Into the Kill Zone

The line separating close calls from shootings is razor thin. As we saw in the last chapter, police officers hold their fire in the face of all sorts of threatening actions, including gunfire directed at them. So when officers do shoot, it is because something—the way armed individuals stand, the way they hold their weapons, the way they move, the words they speak, the look on their faces, some cue—tells them that this moment is different, that it is for keeps, that they can’t hesitate, that they have to fire. The last chapter illustrated the sorts of things that officers consider as they contemplate pulling the trigger but stop short of the act. This one completes the shooting picture by showing how and why officers cross the line, and what happens when they send police bullets plowing through citizens’ flesh and bone.

In some instances, the decision to shoot is the end point of a deliberative process. In others, it is a split-second reaction that involves no conscious thought at all. Sometimes a shooting is the culmination of a protracted encounter during which officers had plenty of time to consider the possibility that they might need to shoot. Other times, officers are thrown into dangerous situations without warning and fire right away. And shootings happen in any sort of situation: burglary investigations; disputes between family members, friends, or neighbors; traffic stops; noise complaints; and even when officers are minding their own business off duty. Because shootings can (and do) unfold in a variety of ways, during situations of every conceivable stripe, there is no such thing as a typical shooting scenario.

The same is true about the people officers shoot: there is no such thing as a typical police opponent. Although some of the people the police shoot are hardened criminals, many are folks who were not in serious trouble with the law before the incident that brought them to the attention of the police. Some souls are enraged about some real or imagined affront they have suffered, some are high on alcohol or other drugs (or both), some suffer from some type of long-standing emotional or mental problem, and some are suicidal. Indeed the most thorough research to date indicates that some 10 percent of the people struck by police gunfire in recent years were suicides who goaded officers into shooting them. This unorthodox form of self-destruction, commonly called suicide-by-cop in law enforcement circles, is sometimes chosen by troubled individuals (such as the disturbed man who stabbed himself in the stomach from the previous chapter) who wish to end their lives but can’t do it by their own hand.1

Whatever the circumstances that bring officer and assailant together, and whatever the assailant’s motive for the behavior that prompts police gunfire, all shootings boil down to the same point: police officers decide that the person they face will do them or another innocent person grave harm if they don’t shoot.

The stories in this chapter show what happens when officers reach that critical point. Readers will meet young officers thrown into violent shoot-outs while they were still wet behind the ears, veteran officers who kill knife-wielding madmen, and officers and shootings of every sort and stripe in between. More than a dozen of the officers I interviewed were injured during their shootings. We will hear from a few of them. Although—as detailed in the Introduction—most officers never shoot anyone, a small number are involved in two or more shootings. Several of the officers I interviewed fall into the multiple-shooter category, and we will hear from two of them here. Finally, I was occasionally able to interview two or more officers who fired their weapons in the same incident. To provide the reader an idea of how different officers experience the same shooting, I have included a handful of stories that deal with a single incident.

As was the case in the first three chapters, the stories are presented in a series of groups, starting with two of the more dramatic shootings, both of which happened when the involved officers were mere novices.

Baptism by Fire

One of the reasons police agencies put newly minted academy graduates through a probationary period that includes substantial time riding with senior officers is to allow young officers the opportunity to break into the rigors of police work slowly. Fate is no respecter of time on the job, however, and some officers find themselves in deadly straits before they have learned the ropes. We saw in previous chapters that this can include witnessing fellow officers struck down in the line of duty, watching other officers shoot citizens, and nearly shooting people themselves. This section completes the picture of rookies’ exposure to deadly violence with a pair of stories from young officers who shot people long before they had a chance to get their police legs under them; in the case of the first officer we hear from, just ten days after he hit the streets.

My first training officer was a fairly young guy, who spent a lot of time talking with me about deadly force. At the time I showed up at the station, he had been in two shootings in less than two years. So he was one of those guys that was just always in the middle of whatever action was going on in the division. Because of that, he put a major emphasis on deadly force in training.

When he told me about those shootings, I figured that couldn’t happen to me. I was just getting out on the street. I was like, “Well, yeah, I know it happens, but it’s probably not going to happen to me.” I mean, I knew that something like that could happen, but in my mind I thought it wouldn’t, at least not early on in my career. Then, on my tenth day in the field, it happened.

It was a Monday and we were working day shift. We were very busy because of this gas station across the street from a housing project that was a real crime magnet. The gang-bangers who lived in the projects would run across the street, rob the patrons at the gas station, and then run back into the projects. As a trainee, I had to write all the crime reports for our car, and I was getting report after report after report of robberies at that gas station. My training officer wanted to make sure he got off duty on time that day—I can’t remember why—so he said, “Let’s park our car near the gas station and sit and write your reports there. Maybe we can keep them from robbing it, so we can go home on time.” So that’s what we did. We parked in a visible area to the rear of this little tiny hot dog stand that was right next to the gas station.

So we were parked there in a marked black-and-white radio car writing our reports when both me and my partner saw this guy walk up to a customer who was putting gas in his car about thirty to forty feet away from us. The guy didn’t look at us. He just reached into the back of his waistband, pulled out an automatic, jacked a round into the gun, and stuck it into the customer’s stomach. The guy then took the customer’s wallet and started going through his pockets.

My training officer grabbed the radio and put out the emergency traffic that we had an armed robbery in progress and where we were. I don’t even remember drawing my gun, but by the time my training officer got off the air, I had my gun out and I was ready to go. He told me, “OK, wait till he gets away from the victim,” because the crook still had the gun in the guy’s stomach.

After a little while, the suspect finally looked over and saw us sitting there. My training officer said, “We’re going to let him walk away, and then we’re going to pull forward.” And that’s exactly what happened. The guy pretended like maybe we didn’t see this whole thing in front of us, put the gun down by his side, and started to walk away. As we started to pull forward in the car, the guy started to run. When he got to the curb, he slowed down, then ran out into the street. It’s a major street—four lanes across—and when he got to the middle of it, he turned around and started firing at us.

I was still sitting in the radio car with the door open, one foot on the ground. I knew the guy was shooting at us because I saw him shooting, but I didn’t really hear the rounds going off. The audible start-up and “BANG!” that usually happens when you pull the trigger wasn’t there. It was just a soft “pop, pop, pop.” He fired nine rounds at us—all misses. My partner fired four, and I fired two. At the time, I didn’t know my partner fired because I didn’t hear his shots. In fact, when it was over, I asked him, “Did you shoot, or was it just me?”

When the shooting started, there was this Housing Authority police unit right there, almost between us. When they saw what was happening, they just left. I remember them watching us in this gunfight, looking at us, and putting it in reverse. I remember their tires screeching as they left. I couldn’t believe it.

Another thing I remember is that when the guy turned and started firing, I got tunnel vision on him. I also remember that I had a sight picture on him as I was firing, because I remember seeing my front sights as I was shooting and wondering why he wasn’t falling. I remember actually thinking, “Why isn’t he falling?” Then I wondered, “Why is he still running?” because after he fired his rounds, he took off running again. It turns out that we hit him four times, but we didn’t know it because he just ran into the projects.

As soon as the guy disappeared into the projects, everything got loud. My partner said to me, “We’re not going to chase him. We got to get the victim and make sure he’s OK.” Not chasing the guy was a judgment call on his part, and it turned out to be a sound decision, because all the witnesses said that the guy went around the first corner and waited there to ambush us. He waited there for us for quite a while. It wasn’t until the first assisting unit got there that he got up from his ambush position. The witnesses said that when that first unit arrived, the guy took off running a little ways, then fell in some bushes and died. And that was probably a good minute to two minutes after we shot him.

Now we didn’t know any of that at the time. In fact, after he disappeared, I thought he was gone. I thought our rounds missed him, and I didn’t think we were going to find him because, traditionally, once suspects disappear in the projects, they’re gone. So I thought the incident was over. I noticed at that point that I was breathing real heavy, like I had just run a hundred yards, when I hadn’t moved even ten feet. Because I thought it was over, I started to calm down for a couple of minutes. Then the world started to fall apart again.

