Into the Kill Zone

by David Klinger

  The tightness in my chest lasted for the next few days. It was always there. It just never went away for those first few days. I felt really anxious. I don’t know what about—nothing in particular, just a general feeling. I was constantly replaying the shooting in my mind, thinking, “Did I do the right thing? Was I justified?” That kind of thing. I also felt real numb the first few days—maybe the whole week—after the shooting. It was almost a detached feeling, like what was going on wasn’t really happening. On top of all that, I had trouble sleeping the first few nights. I’d go to bed and I’d fall asleep OK, but then I’d wake up and I’d toss and turn, then go back to bed. Then I’d get up and get a drink, maybe turn on TV for a little bit, and then go back to bed. That kind of thing.

  Then, about ten days after the shooting, I had this weird dream where my wife and I were going for a walk in the neighborhood. We went to the next street over on the block. As we were walking down there, we ran into a group of guys. It was the cousin and other family members of the guy I shot. Now I never go anywhere without my off-duty gun, but in the dream, I forgot my off-duty gun. I left it at home. The guys start chasing me. My wife can’t run as fast as me, and I looked over as we’re running and she falls down. Then I woke up. I had the dream just one time, but boy, was it weird.

  After that, things smoothed out, and I was functioning fine up until about three months after the shooting. My wife and I basically quit communicating; we started having problems. Things deteriorated so bad that about eight months after the shooting my wife and I separated and I went to live with my folks. When I was living with my folks, I started going through a bout of depression. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but it was real bad. I would stay up to two or three o’clock in the morning trying to get tired, so I could get a good night’s sleep. I’d sleep for a couple of hours and dream of the separation with my wife, dream of my kids, that kind of thing. Then I’d wake up with my stomach tied in knots, sweating. The bedsheet would be completely wet with sweat. Then I couldn’t get back to sleep. After a couple of nights like that, I asked my mom if she had anything to make me sleep a good sleep, and she had some Valium. So I started taking Valium before I’d go to bed, trying to sleep, but it wasn’t doing a thing. It was like I couldn’t even feel it. On top of all that, I started dropping weight like you wouldn’t believe—I think I lost like ten pounds in a week. So I was pretty bad off.

  A week or so after the depression hit, my wife and I went for some counseling with my pastor at church because of the problems we were having. I just started bawling, crying my eyes out, saying my wife didn’t love me anymore, that the only reason she married me was that she wanted kids, and now she’s got the kids. We’d just had our second daughter. She was born in June, and the shooting went down the previous December, so my daughter wasn’t a month old, and I was wailing that my wife didn’t love me anymore, that she wanted kids, that she had them now, so she didn’t need me, blah, blah, blah. As I was crying, my pastor said, “Ted, I think your shooting is bothering you more than you realize.” I said, “The shooting? That was six months ago. I’m not bothered by that. My wife doesn’t love me anymore. That’s my problem now.” He gave me the name and number of a psychiatrist and told me that he wanted me to go see her. I took the number from him, thinking, “OK. I’m not gonna insult him. I’ll take it, but I ain’t gonna see nobody. This isn’t a psychiatrist issue.” I put the number in my wallet just to be polite and we left.

  It wasn’t two or three days later when a detective asked me if I had time to run down to Mercy Hospital for him and pick up a rape kit that had been done on a rape that had occurred the night before. I was working a plainclothes assignment up in investigations, so I said, “Yeah, no problem.” Driving to the hospital, I was thinking about the shooting and everything else. About two miles from the hospital, I started to cry. I pulled over, bawling like a baby, thinking, “What can I do to make my life like it was before?” My life had been a bed of roses up until that point. Nothing had ever gone wrong in my life. Everything that I had ever tried for I had gotten. Tried to get on the police department, got it on the first time, the only department I had ever tried for. Never been rejected or turned down for anything I’d ever really wanted and tried to get, and now I’m separated from my wife. I couldn’t believe the crap that was going on in my life and how bad I was feeling. I didn’t know why I was feeling so bad. I was just bawling like a baby, trying to figure out what to do, and I said to myself, “Well, you can kill yourself.” Then I thought, “Holy shit, I need some help.”

  I regained my composure, got the rape kit, went back to the station, gave the kit to the detective, went back into the office, shut the door, locked it, and pulled out the phone number my pastor had given me. I called her and told her that I had been having problems with my marriage and my pastor had given me her number. She asked me if anything else had happened. I told her that I was a police officer and that I’d been involved in a shooting about six months ago, but that that wasn’t the problem. I told her the problem was my marriage. She asked me a couple of questions I can’t remember; then she asked me if I had had any thoughts about harming myself. I got quiet for a few seconds; then I said, “Well, I thought about it, but I’m not gonna do it. I mean, the thought crossed my mind, but I know that I don’t need to do that. I have some sanity left.”

  She asked me, “When can you be here?”

  I said, “I’m not doing anything right now.”

  She said, “I want you to come down here now.” Half an hour later, I was in her office.

