comatose for about six weeks afterward, blood pressure up and down, real bad condition. They really didn’t expect him to survive, and then he pulled through. He decided not to plead guilty, so we had to go to trial.

  Initially, he was charged with aggravated assault for what he did before we got there and then attempted murder on a police officer for attacking me, but they reduced that one to an aggravated assault with great bodily injury. That really pissed me off, because he was sure as hell trying to kill me when I shot him. Then his wife got up to testify, and she lied through her teeth. She perjured herself and said that he never attempted to attack her with a knife, that he never cut any police officers, that he was a good man who held a job, and all sorts of other baloney. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was steamed. It was like so many other family disputes where the couple is all in love again the day after some horrendous melee. She went on about what a great father he was, how he might have had a beer or two that night, but he never even had a knife in his hand. I couldn’t believe it.

  Then the prosecuting attorney called me up and just had me stand in front of the judge’s bench, right at the dead center of the courtroom, with her sitting in the witness box and asked me to roll up my left sleeve, so I rolled up my sleeve and showed off my scar. It was still pretty gruesome looking at that time, with some stitches hanging out and stuff. The prosecutor said that she’d like to have a photo taken of my arm and put it into evidence so that the record would reflect that there was indeed a knife at the location. The defense attorney then said, “We’ll stipulate to that,” and asked for a recess to speak with his client. So the prosecutor brought all that bullshit to a grinding halt.

  The guy got convicted on both counts and ended up serving two or three years hard time, then got out for good behavior. I didn’t really have any ill feeling toward the guy. He got convicted and went to prison for what he did, so he paid for it—not enough, but he did pay. I was much more angry at his wife for lying on the stand. When I heard her lying up there, I thought to myself, “I should have just let him fucking stab you.” I was so pissed off. I didn’t give up part of my arm and almost bleed to death so she could get up in court and tell a bunch of lies.

  • • •

  The suspect’s lawyer really pissed me off. I was one of the first witnesses to testify in the preliminary hearing, and he just opened up on me. “Isn’t it true that you are an abusive police officer? Isn’t it true that you don’t like blacks?”

  Apparently, he was trying to get me to say, “Yeah, that’s me. I don’t like blacks, and I beat the shit out of people every day.” I thought, “What’s wrong with you? Do I look stupid?” I mean, do prejudiced people actually answer correctly to these questions? If I were a prejudiced person, why would I admit it in court? It was just a dumb question. And then on top of it being a dumb question and me thinking, “Would a prejudiced person answer that truthfully?” I was offended. I’m not a prejudiced person. My partner the night of the shooting was Mexican. My partner after that was black. I judge people on the single basis of their behavior, not by the tone of their skin or whatever. So that offended me, the lawyer insinuating that I was prejudiced. I wanted to answer him by saying, “You’re right, I am prejudiced. Toward criminals like your client and toward fucking assholes like you.” I really wanted to say t
hat. I had to bite my tongue big time.

  • • •

  We beat the shit out of the guy after we finally got the gun away from him, so bad that both his eyes were swollen almost shut. Then, when some of the other officers showed up a few minutes later, he got his ass kicked some more. One officer in particular really thumped him. He came up, rolled the guy over onto his back, and stomped on the guy’s chest about three times. I mean, he stomped the shit out of him.

  This became a very delicate thing in court because his attorney tried to use it to turn the tables, to put me on trial instead of the state putting his client on trial. He didn’t ask me about the facial injuries, just about the stomping. I guess the suspect thought it was me who kicked him. The officer who did it is Hispanic, but he looks a little like me. I guess that when the guy looked up through the slits in his swollen eyes, that he mistook the other officer for me.

  So his attorney asked me if I had done the kicking, and I said, “No.” Then he asked me if my partner had done it, and I said, “No.” He never asked about any other officers, so I didn’t lie. He just never asked me the right question. After I gave my testimony, I was standing off by myself in the foyer outside the judge’s office, and one of the people who works at the courthouse came up to me and—in a voice nobody else could hear—said, “Buddy, given what he did, I’d have kicked the shit out of him too.”

  • • •

  The criminal trial didn’t go the way we wanted it to. He was there all cleaned up, as crooks will be, in a suit, with his attorney. His hand, minus the fingers I shot off, was still wrapped up. My testimony was very short. Nothing outstanding about it. The prosecutor asked, “Were you there?”

  “Yep.”

  “Did you shoot him?”

  “Yep.”

  “Did he have a gun when you shot him?”

  “Yep.”

  “Did you feel threatened?”

  “Yep.”

  “Thank you very much, have a nice day.”

  No cross.

  They ended up convicting him of one count of burglary first, for breaking into the house, but in terms of me, they only convicted him of a third degree assault, the lowest-level misdemeanor assault under state statute. The prosecution was going for first degree assault, which includes attempted murder, because the crook pointed the shotgun at me. His testimony was that he was only trying to scare me when he pointed the shotgun at me. The jury bought that, that he wasn’t trying to hurt anybody, that he just wanted to scare me. They also convicted him of third degree assault for firing at the other officer before I got there. I guess the jury figured they had a male Annie Oakley in front of them, that he was just trying to shoot the gun out of the copper’s hand with a shotgun at thirty yards.

  The judge went goofy when the verdict came back. He told the jury it was one of the worst decisions he’d ever heard and hammered the guy in sentencing. The guy was on parole at the time, and the judge hammered him on the parole and gave him everything he could on the burglary and the two third degree assaults. The guy deserved a lot more than he got, but, hey, you win some, you lose some. I shot part of his hand off, he went to prison, and I figure that every time he goes to tie his shoes, he’s gonna remember me.