When the other units got there, we started to set up a crime scene, and some other guys went into the projects to try to find this guy. Well, when they located him, a miniriot broke out. Four to five hundred people came out of the projects, and our units started taking bottles and rocks. They were upset that we’d shot one of their people. We had to get the help from all the sheriff’s stations in the region, and then the city sent us one-hundred-plus officers right away. When the city units started showing up, a lot of the anger turned on them because some of the gangsters were telling people that some city officers had simply walked up to the guy where he lay and shot him for no reason. So the city units started taking bottles and rocks. It went from a real quick incident—a matter of seconds—with the shooting, then it mellowed for a couple of minutes, and then it turned into a major civil disturbance. I mean, we were standing there in the middle of hundreds of radio cars, hundreds of cops, two helicopters, and sirens everywhere. It was quite a production.

We were trying to maintain a crime scene where the shooting occurred. Other deputies were looking for where his rounds hit, for his expended shell casings, all that kind of stuff. City units were trying to maintain the scene where the guy fell. There were hundreds of angry people, and there were bottles and rocks flying in the projects. After about half an hour, they pulled my partner and me out of there and took us back to the station while the riot continued. About another half hour after that, the city units started taking people to jail, and things slowly started to calm down.

I had been a little bit worried about things when we were still back at the scene, but my training officer was real reassuring. He told me that I had done a good job and that I shouldn’t second-guess myself, because it was so cut-and-dried: armed robbery right there. Crook started shooting at us. That’s as clean a shooting as you can get. When he told me that, it was a big load off my mind, because I knew that if it wasn’t that way that he’d have told me so.

I got out of the academy in the springtime, completed my FTO program in the summer, and was patrolling by myself in the early fall when the shooting went down. It was a Friday, my first day back at work after my normal two days off. There was another guy on my shift, named Mike Mural, that I had gone to the academy with, so we were still full of excitement for our jobs, glad to be back at work on our Monday. It was a beautiful fall day. It was cool and the sun was out. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. In fact, I remember telling Mike what a beautiful day it was.

We took some calls that morning. We ate breakfast. We took a few more calls, then met to talk and write our reports that we were catching up on. When we finished up, he went off to his beat, and I went the other way to mine. Shortly after that, a burglary-in-progress call came out. Dispatch told us that there were two men trying to get into the sliding glass door of an apartment and that the complainant was inside the house with a small child.

Mike said he was en route, and I heard another unit say they were en route too. I was pretty far away, but I responded anyway because it was a felony in progress—one of those calls where more than just two people should go. Before I arrived, Mike broadcast that he was going to go out on two guys walking out of the complex that matched the description of the burglars. Then, a few seconds after that, he advised that he was in foot pursuit, and I heard the sound of the foot pursuit on the radio. He was gasping for breath, giving out directions, giving out descriptions of the suspects, and then the radio was quiet. Then the dispatcher prompted him, asked him to advise. No response. Prompted him again. No response. Some other units arrived on the scene. Then I got there, and we started to set up a perimeter on this large wooded area that was just adjacent to the apartment complex, because that was the direction the foot pursuit had been traveling before Mike’s radio went dead.

Soon thereafter, one of the officers on the scene broadcast that a citizen had advised him that he had seen a police officer being led into the woods at gunpoint. I was thinking, “Man, this is not good.” But instead of staying where I should and manning the perimeter, I said to myself, “This is my buddy. I got to go in and find him.” So I just trudged off into the woods looking for my buddy. I didn’t put out a broadcast of what I was doing; I just took off looking for Mike.

I had my gun out. I was walking slowly. Being careful. Being real deliberate. Looking around, trying not to stumble upon them and make whatever the situation was worse. There was a lot of commotion on the radio as I was walking. Other units were checking out an equipment shed at a baseball diamond on the other side of the woods, thinking they might have made it that far. Someone called for the SWAT team, and a supervisor called for an ambulance to respond to the scene. The radio was abuzz with all sorts of chatter. There were sirens wailing all over the place. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I couldn’t believe someone had taken Mike hostage. I couldn’t believe I was walking through the woods looking for my buddy who had disappeared.

Then I came to a small clearing and saw something worse than the worst nightmare I ever had. Just on the other side of the clearing, I saw Mike standing there with his hands up and some guy standing right in front of him holding a gun to his head. I could see that Mike’s holster was empty, so I figured the guy had disarmed Mike and was holding his own gun to his head. Mike’s back was facing toward me, so the guy could look past Mike and see me. Then the guy said, “You better get out of here or I’m going to blow his fucking head off!” I was in the open, so I took about three or four quick steps to the right through a bunch of thorns and tried to get behind a nearby tree. As I did that, the guy kind of shifted so he could use Mike as a shield. Now I really couldn’t believe what was happening. I just couldn’t believe that I was looking at this guy pointing a gun at Mike.

I tried to get on the radio to advise the other units, but I couldn’t get through, so I just put my radio away and we had a standoff. I remember thinking at that point that I was in a no-win situation. The guy kept telling me to get away, to get back, but I wasn’t going to leave. I came there, I found him, and I was not going to back off. I was not going to give ground. We stood there for about a minute or two. Then I told myself that something bad was going to happen sometime soon if I didn’t do something. The guy was looking back and forth. He would look at me, then he would look at Mike. Me, then Mike, back and forth, with the gun pointed at Mike’s head the whole time.

The guy wasn’t moving his head, just his eyes. He was trying to keep Mike like a shield between us, staying where he could make eye contact with me and see where I was at. At one point, when the guy shifted his eyes toward me, Mike reached up and grabbed the gun. When he grabbed it, he grabbed it around the cylinder. It wasn’t cocked, so that made it real hard for the guy to pull the trigger.

As soon as Mike grabbed the gun, I tore out of the bushes like a rhino. I put my gun in front of me, thinking that I had to shoot this guy as soon as I could. As I was running up, I could see that the guy wasn’t trying to shoot Mike. He was struggling with Mike to get the gun pointed at me, and he was trying to pull the trigger. I didn’t know it at the time, but the cylinder was half rotated. The guy had pulled the trigger far enough to start the cylinder rotating, but Mike had a grip on the cylinder that was keeping it from moving a round into the firing position. So the guy was trying with all his might to shoot me as I ran up, but Mike’s grip kept him from doing that.

When I got there, I stuck my gun into what I thought was the center of his stomach and pulled the trigger. It was almost like an instantaneous reaction. I ran there so fast that we had a collision. Boom, I got there, my gun went off, and we all fell to the ground like a bunch of bowling pins.

When we fell to the ground, the guy dropped the gun and Mike said, “Get the gun, get the gun!” So I reached over and just kind of swept it to the side, put my gun away, and then we commenced to pummeling the shit out of the guy. He was resisting at first, then he quit fighting, and we got the handcuffs on him. Once we got the cuffs on, it dawned on me that the guy was still alive. I could see a big powder burn on his shirt, so I raised it up. He was an obese guy, and I could see two holes on his big belly, an entry wound and an exit wound. There was a little bit of blood coming out of the holes, but I really couldn’t tell how bad he was hurt. It turns out that the gunshot wasn’t that bad at all. The round had gone in at an angle on one side of his belly, traveled between the dermis of the skin and the peritoneum, and went out the other side. It never entered his abdominal cavity, so it was basically just a superficial wound. Now I didn’t know any of this at the time. All I knew is that he was still alive and that sort of shocked me, given the fact that I’d just put a contact shot into his gut.

A few minutes later, some other officers arrived and one of them took the guy away. Then I remember saying something that was just totally stupid and irrelevant. I’d left the headlights on my car on from running code over to the scene, so I asked the other officers if they could send someone over to turn the headlights off. I don’t know why that thought even entered my mind. Why would I remember leaving my headlights on? I hadn’t even remembered leaving them on up to that point. I’d just been involved in a hostage situation and in a shooting, and I’m worried about the battery running dead on my car? Who knows?

But I was still pretty juiced up from what had happened. When I first spotted them in the clearing, I could feel these chemicals running through my body, like I’d just seen a lion or some other dangerous animal running loose. It felt like my body had just been charged with something, and it was very powerful. It wasn’t fear. I never felt any fear in the situation. That was pretty amazing because, like I said, what happened was worse than my worst nightmare, but I wasn’t afraid. It was like fear was not an option, like there was no room for the emotion of fear at the time.

I was so juiced up that I didn’t even realize that I was cut up pretty bad from running through the patch of briars to get behind that tree when I first spotted Mike and the guy. I had on a short-sleeved shirt, and some of the thorns tore my arm up, just scratched and lacerated the hell out of my right arm. It looked like shit, but during the situation, I hadn’t even realized I was injured, that I was bleeding. When I first spotted the cuts, I didn’t know where they came from. I said to myself, “How in the hell did this happen?” Then I looked around where I was at and figured out what happened.