  I basically spent the first hour with her doing nothing but crying. Then I saw her about twice a week for three or four weeks. The first four or five times I was there, she’d asked me a couple of questions and the entire time I tried to answer her, it’d be through bouts of crying. Eventually, I got to where we could talk and I didn’t just break out crying all the time. When I finally made it through a whole hour without crying at all, we went down to one session a week. I did that for a couple or three weeks, and then she brought my wife in privately. She met with her alone for a couple or three visits. Then my wife and I went to see her together either once or twice, and then we didn’t see her anymore. I moved back in with my wife, and things gradually got better after that.

  The biggest thing I learned through the counseling was what had happened between my wife and me over the shooting. I didn’t see it when it was happening, but she was doing what she thought I wanted to deal with the shooting. My wife knew that I really didn’t like to talk about it. Everybody was asking me questions about the shooting, and I would tell them about it. I felt like I needed to tell them, but as soon as I started to talk, I felt like, “What an idiot, you are going to sound like you are bragging. Everybody’s going to think that you think that this is a really neat deal,” crap like that. So as I was talking, I was thinking, “Shut your mouth and quit. You sound like an idiot.”

  My wife was the only person I felt comfortable talking to, but I’d told her that I felt really bad when I told people about these things, that I thought they were gonna feel that I was bragging about it or that I felt good about it. So she knew I didn’t like to talk about it. I never told her that I felt comfortable talking to her, so she just figured I didn’t want to talk about it at all and quit talking about it with me.

  Then we basically quit talking about everything. She just quit communicating. When we went in to see the psychiatrist, she said, “I’ll tell you what your problem is—you guys are not talking to each other. You’re not talking to her. You’re not talking to him. When was the last time you actually sat down and talked about something involving the kids or outside of the fact that you’re separated and arguing about your problems with the separation? When was the last time you sat down and talked about anything to do with going and doing something, or the kids growing up, or something else about your family life?” We couldn’t remember, and she said, “You gotta start talking.” So we left and went home
and talked. It was either that night or the next night that I moved back in. And it was really good. My wife sat down with me and made me talk about the shooting, about how I was feeling, that kind of stuff.

  So the counseling got us back on track, but I still had some tough times. Prior to the shooting, I wasn’t a moody person. I was always in a good mood, always, but after the shooting I was real moody. I’d be sitting there watching TV—I could be watching a comedy—a commercial would come on, and for no reason I would get pissed off. Then I would be pissed off because I had no reason to be pissed off. It was like a vicious circle. That type of stuff happened all the time for about three and a half years, until the civil suit finally ended.

  The single thing that bothered me the most about the whole lawsuit was the plaintiff’s attorney. He tried to make me out to be the bad guy. I mean, the guy I shot was a parolee living in a halfway house, working at a job at a commercial laundry. He didn’t show up for work and his boss reported him. That violated his parole, so he was a felony absconder. He had gone back to his workplace looking for his boss, pulled a knife, and started threatening people, demanding to know where the boss was. At one point, he took a swipe at this guy through the window of his car, so he was wanted for felony absconding and ADW. As I was chasing him, he pulled the knife on me, so I shot him.

  In my deposition, when we got to the question of the shooting and my bullet hitting the guy in the head, the attorney got all indignant. He asked me, “Did you think about shooting him in the legs?” I said, “No. We’re trained to shoot center mass because that’s the biggest target.” So he goes, “Well, you don’t think you can hit him in the thigh, but you can hit him in the back of his head. You think that the head is about the same width as the thigh? If you can hit one, why can’t you hit the other?” He was being real accusatory, insinuating in his questions that I was an idiot. When I answered him, I said, “You’re assuming that I was aiming at his head, but I wasn’t. I was running, he was running, but I was shooting center mass. I wasn’t aiming at his head. I just happened to hit him there.” The manner that he asked things pissed me off. It was all I could do to keep my cool in that deposition and answer those questions. He was just a typical attorney, not caring about what really happened, just spouting off with righteous indignation.

  The suit went all the way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court rejected it. They wouldn’t even review it. They upheld the appellate court’s decision that the shooting was justified. When that happened, the periods of me getting pissed off for no reason started declining. I still have them, and it pisses me off when it happens, because I sit there and for no reason I’ll just get mad. Pissed off at the world. It’s one of those things that still bothers me. I’ll still blow up at my kids for no reason, but it happens a lot less than it did when the lawsuit was going on.

  Another thing that came from the shooting is that I completely quit hunting. I used to love to hunt. I hunted almost religiously all through college and even after I became an officer, but since the shooting, I don’t want to hunt anymore. I don’t know why; it’s just that I don’t have any desire to hunt. I still fish, fly-fish, the quiet sport. That’s what I want. I want that quiet solitude, just to get away from things.

  • • •

  The guy I shot was barricaded up near a fence between two houses. It started out as a pursuit where he’d tried to run several cars off the road. We’d chased him all over the county until he tried to make a U-turn and one of the other units smashed his car and knocked him into a ditch. The guy bailed out of the car. And when he did, he put a pistol to his head. He walked backwards from the car, telling us to stay back or he’d shoot us or he’d shoot himself; then he took off running, still holding the gun to his head. When we finally caught up with him between the houses, he sat down against the fence, kept the gun against his head, and told us that he was gonna off himself and that he’d kill us if we came near him. Then it was a standoff.