  • • •

  The second guy I shot during my rookie year had robbed a bunch of people with an Uzi at this drug-den-type apartment building, shot one of the robbery victims, and pointed his gun at me and two other officers. He lived, and when it came time to charge him, the prosecutor’s office didn’t file on him for pointing the gun at us. They didn’t issue that because we didn’t get hurt. That ticked me off. I was like, “OK, you’re telling me I have to get hurt before you’ll do anything?” Then I found out that the victims couldn’t care less about what happened. All they wanted was their money back. The homicide detectives had to bribe them to cooperate. They had to say, “Hey, if you want your money back, you gotta meet us downtown.”

  I thought, “You know, isn’t this something? Here I am out there trying to help these people, trying to get this guy off the street, and the victims don’t care, and the prosecutor’s office won’t do anything.” They wound up issuing a charge for flourishing a weapon; that was all they issued on him for pointing his weapon at us. They also issued maybe five counts of robbery first, and they issued one assault first for shooting the guy in the leg.

  So they did wind up issuing something on him, but it was just that I’d been through the ringer, been in this pretty tense situation, and here you got this desk jockey sitting there, saying, “Well, you know you’re not hurt, so we’re not gonna issue any kind of assault on you.” I just wanted to say, “Hey, you take the fucking gun, and you go out there and go through this shit that I just went through, and we’ll see what we’re gonna issue for you, and we’ll see how irate you’re gonna be.” But I came to find out that that’s pretty much the norm down there at our district attorney’s office, that they don’t want to do anything. They try to say how great they are by saying, “We win 98 percent of the cases that we take to trial.” Well, when you issue on 2 percent of the cases that are brought to you, it’s probably really easy to get a 98 percent conviction rate. Before I came on the job, I always thought the prosecuting attorney’s office and the police department would work together. But I’ve come to see that that’s not the case.

  Problems with the Press

  Given the newsroom dictum that “if it bleeds it leads” and the role the press has historically played in monitoring government activities in the United States, it is not surprising that the news media find deadly encounters between citizens and police officers compelling targets for coverage. But all shootings are not created equal, so the nature of the coverage that the fourth estate devotes to them can vary considerably. The scope can range from short blurbs or brief spots in local papers or on local broadcast stations to repeated and in-depth stories in national media outlets. The tone of coverage can also vary, from high praise for “hero cops,” who save innocents from the clutches of criminals, to vitriolic condemnation of “trigger-happy” officers, who “shoot first and ask questions later.”

  There is an old adage about media coverage of the police that goes something like this: cops read about their failures on the front page and their successes in the “law and order” column of the local section—if they make the paper at all. Given the tendency of the press to stress police problems, it is the negative stories of shootings that tend to get more media play. As a consequence, it is a widely held belief in law enforcement circles that the press is just waiting to dump on officers who shoot people. The press practice of playing up negative stories, together with the trepidation it generates among the police, creates a climate in which officers who shoot can have strong reactions to the manner in which the press treats what they have done. The stories in this section focus on these twin issues: the coverage the fourth estate gives to police shootings and the sorts of reactions that the involved officers have to it.

  • • •

  The press just had a field day with me. One of the newspaper headlines read, “POLICE OFFICER MURDERER,” in big two-inch print, then underneath it in small print, “Family of Victim Says.” All sorts of other ridiculous statements from the family appeared in that paper. Plus the picture they showed of the guy was his boot camp photo, where he was standing in front of the American flag in his greens. That wasn’t the guy I shot. The guy that I shot had a tattoo with a skull and crossbones on his chest. He had big, bushed-out, wigged-out hair. He was dirty, a real scumbag. So the family and the press coverage pissed me off. They were talking about what a fine young man he was, but the truth was that he’d been in trouble ever since he was old enough to be in trouble, that he’d tried to stab some people, and that he pulled a knife on me.

  • • •

  Some stuff about the way the press reported the incident kind of bothered me. The first day, it was on the front page of both local papers. The second day, the bigger paper had a big half
-page article that had diagrams of the scene and pictures of me and the suspect side by side, right next to each other. They had a stock photo from an interview that I had done about six months prior that they just threw in the paper without asking me if it was OK. It wasn’t a good picture, and putting it right next to the suspect really pissed me off, because I could just see people reading the damn caption underneath the pictures, turning the page and not knowing which one was the crook and which one was the cop. I mean, the picture was so bad that from the looks of it I thought that people were probably going to think that I was the crook. That really bothered me, being associated with a hoodlum that way.

  • • •

  There was never, ever any doubt that this was a good shooting. The only thing that ever came up was that some liberals—a bunch of attorneys—were flapping their gums in the press, questioning why the guy was shot nine times. My response to them was that they shouldn’t question me or the other officers because they weren’t there. They didn’t know how fast it happened. When the guy came at us, it was split seconds that we made our decisions and did what we did. It wasn’t like, “OK, he’s coming out in the hallway. OK, he’s got two guns. Oh, he just shot a security guard. Oh, he’s pointing a gun at John. I’d better make my decision about what to do.” It wasn’t like that. It was, “Here he comes. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom—a brief pause—then boom,” and it was over. I think three seconds total from the time I saw him till I fired my last shot. I don’t think the people who questioned what we did ever really sat down and thought that it happened like that.

  Maybe the best way to describe it is like a car accident: you’re driving down the street one day, and, “Wham!” someone hits you. I mean, I didn’t even know what was happening, then it was over. But the critics don’t bother to get the facts before spouting off.