After that, a supervisor came up to me and asked me to give him my gun. I was expecting that because we’d been told in the academy that it was department policy to hold the guns from officers who get involved in shootings as evidence. They told us that the gun would be taken away at the scene and that the officer would be given another gun right away, and that’s what happened that day. The supervisor took my gun and gave me another one to put in my holster.

Then my sergeant showed up, we walked back to his car, and we drove to Homicide to talk to the detectives.

More from Patrol

Both of the preceding shootings have unusual features besides the fact that the officers involved were so short in experience when they occurred. For example, although citizens attack police officers on a regular basis, one thing that crooks hardly ever do to officers is kidnap them. So when the officer in the second story found himself in the middle of the woods living something worse than his worst nightmare, he was involved in an event that occurs only once in a blue moon. It is therefore no wonder that he experienced such a strong sense of incredulity.

The first shooting included two unusual features. First, for obvious reasons, robbers rarely stick up victims who are standing only a few yards from a marked police car with two officers in it. The second unusual feature of this shooting concerns what happened after the smoke had cleared. Even though police gunfire has sparked many a riot in the last few decades, the vast majority of police shootings do not prompt any sort of civil unrest. So when a brand-new rookie witnesses a robbery that leads to a shooting that leads to a riot, he has indeed had quite a baptism by fire.

The lion’s share of the five-dozen-plus other shootings that happened when the officers I interviewed were on patrol were, in comparison to these two rookies’ shootings, ordinary events. But a few, in one way or another, were highly unusual. The stories in this section include shootings of both sorts, providing a more complete sense of the range of deadly circumstances that patrol officers can find themselves in, and highlighting some of the things that most police shootings have in common.

The first point of commonality across most shootings has to do with the distance between police officers and suspects. Although fictional portrayals of police shootings often place officers a substantial distance from the citizens with whom they do battle, the vast majority of real-life shootings involve a separation of a few yards or less, and in many cases less than an arm’s length. So the two-lane distance separating the first rookie from the suspect he shot was near the outer range of what typifies police shootings, and the extremely close quarters in which the second rookie fired was not at all unusual. Similarly close distances are involved in most of the shootings in this section (and in most of the shootings that make up the rest of this chapter as well).

Another thing that is common to most shootings is that officers usually fire only a small number of rounds. Although patrol officers occasionally shoot gobs of bullets, they usually fire fewer than a handful, and a single shot is quite common. In a related vein, most shootings happen quite quickly. Quite obviously, the time spent shooting when firing a single shot is quite brief, but human beings can pull a trigger multiple times in a single second, so officers can—and usually do—fire all the rounds they shoot in just a second or two.2 It is important to keep this in mind when considering the stories in this section (as well as the other stories in this chapter), because the pace of narratives is often much slower than the pace of the action as events unfolded in real time.

At this point, it is worthwhile to briefly revisit our second rookie’s shooting, for there is one aspect of it that deserves some mention—the fact that the suspect took his kidnapped partner’s gun from him. Although suspects almost never kidnap officers, they do try to disarm them on a fairly regular basis. A decent number of suspects succeed, but when they do, they typically shoot the officer in short order. Indeed just under 10 percent of officers murdered with firearms in the decade ending in the year 2000 were slain with their own guns, usually within moments of being disarmed.3 Because officers know that they are liable to be killed if they are disarmed, they often shoot suspects who try to take their weapons. Because suspects attempt to disarm officers on a regular basis, a sizable minority of police shootings occur in situations in which suspects try to take officers’ guns from them. In order to provide some sense of what a more typical disarming case looks like, this section includes a shooting in which the officer in question shot the suspect before he could complete his potentially lethal theft.

This chapter also talks about mistakes. The rules that govern officers’ use of deadly force do not require that an actual deadly threat be present before officers fire, only that officers have a reasonable belief that this is the case. The standard of reasonable belief allows officers to make what the law calls good faith mistakes in their use of deadly force. One sort of good faith mistake that officers sometimes make is shooting people who wield objects that appear to be deadly weapons, such as toy guns. Another sort of good faith mistake officers sometimes make is shooting unarmed individuals whose actions immediately prior to being shot led the officers to form the reasonable belief that they were in fact armed with a deadly weapon with which they were about to harm the officer or others.

Incidents in which officers mistakenly use deadly force against nonthreatening people are quite different from those exceptionally rare cases in which a brutal officer purposely shoots someone without cause, and readers should be careful to note the difference. This may be difficult, however, as many people have a hard time understanding shootings in which the person shot posed no actual deadly threat to anyone—particularly those cases in which the person was unarmed—because they believe officers should be able to easily discern real threats from innocuous action. But in many cases, it is not in fact easy for officers to determine whether an individual confronting them is armed or whether what an armed individual is carrying is a deadly weapon or some less harmful object. The nature of the problems that officers must deal with often is unclear: lighting often is poor, circumstances often are evolving (or devolving) rapidly, and officers often have to make decisions about whether to shoot in split seconds, before they have a chance to obtain all relevant information. So officers sometimes shoot when the facts established in the aftermath of incidents indicate that they really didn’t need to.4

The stories in this section shed light on this matter by relating two shootings in which officers came to believe they were in imminent peril when the people they shot, in fact, posed no deadly threat. Together, they illustrate how officers’ interpretations of citizens’ actions during tense, fast-moving, uncertain circumstances can lead them to believe that they must shoot to protect themselves or others from deadly threats that do not really exist.

But in the vast majority of cases in which officers fire, they do so to defeat real threats. In fact, only three of the officers I interviewed shot unarmed individuals, and fewer than a handful of others were involved in cases in which they mistook objects such as toy guns for deadly weapons. Consequently, most of the stories in this section (as well as the vast majority of those in the rest of the chapter) deal with shootings in which officers’ opponents in fact had deadly weapons, including one in which the suspect was armed with arguably the most unusual deadly weapon officers ever faced in the history of American law enforcement: a stolen army tank.

I was working a ten-hour shift that started at 9:00 on Halloween night when I got in my first shooting. I had taken my kids trick-or-treating, dropped them off back home, grabbed my gear, kissed the wife and kids good-bye, and went into work. I was working with my regular partner, and we figured it would be a busy shift, but it was cold out, and that really put a crimp on the trick-or-treaters. We had some calls at first, but after about 11:00 it was just dead. We couldn’t find anything—nobody walking around, nothing at all. Then, about 3:00 or so in the morning, we spotted something. I was driving. We had the heat on, but the windows open. I was going eastbound down this four-lane road real slow, five or ten miles an hour, just kind of daydreaming, looking around. We were coming up on some apartments when I noticed an open door on a car facing us on the other side of the street. I kind of gave my partner a shot in the shoulder ’cause he was fading in and out and said, “Hey Dave, there’s an open car door. Let’s check it out.”

As I was making a U-turn to come up behind the car, our headlights went across the open door. I saw two guys there, one in the seat of the car with a screwdriver, working on the steering column, and the other one squatting down next to him. The second guy was holding something I couldn’t make out in one hand and a lighter in the other that he was using to light up the interior of the car. The guy squatting was kind of tall and thin. The guy behind the steering wheel was really big, a real muscular-looking guy—I could tell by the size of his jacket. There wasn’t enough room to complete the U-turn, so we actually ended up facing the side of the other car at a slight angle, like a K minus the bottom leg, with our spotlights and headlights shining on the side of the car.

The guy who was squatting stood up real quick. We were both expecting these guys to beat feet out of there, so we were ready for a foot chase. Dave went to run around to the rear of the car to pin them in, and I was going to pin them the other way so that we could catch them before they ran. The thin guy, who had his back to me, dropped the stuff he was holding. I shouted for him to stop, and he kind of put his hands out to his side.

The other guy started to get out of the car, and I could see that he was wearing jeans, but no shirt under his big, black, 1950s Fonzie-style leather jacket. As he turned, I could see that he was a big, muscular, weight-lifter-type guy. As soon as I saw his build, I said to myself, “This guy is a parolee.” The other guy I wasn’t so sure about, but I was certain the big guy had done some time. I was thinking, “He doesn’t want to go back to the pen,” so I figured we had a fight on our hands.