  I stayed about twenty-five feet away back at the corner of the first house and covered him with my gun while some other officers negotiated with him for several hours. They even brought his girlfriend to the scene to talk to him. After a while, he put the gun down, and a couple of the guys got close to him and tried to grab him before he could get to his gun. The guy slipped from their grasp, picked up the gun, and started to swing it toward them. That’s when I started firing.

  I could actually see his body taking the rounds. It was kind of like a Rocky movie when Rocky’s punched in the face and you see his head snap back. I saw his chest and his arm and his body moving like somebody was kicking him or hitting him or something. So I knew I hit him. I quit shooting when the guy totally collapsed to the ground. His body just went completely limp. In my mind, that was the cutoff switch. He wasn’t gonna harm anybody anymore, so I started advancing on him. As I came up on him, I could see blood spurting out of the side of his chest.

  The negotiator was asking for a knife to cut the guy’s shirt off, so we could start CPR and cover his wounds. I gave him my pocketknife, and he ripped the guy’s shirt open. I looked over, and I could really see the blood pumping out. The only wound I could see was a sucking chest wound underneath his right arm. There was blood everywhere. Blood was just pouring out of him like a faucet. He was looking up at me, and I could tell that he knew it was me that shot him. I remember looking at his face thinking, “Well, what do I do now?” I knew that if you hurt somebody, you gotta take ’em to the hospital, but that’s all I could think of. I was freaking out. Not emotionally or anything, but just like, “Man I can’t believe what’s going on.” It all happened real quick.

  On top of that, the guy’s girlfriend started screaming and hollering. No one had thought to get her out of there, and at one point she started hitting me in the back, so I had to fight with her while I was still dealing with this guy. I said to the other guys, “You all need to get this bitch out of here.” For one, she was getting hysterical, and for two, I just shot her friend and that ain’t looking good for us to be fighting. Someone took her away, and I turned back to the guy.

  Now we’re taught by watching videos and stuff that if you see a sucking chest wound that you need to put something over the wound to keep the chest from sucking in air. Blood going out is not as bad as the air coming in. So the negotiator asked for a cigarette wrapper, which is plastic. I got one for him, and he stuck the cigarette wrapper on the hole. At that point, the guy’s body started to twitch and jerk. I knew he was going out. I didn’t think he could survive, but still I thought we needed to get EMS up to where we were.

  I said, “Somebody get EMS up here now!”

  The negotiator said, “No, no. Disregard EMS. He’s dead.”

  Well, the guy was still gasping for air. He was looking at me in the eyes. So I said, “You better get fucking EMS up here! Get them now!” I smoked this guy, I’m the one who shot him, and I wasn’t gonna let them disregard EMS.

  Right about the time I said, “Fuck you, get EMS over here,” the guy’s body stiffened out, and he stretched out in a flat position on his back. That’s when I could kind of see the life going away from his eyes. At that point, my sergeant showed up, and he and my captain grabbed me, and we kind of walked away.

  I told my buddy Artie afterwards that one of the things that bothers me the most about what happened was having to see the guy’s face, because I saw every emotion he’s ever had in that three-, four-, five-hour period we knew each other. I saw him hating everybody, trying to run people off the road. I saw him running down the road with a gun to his head in desperation. I saw fear in his eyes. I saw pain and agony, grouchiness. I saw a drunken stupor, and then, when I shot the guy, I saw the face of a two-year-old staring right at me in pain, pleading for help.

  I work in a small town, but I’d seen a guy die before this guy. A guy who shot his ex-wife in a murder-suicide-type deal. I got there right after he had shot himself in the head and was taking his few last breaths. EMS was showing up, an
d he was doing the death gurgle, but he saw me. I looked over, and after I saw his ex-wife shot to hell, I said, “You better die, motherfucker,” and he went out. It didn’t bother me. I didn’t shoot him, plus he was an asshole. He’d shot his wife, killed her. He looked in my eyes, but it didn’t bother me. I had also seen a friend of mine’s sister who got shot in the head. I heard her take her last breath on a police call. That didn’t bother me, either. I knew it was my buddy’s sister, but I didn’t do it.

  It was different with the guy I killed. When I had to see this guy’s face, knowing the fact that I was the one that took his life away from him, that kind of disturbed me for a while. In fact, it’s been a couple of years now, and it still kind of disturbs me. To this day, I feel really bad that I had to kill that guy. I mean, if it was the same situation, if it happened right now, somebody came in with a gun, I would react and take care of business. I don’t have a problem with that. But I’m not a cold-blooded killer. I don’t do that for kicks. A lot of people told me I was a hero for protecting those other officers, but I don’t consider myself a hero. I mean, I’m a cop. I’m trained to help other people, and I’m also trained to react and I reacted. I did my job, to hell with it.