I started to move around my open door to grab the thin guy ’cause I was pretty close to him. As I was doing this, the big guy took two quick steps toward the back of the car—where Dave was heading to cut him off—and he reached back to the rear of his right side, which was facing me. This movement caught my eye, and I saw the outline of his hand going onto the grip of a pistol—some type of semiautomatic—that was tucked in the waistband of his jeans. I start yelling, “GUN!!” to let Dave know what was going on. As I was yelling, I started to draw my gun, and the big guy started to pull his gun out. I could see that it had a long slide on it, and I thought, “Holy shit! This guy’s got a .45!”

Everything started to slow down at that point. I was really worried that he was going to shoot Dave, and I wanted to shoot him before he did, but I couldn’t seem to make my body move fast enough. He seemed to be moving slowly, too; his gun was coming out slow. I fired a round as soon as I got my gun out of my holster. I saw the muzzle flash and some smoke. The shot sounded real muffled, not like a regular gunshot. Then I heard my casing hit the windshield of my squad car, slide down, and hit the windshield wiper. I brought my gun up to eye level to take a second shot, but before I could pull the trigger, Dave ran into the guy at full speed. He grabbed the gun as it was coming up, pushed it down, and tackled the guy into the trunk of the car that they were trying to steal.

Dave and the big guy fell off the trunk and onto the ground. As they were fighting, I heard the gun hit the ground and slide on the cement. The other suspect then started to turn and face toward me. I had closed the ground between the two of us as I was shooting, so I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and shirt and slammed him onto the hood of the car. I put my gun in the back of his neck and told him not to move or I was going to shoot him. At that point, time started to return to normal. The slow-motion stuff stopped. Then I got on the radio and called for help.

It turns out the round I fired went through the big guy’s right forearm, into his stomach, traveled around his hip bone, went into his colon, and ended up somewhere near his scrotum. He was injured pretty bad, but at the time I wasn’t sure I’d hit him because he was still fighting with Dave. They were on the ground. The suspect was on his stomach, and Dave had him from behind in a choke hold. He was holding on for dear life. Just riding him, basically. He had one arm around the suspect’s neck, and he was trying to pin the guy’s arm down with his other one. He had his legs wrapped around the suspect’s waist and thighs, and they were sort of rolling around. I looked at Dave and asked him if he was OK. I thought maybe I shot him by mistake because he was so close when I fired.

He said, “I don’t think I’m hit,” and started to look at his legs as he was fighting the guy.

I kept asking, “Are you OK? Are you OK?” He said he was OK, so I asked him where the gun was. He told me he thought the guy had fallen on top of it, and I thought, “Oh, my God, he’s still got the gun!”

I leaned down and put my gun into the suspect’s side to put a couple of contact shots into his ribs. I’d seen a training tape during lineup one night about doing contact shots to the head and the ribs. It explained how you can be pretty sure that when you press the barrel against the bone that the bullets will go right in where you press, so in close quarters you don’t have to worry about bullets flying around. So that’s what I was thinking—put my gun in this guy’s ribs and put a couple of shots into him sideways so no rounds would come through and hit my partner.

Just as I was about to pull the trigger, Dave spun the guy over and the suspect’s arms came free. There was no gun in his hands, so I held my fire. I could see that the suspect was bleeding from his arm and stomach. There was blood all over the place. That’s when I realized I’d hit him with my first shot. The guy was still fighting with Dave, but Dave was holding his own. I just held onto the thin guy until the rest of our squad arrived about a minute later. They took the thin guy from me, cuffed him, and helped Dave cuff the guy I shot. He kept fighting, even after they got the cuffs on him. He didn’t even know he’d been shot until one of the other officers told him, “Quit fighting. You’ve been shot!” Then he looked down, realized that he had been shot, and gave up.

After the guy finally gave up, my attention turned to finding the gun. I looked everywhere around where he and Dave had fought, but I couldn’t find it. I was really, really afraid because I knew I saw a gun, but I was worried that maybe I saw something that wasn’t there. I was thinking, “The media is going to love that,” and worrying about how I was going to explain my actions to the detectives. As I was thinking this stuff, one of the other officers found the gun on the other side of the car the suspects were trying to steal. It was on the street by the sidewalk. It had gone across the trunk and landed on the other side when Dave tackled him. When I saw that gun, I had a sense of relief like you wouldn’t believe.

My emotions changed pretty quickly, though, because it turned out the gun was a Crossman air pistol. Damn replica of Colt .45. It even says “Replica .45” on it. You can go to K-Mart and buy them. I thought, “Why did this idiot pull a BB gun?” After it was all over, Dave and I discussed what he was planning on doing with the gun. We were thinking maybe he was going to try to bluff us and escape. Maybe he was going to try to throw it because he was on parole and didn’t want to get caught with it. Who knows? Whatever he was thinking, he’s obviously not the brightest guy in the world.

Thirty days later, Dave killed an ex-con who attacked him, and seven months after that we got in another shooting. We were working day watch when a call came out on a disturbance at a house that we knew. Dave and I had been there numerous times. We had arrested a guy there who was a crystal meth user. He was an asshole, always doing something to get us called out there. He lived in a camper on the bed of a pickup in the driveway of his uncle’s house, a beautiful home. The house is in the area we usually work, but we weren’t working that beat that day. The call went out to some other units, but we decided to respond because we knew the guy. So Dave drove like a maniac. I mean, he broke a thousand vehicle code sections. The guy can drive. He went ninety-some miles an hour. He was flying. The dispatch said the suspect was armed with a screwdriver that he was using to pry the bars off the window to get into the house. It gave his description, said he was wearing a red shirt and blue jeans. We knew who it was.

We worked out a plan so that when we got there, Dave would drop me of in front, then take the car around back in the alley. That way, if the guy took off when he saw me, we’d have him trapped. We’d take him to jail and put an end to these repeat calls for a while. Unbeknownst to us, a few days prior he’d threatened some other cops with a knife. They had to mace him. He spent a couple of days in custody, talked to some mental health people and such, then they released him. Since getting out, he’d been talking about how he was going to kill the next cop he came in contact with. All this stuff had gone on the last couple of nights, but nobody put anything in the books about it or anything, so we didn’t know about it.

When we got there, we saw that one of our K-9 guys, Dan Franklin, was already there. Dave let me off by Dan’s patrol car, which still had the dog in it, and he took off to get to the alley. When I started walking up the driveway, I saw Dan fighting with the guy in the backyard of the house. He had him by the neck from behind like he was trying to put a carotid on him or just hold him, and they were banging against the side of the house. There was no easy way for me to get to him because there were some fences between us. The people who let Dan in weren’t there anymore, so I took off running along the side of another fence that went back to where they were fighting. There were actually two fences—a six-foot wooden fence and a three-foot chain-link fence—that were up against each other.

I pulled my pepper spray so that when I got to where they were fighting, I could hop the fences and help Dan get the guy into custody. I was running full speed through the yard—I couldn’t see how the fight was going because of the six-foot wood fence—and as I got parallel to the camper, I heard, “BOOM,” a gunshot, loud as can be, right in the area where they were fighting. I figured Dan had shot the guy because he pulled the screwdriver and tried to stab him. I jumped up on the chain-link fence to look over the wood fence to see what was going on. I dropped my mace as I was coming up and drew my gun ’cause I figured Dan might need me to cover down on the guy while he cuffed him up.

When I looked over, I saw a whole different scenario from the one I was expecting. The suspect was sitting upright on his butt, legs spread. Dan was sitting between his legs in front of him. The suspect had Dan from behind. He had Dan in a headlock with his left arm, and he had Dan’s Smith & Wesson 5903 in his right hand. He was trying to turn it toward Dan’s head. Dan had grabbed the gun with his left hand and was trying to push it away from his head. With his right hand, Dan was reaching down, trying to pull his backup gun from his ankle holster. Because one round had already been fired, I was thinking that Dan had already been shot once. I was about twelve feet away, standing on the chain-link fence, looking right at them. They were facing right at me. I saw the whole picture in detail. I saw Dan reaching for his backup gun. I saw that it was a Walther PPK, just by the handle of it. I saw Dan’s 5903. I saw the suspect’s hands. I saw the three fingers and thumb of his right hand around the pistol grip, and I saw his finger on the trigger. I saw that it was Dan’s left hand on his 5903, and I saw fear in his eyes. Dan’s head was centered on the suspect’s chest, so all I could see of the suspect was his head and his gun arm.

He looked up, saw me, and said, “Oh, shit.” Not like, “Oh, shit, I’m scared.” But like, “Oh, shit, now here’s somebody else I gotta kill”—real aggressive and mean. Instead of continuing to push the gun at Dan’s head, he started to try to bring it around on me. This all happened real fast—in milliseconds—and at the same time, I was bringing my gun up. Dan was still fighting with him, and the only thought that came through my mind was, “Oh, dear God, don’t let me hit Dan.” I fired five rounds. My vision changed as soon as I started to shoot. It went from seeing the whole picture to just the suspect’s head. Everything else just disappeared. I didn’t see Dan anymore, didn’t see anything else. All I could see was the suspect’s head.

I saw four of my five rounds hit. The first one hit him on his left eyebrow. It opened up a hole, and the guy’s head snapped back, and he said, “Ooh,” like, “Ooh, you got me.” He still continued to turn the gun toward me, and I fired my second round. I saw a red dot right below the base of his left eye, and his head kind of turned sideways. I fired another round. It hit on the outside of his left eye, and his eye exploded, just ruptured and came out. My fourth round hit just in front of his left ear. The third round had moved his head even further sideways to me, and when the fourth round hit, I saw a red dot open on the side of his head, then close up. I didn’t see where my last round went. Then I heard the guy fall backwards and hit the ground. He was still holding Dan’s gun in his right hand when he hit. A second later, Dan jumped up, holding his backup, reached down and took his Smith & Wesson back from the suspect.

I got on the air, put out a broadcast that we’d had a shooting, and hopped the fence. The guy was obviously dead. I asked Dan if the suspect had fired his gun, and he said, “Yeah, he tried to shoot me.” I said, “OK, let’s inspect you.” So as we were waiting for people to show up, we looked at his arms, looked at his legs, making sure he hadn’t been shot. As we were inspecting Dan, Dave came running up. He’d had the windows rolled up and air conditioner on, so he hadn’t heard any of the shots. All he’d heard was my “shots fired” broadcast. He looked over at me and asked, “Was this you?”

He said, “Go ahead out front. The sergeant will be here in a couple of minutes.”

I hopped the fence, then Dan hopped the fence, and we just went out and sat on the curb while Dave stood over the body. Then my boss came, same sergeant who had been at the other two shootings. He separated us, and after a few minutes we went down to headquarters to talk to the detectives one more time.

It was back in ’86, and I was working the area around Sherman Park, which the FBI said was the most violent three-square-mile area in the United States. There were more homicides and more police activity and more police shootings in that area than any other area in the United States for three years running in the late ’80s, so it was pretty heavy at that time.

We’d just arrived in our patrol area after clearing midnight roll call when we saw somebody lying down on the sidewalk. Looked like he was a drunk down. When we got out of the car, I saw that this drunk guy had a hole in him about the size of my fist from the back to the front and that there was a shotgun shell laying next to him. We called an RA unit in, a supervisor showed up, and we started setting up for a homicide scene when another round went off, probably about a hundred yards away. It sounded like it was probably another shotgun round, because it was real loud and it wasn’t a sharp crack like a rifle round.

I was working with a probationer, and I told the sergeant that we should head to the area the shot came from because we had no units over there, and I thought that maybe the shot was related to the scene we were sitting on. So my partner and I went down there, and lo and behold, there was another body on the ground. So we put out the information that we had some clown running around shooting people. After that, we could hear shots being fired down the block, going to the west and coming back up north again.

We got some more units there, and we got the whole area basically cordoned off. We got RA units in there, taking care of the people who were shot, and set up for Homicide for those that were killed. We talked to a couple of civilians, who were telling us that they saw a guy with a black coat walk up the right side, the east side, of the street a little ways from us, and it looked like he went into one of the apartment buildings up there. So we decided to take a team of four, maybe five, officers and clear the street as far as we could in order to make the perimeter smaller and more manageable.

We were walking, clearing the area house by house as we went along. Even though it was real early in the morning, a lot of people were out in the neighborhood. With people all over the place, it was going pretty slowly. Then, finally, we heard some screaming and saw somebody running up the street about four or five houses in front of us. Three of us ran up there—me, my probationer, and a guy named Greg Davis. It turned out to be a fistfight, where a friend of one of the people who was shot was beating up on this other guy who he thought was the guy who shot his friend. Turned out the beating victim wasn’t involved in the shooting. He was just one of the people standing out there watching.

So we were breaking up the fight when Greg Davis saw somebody standing in an alcove of this nearby apartment building. The alcove was all brick and concrete, with a walkway going through it and a roof overhead—it looked like a bunker. When he saw the guy, Greg said, “It’s him, he’s got a shotgun!” Then the suspect came up on Greg with a sawed-off, pistol-grip shotgun. He had a bandoleer of 00-buck under his jacket, which I could see as he raised the shotgun. Greg was about twenty-five feet from the guy. I was probably fifteen or twenty feet from Greg and probably about thirty feet from the suspect. I didn’t have a real good view of the suspect, but I could see the bandoleer, and I could see the shotgun come out between the sides of the little entry to the alcove.

Greg had a shotgun, and he fired two rounds real quick—“boom, boom”—at the suspect, but the way the suspect was in this little alcove, he was pretty much protected from the rounds. The rounds were gonna hit the concrete; they weren’t gonna penetrate where he was. The other officers and I were out in the open, and I thought Greg had some protection from this brick wall next to these bushes he was standing by, so I told him to slow down his fire and let us get some cover, to keep the suspect pinned in the alcove. Greg did that, but his shotgun jammed after he fired his third round. It turned out that there was no wall next to the bushes he was standing by, so he was out in the open when his shotgun jammed.

He yelled out, “It’s jammed!” and the suspect stepped out into the open a little bit. As he fired a round or two, I fired three rounds. I knew I hit him good—because I could hear the rounds hit, like a “smack” on the skin, and he went down instantly—but I also knew I had hit him low, maybe the pelvis area, because I was looking over the top of my sights when I fired. I ran toward Greg and told him to get rid of the shotgun and draw his handgun. Then we went over to where I thought this wall was. Like I said, it turned out to be bushes, so we really had no protection at all, but from the bushes we could look straight into the alcove opening and see the suspect clearly. Around that time, there was another round fired from my left side. Came from my probationer who basically fired into the alcove where the suspect was. He didn’t hit anything—it just bounced off the concrete.

The suspect wasn’t moving anymore, so now somebody had to go up and check him out. By that time, other officers had arrived, and we were putting together a plan for two of them to slowly move up on the suspect. But before we got the plan squared away, another officer started going up there by himself. As that officer got to the opening of the alcove, I could see that the suspect was obviously not out of commission, because I saw him start to move the shotgun. He was holding the pistol grip in his left hand, and he had his right hand on the pump handle, and he was starting to lean forward. He was doing that just as the officer started to lean around the wall to check him out. I yelled for the officer to move back, but he didn’t hear me and continued forward. When the officer looked around the wall, the suspect brought the shotgun up. I thought he was going to shoot the officer in the face, so I fired one more round. It hit the suspect in the chest, knocked him back, the shotgun went off, and the officer fired one round from the shotgun—almost a contact shot—into the guy’s side. He died at the scene.

The other officer was upset with me for firing that last shot—thought I fired too close to him. He didn’t realize that the guy was trying to shoot him because even though he was on top of the guy, he never heard the suspect’s shotgun go off. We couldn’t find where this guy fired—into the wall, across the street, or anything like that. We couldn’t figure out where the round went. I was saying that he fired, Greg said he fired, but the officer that was up there was upset, saying the suspect didn’t fire. So everybody was a little tense about that.

After everything was secured, they transported us back to the station, where we gave our statements to the shooting team. We found out what happened to that last shotgun blast when we came back to the scene for the walk-through. Some detectives from the shooting team asked the officer, “Where were you standing?” then put him where he’d been. He told them that the guy couldn’t have fired a round when he was there because he’d have heard it. Then they pointed up to the ceiling of the alcove and showed him a bunch of pellets in this crease where one part of the ceiling overlapped with another. Turns out the blast went over his head by about a foot. When he realized that, he said, “Oh, my God!” Kind of a rude awakening for him.

When it was all over, it turned out that the guy had killed two people—shot five total—before we found him. We knew he’d shot at least two when we caught up to him, and that gave a bit of a sense of fear because it was obvious to me that this guy wasn’t finished killing people and that he was waiting for us. But there was also something humorous about what happened. It was when Greg Davis’s shotgun jammed. After telling us that it had jammed, he said, “Goddamn shotgun. I knew I should’ve changed that damn ammo,” as he threw it to the ground. We had old ammo, and what had happened was we had gone to the sergeant before the shift started and asked him for some new shotgun rounds.

We’re supposed to trade our rounds in if they’re old or scuffed up, and some of Greg’s were. Greg had gone to the sergeant that night and asked him for some new shotgun rounds. He looked at Greg’s rounds, and he said, “Oh, your rounds are good enough.” What occurred during the shooting was that the brass on the fourth round that was in there was oblong, and it jammed the shotgun. So that was the remark that I remember Greg saying: “I should’ve got some new ammo.” Right in the middle of a shoot-out, he threw the shotgun down and said, “Should’ve got some new ammo.” So after it was all over and we were talking about what had happened, I thought that was sort of humorous.

I was at home nursing my daughter right before the shooting. She was about four months old, so I would take my dinner breaks at home in order to nurse her. I finished up about nine o’clock, gave her to my husband, and went back on patrol. Right after I told dispatch I was back in service, I was driving through a parking lot, and this Hispanic lady came running up to my car. She was in a big panic, screaming something about her husband chasing this guy who didn’t pay for his dinner at their restaurant. I got her calmed down a little bit, and she told me that she and her husband owned this Mexican restaurant next to where we were talking and that the guy her husband was chasing had a gun. She was terrified that her husband had gone after this guy who had a gun because he didn’t have one himself. I got descriptions and the direction the guy and her husband were running in, broadcast what I had over the air, and went looking for her husband.

I hadn’t gone very far—maybe two blocks—when some citizens flashed their headlights and flagged me down in front of this car dealership. When I pulled into the front end of the parking lot and stopped, I could see a commotion about a hundred feet away at the back. One of the citizens, a Mexican guy, pointed to the back of the lot and said, “They’re in the back, they’re over there, they’re over there!” When I got out of my car, I saw two other Hispanics in restaurant outfits fighting on the ground with this guy who matched the description given by the woman who flagged me down. He was a white guy wearing a jacket.

It was obvious that these were the guys I was looking for, so I broadcast what I had, drew my gun, and started to move toward the back of the lot. Normally, I would have waited for some backup before doing anything in a case where I had a guy with a gun, but I was worried that the guy might hurt the other citizens if I waited. When I got to a position about thirty or forty feet from where the fight was, the two Mexican guys let go and started to move away from the white guy.

Then the white guy stood up real quick. Not all the way, but in a low crouch. I yelled at him to get back down on the ground, but he didn’t move, so I kept yelling, “Get on the ground! Get on the ground!” Then, all of a sudden, he stood straight up and started sprinting toward me. As he was running at me, he started yelling, “Shoot me! Shoot me! Shoot me!” over and over.

When he started to run at me, I started backpedaling as fast as I could go. I kept yelling, “Get on the ground! Get on the ground!” as I was moving back with my gun pointed at him. He kept yelling, “Shoot me, shoot me, shoot me, shoot me,” as he was closing in on me. I don’t have a clear memory of what happened next, but the citizens who where right there all told the investigators that the guy reached across his body and into his coat with his right hand. All I remember is that I thought that he was going to kill me, so I shot him. I wanted to go home that night, that was all that mattered.

I thought that the guy was about eight to ten feet away when I pulled the trigger, but the citizens said we were almost touching, that we were close enough to shake hands. They even remember that I had the trigger indexed as I was backpedaling. Part of their statement was that they thought I was going to die if I didn’t put my finger on the trigger and shoot, that the guy was going to kill me. At any rate, right after I fired, the guy fell to the ground, holding his stomach. Then another officer who had arrived just as the shooting went down ran up, patted the guy down, and handcuffed him.

I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to stand there and watch the guy bleed to death, so I backed away and walked down this little driveway toward where some other officers were coming in. My lieutenant came up and asked me to tell him what happened. I briefly told him, then I gave him my gun because I knew that was part of the procedure. He told me to go sit in the car with one of the officers on the scene, who had been in a shooting before. I talked with him a little bit about what I could remember. Then the lieutenant told me I could go, and the other officer drove me back to the station.

About an hour or two later, somebody told me the guy I shot didn’t have a gun on him. That made me feel pretty bad. It turns out that the guy’s a drunk and mentally ill. He’d been sitting around the restaurant that night, looking at a picture of his dead nephew lying in a coffin. He kept reaching into the pocket of his coat as if he had a gun in there and telling the workers that he was going to shoot them. I think the guy wanted to die. That’s why he ran at me shouting for me to shoot him, but hearing that I had just shot an unarmed man made me feel shitty.

I was supposed to get off at seven o’ clock that night, so about 6:45 I was in the locker room taking my gun belt off. I still had my radio turned on, and a call came out that an army tank was running things over not too far away. I thought, “You know, that’d be a pretty cool call to go to,” so I put my gun belt back on and jumped in my car. Another officer jumped in the passenger seat and off we went. I started driving through some streets where the tank had already been, and I couldn’t believe what I saw. There were crushed cars, knocked-over fire hydrants, and telephone poles down. I was just like, “Holy cow!” I remember thinking it looked like something you’d see on CNN out of Bosnia or something, not here.

When I got to the intersection of DeSoto and Mesa Vista, I looked to my left and saw a tank rolling down the street. It had dragged a streetlight that came off when the driver turned the corner, leaving the pole blocking the intersection. To avoid it, I drove through the driveway of the Jack in the Box on the corner and got behind the tank. There was a crapload of other cops there too, so we just kind of traded places back and forth, all in a line abreast from the intersection, and then down onto the freeway. We were all just following along, kind of looking through our windows at each other, going like, “Hey, how you doing?” because there was nothing much we could do.

I remember thinking that the guy was either gonna stop and give up, or some knucklehead was gonna have to jump up there and shoot the driver. He had already run over a van that was occupied with civilians, and he’d been trying to ram police cars throughout the pursuit. Anytime somebody would get up close to him, he’d turn toward ’em and try to hit ’em. Of course, our cars were faster than he was, so we were able to get out of the way, but he was definitely trying to kill some cops. Somebody got on the radio and asked if SWAT could do anything. They said they couldn’t, so there was no way we could stop him. If he wanted to keep going, he was gonna keep going. I knew that eventually he would have to stop somewhere, but I didn’t know what was gonna happen then. So I figured that there were only two options: either he was gonna give up or somebody was gonna shoot him.

Tom Jackson, one of the guys in the pursuit, was a tank commander in Desert Storm, so I figured if anyone could figure out some way to stop the guy, it’d be him. He had actually been ordered to go up behind the tank by his sergeant, who knew he had tank experience, so he was in the unit closest to the tank, along with a sergeant and another officer.

After we’d been on the freeway for a little while, the guy started to drive toward the center divider, heading for the oncoming traffic. I thought, “Oh, shit, there he goes.” We were heading southbound, and no one had stopped the northbound traffic. It was still pretty much rush hour, and I knew that there wasn’t enough room for both his tank and all the traffic in the northbound lanes, so somebody was going to get run over once he made it over to the other side. I was thinking that he was about to kill a bunch of people.

When he hit the Jersey wall separating the north and southbound traffic, he sent up a huge cloud of dust that I couldn’t see through. When the dust settled a few seconds later, I could see that he had high-centered the tank on the center divider wall so that the left tracks were on the northbound side and the right tracks were on the southbound lanes. He kept moving the tank back and forth, just crushing the concrete wall underneath him. I stopped my car just a little forward of the tank and jumped out.

There were cops all over the place, and by the time I got over to the tank, Tom Jackson and a robbery detective named Henry Beard were already up on it. The tank was still moving, going back and forth, crabbing along the wall, crushing the concrete. I stood there for a few seconds. Then it stopped for a moment. At that point, a guy named Bill Kingwood boosted me up onto the tank. Just as I got up on it, it started moving again. When that happened, I got a little bit worried because I didn’t want to get caught in the track or get flipped off the tank and end up under the track.

I was able to hang on and get all the way up onto the turret, where I felt a little bit safer. The tank was still moving pretty violently, but I got a handhold on a bar up there, so I was pretty stable where I was—even though the three of us were constantly swaying as the tank was jerking left and right and moving forward along the wall. I was on Tom’s right side, which put me on the southbound side of the freeway, just hanging on. He was trying to open the periscope hatch, which is about an eight-inch-long by four-inch-wide hatch in the middle of the big hatch that you actually climb through to get inside the tank. From the inside, you can open it and stick a little periscope up to see what’s going on outside. I let go of my handhold and pulled my gun out when Tom got the periscope hatch open. Just then, the tank lurched, and I almost fell off. Tom reached out and grabbed me. Then I put my gun back in my holster and grabbed the handhold again. We looked down through the periscope hatch, but we couldn’t see the driver, so Tom reached inside and popped the lever that opens the big hatch. When he got the big hatch open, I found another hold for my left hand, grabbed it, and pulled my gun out again.

When we looked inside, the only thing we could see of the driver was the top of the back of his head and the tops of his shoulders. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and I could see his shoulders moving back and forth as he was turning the levers to steer the tank. We started yelling at him, and he looked back up at us, so he knew we were up there, and he knew we had the hatch open. The guy looked real tweakerish, like a methamphetamine user. He had long, stringy, greasy hair down to his shoulders, a bad complexion, real dirty, not quite a transient, but on the way there. We were yelling at him to stop the tank, to let us see his hands, to come out of there, just the general police stuff. All three of us were yelling at the same time. In fact, the next day all three of us were hoarse, so I guess we were yelling that stuff pretty loud. After a little while, the driver took his eyes off us and looked forward again. He never looked back up at us again.

I know it was real noisy up there from the tank engine and from the concrete breaking underneath us, but I don’t remember hearing any of that noise. I could hear the three of us yelling, plus I had a brief conversation with my sergeant, who was standing on the ground to the right side of the tank, that sounded just like two people chatting at a table. I looked over at him and said, “I’m gonna have to bust a cap in this guy.” He looked back at me and said, “You gotta do what you gotta do.” I know we were yelling because I know it was loud, but it sounded like we were just talking.

I remember a strong smell of hydraulic fluid, ’cause the guy had popped a hydraulic line when he hit the wall. I also remember looking up and seeing all the officers standing on the freeway and all the traffic going by, but it didn’t seem like things were moving very fast. I know the traffic going northbound was still going at a pretty good clip, but when I looked up and saw the cars, it wasn’t like they were whipping past like they’d normally be. Another thing that was weird was that I looked over where the other officers were on the ground a few times, and sometimes I would see them, but sometimes they weren’t there. I don’t really know how to describe it other than to say it was a like a strobe light effect. I remember looking around and thinking, “Wow, this is pretty cool.” Then I started thinking, “What the hell are you thinking about that for? There’s a guy inside the tank. Think about him.” It was odd, but I remember thinking those things. I was like, “What the hell are you thinking about this for now?”

Then I heard Tom yelling some more, and I saw him pull out his OC to spray it into the tank. While he did that, I was thinking, “Oh, crap, that’s just gonna screw up the whole inside of that tank, and we still gotta get in there.” I know how that stuff affects me, and it’s not a good thing. I thought that if we ended up having to go in there, I was gonna have to fight the guy while Tom stopped the tank, and I didn’t want to fight this guy inside a tank full of OC. I was about to knock Tom’s hand away so that he couldn’t spray the inside of the tank when he pulled it back and put it away. He told me later on that he had thought the same stuff I was thinking about the OC, so that’s why he pulled it away and put it back.

I was thinking that we were getting pretty close to where we were going to have to shoot this guy because Tom had to get inside the tank and stop it before it made it all the way over the center divider. Based on the way the tank was moving, I knew that he wasn’t gonna stay on that wall forever, and we were gonna come off the wall and into the northbound traffic pretty soon. We had to do something before he started rolling again, but none of us wanted to go down into the tank because we didn’t know if the driver had guns with him, and we also didn’t know if there was anybody else in the tank with him. I was pretty sure that one of three of us up there on the tank was gonna shoot him if he didn’t give up. I just didn’t know it was gonna be me.

I stuck my gun into the tank and yelled at the guy, “Hey, last chance. Stop the tank or I’m gonna shoot!” Just then, the tank lurched real heavily to the left toward the oncoming traffic. I thought he had finally broken enough of the concrete to where we were on our way to the northbound lanes. It turns out that the left track had come off the tank at that time, but I didn’t know that until it was all over. I thought that he was about to drive into the oncoming traffic, so I aimed my gun at the back of his head and pulled the trigger. I didn’t want to miss him because I didn’t want the bullet to bounce around on all that steel in there ’cause with my luck, I figured it’d bounce back up and pop me right between the eyes.

Just as I pulled the trigger, he moved his head forward and to the left a little bit, so I knew the bullet wasn’t gonna hit his head. I heard the round go off, but it wasn’t real loud. It sounded exactly like it does at the firing range when you have mufflers on your ears. Then I saw the bullet strike the guy’s right shoulder. I actually saw the projectile hit his shoulder, I saw the hole open up, I saw the blood spurt out, I saw my slide come back, and I saw my casing come out of my pistol. I thought that was pretty weird, seeing all that. Then my next thought was, “Oh, shit, now I’m gonna get sued.” I wasn’t afraid of getting sued; it was just a thought that crossed my mind. I knew that officers who shoot people sometimes get sued. I don’t know why it went through my mind, but it did. Then the tank stopped moving.

A few seconds later, Tom told me to go down into the tank, so I hopped on in. Once I was down inside, I could see that the guy had fallen forward but that he was still in a seated position with his hands on his thighs. I could see that he had no gun, so I put my gun away, put on my rubber gloves, and felt for a pulse. I couldn’t feel anything. As I was doing that stuff, Tom came in, checked the rest of the tank to make sure there were no more suspects inside, then told me to shut the tank off. He told me how to do it. Then he grabbed the guy and pulled him to the side so I could lean over and pull the levers. It got real quiet when I shut the tank down.

I looked over and saw that the guy was still bleeding a little bit. I thought, “How do we get him out of here?” Then I reached over him, and I grabbed both of his hands in both of mine and started pulling him up. When I got to a point where I was standing up in the turret with him right in front of me, all this blood started spurting out all over the place. By that time, other officers had climbed up onto the tank, and one of them reached down and stuck his finger in the hole in his shoulder to stop the blood flow. I thought, “Well, what do we do now?” Then a bunch of hands reached down through the hatch, grabbed him, and just sucked him right out. Tom and I sat inside there for a few minutes. Then I thought, “This is boring,” so I got out and jumped off the tank. One of the sergeants there grabbed me, threw me in his car, and drove me back to the station.

I was working a crime suppression detail with Roger, my regular partner. Our job was to go into the housing projects and gang areas that were known for narcotics activity and see what was going on. At about 2145, we were cruising through a place called Kennedy Court, a high-crime area with a lot of crack cocaine dealers. Roger was driving. We spotted these two guys at the corner who were making some type of exchange. Automatically, we thought narcotics. They saw us, turned, and started walking away. Roger pulled up just behind them as I opened up the patrol car door. I asked them, “Hey, guys, what’s going on?” One of them replied, “Nothing.” So I asked, “Have you all got any ID on you?” The other guy then said, “We’re just going to the store.” And I said, “Well, that’s fine. I understand that, but could I still see some ID?” About that time, the guy who said they were going to the store took off running. I figured he had dope on him, so I took off after him, leaving the other guy behind. I was chasing him down the sidewalk. Roger was in the car so he pulled ahead, then swung the car to block the guy in before he got to the corner. I had been about ten feet behind the guy as I was chasing him, but I caught up to him when Roger cut him off.

I was just about to grab him, couldn’t have been more than three feet away, when the guy turned around and shot me. I never saw the gun. He was a black guy, the gun was black, and it was dark out. All I remember is that when he turned around, he was firing. I don’t remember seeing the muzzle flash, but I did hear the round go off. It was kind of muted though, not as loud as it should be. The bullet hit me in the inside of my right forearm. It didn’t really hurt, but it stung, like somebody had slapped me real hard.

As soon as I got hit, I yelled, “I’m hit!” Then I remember spinning around, falling down, taking my gun out of my holster, getting up, drawing down on the guy as he ran away, hearing Roger shooting at the guy, then seeing the guy on the ground. Roger went over to him, got the gun away, and cuffed him up. Then Roger came back to the car to check on me, and we started arguing about who was going to get on the radio to tell the other units what had happened and where we were at. I guess he thought that I was hurt pretty bad, but I didn’t feel I was injured bad at all. I knew I was hit, but I figured I could still do my job. So we had a little argument:

Back and forth like that for a few seconds, then I finally got on the radio and advised dispatch about the shooting.

Other marked units started arriving just a short time later. They made sure the guy was secure and kept the crowd that had gathered away from the scene. I was feeling real hyper, just walking around. Then a detective arrived, and he made me sit down in the patrol car. He asked me how I was and I said, “I’m fine.”

He said, “No, you’re not! Look at your arm! You’ve been shot! Just calm down.”

I replied, “I know. But I’m fine, I’m fine.” I lost that argument, and they took me to the hospital. Turns out it was a through-and-through wound. No bones hit. No serious damage. I was out of there in a couple of hours.

Before going to the hospital, the detectives asked me if I had fired my gun. I told them I hadn’t. They checked my gun, and it turned out one round was missing. To this day, I don’t remember firing my gun, but I did. All I remember is getting shot, spinning around, drawing, coming up, Roger shooting, and then seeing the guy on the ground. The only thing I can think is that I just reacted to my training. I have a real good friend who was one of the instructors in the academy. We’ve had some long talks about officer survival and what happens in life-threatening situations. He’s helped me out a whole lot in how to think when you go into situations like that, because he’s been there, and he’s told me that sometimes you just respond automatically. It’s like someone presses this button and you just shoot. So when the guy shot me, he pressed that button, and I just responded.

The detail we were working was this combination antigang–crime suppression deal, where the city councilmen call the chief and say, “Hey, I’ve got a constituent here saying she’s having problems with this gang-banger down the street. Send me some guys over here.” So we go and flood the whole neighborhood with officers and just basically shut it down for a couple of days. Pick up everybody we can, put as many people in jail as we can.

Johnny and I just seemed to attract criminals. We just picked the right guys, and one night we spotted these two guys about a block from us looking like they were exchanging some money, so we decided to stop and check them out. We were in a known dope area, so we figured they might be doing a dope deal. They spotted us coming up in our car, and they started to walk away on this cross street. We lost sight of them for a few seconds, then spotted them again when we turned the corner.

I slid up behind them and Johnny got out. I stayed in the car, figuring that he was going to hand me the driver’s licenses, and I’d run them on the computer. He said, “Guys, I need some ID,” real nicely. No big deal. One guy said, “Well, I don’t have any ID. I’m just going to the store, and I don’t need my ID.” Johnny said, “Well, look, man, I’m just checking you out. If you don’t have any warrants, we’ll let you go.” Right after he said that, the guy took off running. Johnny took off after him, so I threw the car in gear and started paralleling them. They were running right along the sidewalk, and as we got up to this little parking lot in front of this market, just a little place where you turn in to park diagonal-like, I got just in front of him and cut the car to the right to block the suspect off. He ran into the car and turned around just as my partner was closing in on him.

I was starting to get out of the car when I heard a shot go off. I didn’t know if my partner had shot the guy or if the guy had shot my partner, so for a split second I wasn’t sure what was going on. Then I heard Johnny yell, “I’m hit!” and I saw the guy running back the way we came. When I heard, “I’m hit!” this rush of adrenaline came over me, and all my attention focused on the suspect as he was running away. I could feel my hair on my arms sort of standing on end, and I just had this sense of where everyone else was. I didn’t have to look; I just knew where Johnny was, where all the people who were out on the street were. I couldn’t really hear much of anything at that point, but I had this heightened sense of awareness.

As I was noticing all this, I was thinking all sorts of thoughts. I didn’t know how bad Johnny was hit, but I was thinking that he bought it. He always wore his vest, but I was thinking that he might have taken the round between the panels, or in his head or neck. I was thinking that “I’m hit!” might be the last words I was ever going to hear him say. We weren’t just partners, we’re best friends, and I was thinking that I’d let him down, that I should have been up there with him when we first stopped the two guys. I should have gotten out of the car, but I was being lazy, staying in the car to make it easier to run the guys on the computer. If I had gotten out, the guy wouldn’t have run, we’d have found the gun and gotten it from him right then, and this wouldn’t have happened. So I told myself, “I’ve got to get this guy, no matter what.” I wasn’t going to let the guy get away.

All this was going through my mind as I was getting the rest of the way out of the car and moving toward the trunk. It couldn’t have taken more than a couple of seconds to get to the back of the car, but it seemed like I was moving in slow motion. I felt like I couldn’t move fast enough. It just seemed like I was being a slug, not getting my ass out of the car fast enough. I wanted to get to the back of the car that instant, but it just wasn’t happening quick enough.

When I finally got to the back of the car, I considered shooting at him, but I thought that maybe he had dropped the gun. I couldn’t see it in his hand. He was a real dark black guy, and he was wearing dark clothes. There were no streetlights where all this went down, so all I could really see was his outline; he looked like a shadow.

Then he suddenly stopped and turned toward me. Like a dumb ass, I stepped out from behind the car so that we were facing each other in the middle of the street, just like an Old West showdown. Then I saw a muzzle flash, and I knew he still had the gun. I thought, “Man, that son of a bitch is shooting at me.” Then I remembered some training I’d had that if you get caught out in the open in a gunfight that it’s a good idea to try to make yourself a smaller target, so I knelt down and commenced to let loose. I fired three rounds, the guy went down, and I stopped shooting.

I took my eyes off the suspect for a second to look over and check on Johnny. He was holding his arm, so I figured he wasn’t hurt too bad after all. I still had to secure the suspect, so I started moving up to where he went down. He had dropped the gun, but he was reaching for it as I was closing in on him. I probably could have shot him again right then. I was ready. I still had my gun out, and I had my sights right on the back of his head, but I figured I could reach him before he grabbed the gun. So I just ran up and kicked him as hard as I could. Then I got his arm back, got the gun secured, and handcuffed him.

I left him there in the street and went back to the squad car. We put out some broadcasts to let everyone know we’d been in a shooting, that one officer and one citizen were hit, that we needed two ambulances. Guys were all over the air saying they were going to respond. We didn’t want anyone to get hurt in an accident trying to get to us, so Johnny got back on the air and told everyone to slow down, that we were OK. A crowd started to gather as we waited for the troops to arrive. Every time another unit arrived, they wanted to know what happened and if we were OK. I told them we were OK, that Johnny got shot, I shot the guy, that it looked like the guy was going to be OK. After a while, the detectives arrived, Johnny and the suspect went to the hospital, and I stayed behind to tell the dicks what happened. They told me that some Housing Authority security officers had caught the other guy, and I gave them the lowdown on the shooting. It took a couple of hours to get that taken care of. Then I went to the station to write up my formal statement.

On the way to the station, my big toe on my right foot started to hurt, so I took my boot off to figure out what was going on. I didn’t look at the boot, but I noticed that my toe was sticking out of my sock. When I looked at my toe from the top and I could see a little scratch at the tip, I said to myself, “Goddamn, look at that,” and figured that it might be the boots. They were kind of old, needed to be resoled. I thought that maybe one of the nails was sticking up in there, and when I kicked the suspect, it split the sock open and cut my toe. I put my boot back on and we went on to the station.

My toe still hurt, so I took my boot off again once I got inside the Homicide office. Some guys came in, looked at my foot, and asked me what had happened to my toe. I said, “Well, I kicked this guy who shot my partner.”

“Well, he shot at me. It looked like he was shooting for my head and missed.”

I was like, “Well, yeah. I mean, it just hurts a little bit. No big deal. Just bandage it up. It’ll be all right.”

They were looking at it from a different angle, where they could see that the whole bottom half of my toe was gone. They were saying, “No way,” but no one ever told me to look at the bottom of my foot.

About a half an hour or forty-five minutes later, somewhere around two in the morning, I was talking with my mom on the phone, when this night sergeant came in and asked me what happened to my toe. I told my mom to hang on, then told him that I kicked a guy and cut my toe doing it. He asked me where my boot was, and I told him it was over there in his office. He left and I went back to talking to my mom. I told her that everything was fine, that Johnny got shot, that he’s OK, that I had to shoot a guy, that it was no big deal, that I wasn’t hurt—just scratched my toe a little bit—stuff like that. About five minutes after the sergeant left, here comes my boot, sailing across the office, followed by the sergeant, saying, “You stupid kid, you got shot. Get your ass to the hospital!” So I said, “Mom, change that. I got shot. I’ll be at the hospital. No big deal though.”

I told her, “Don’t worry about it. It’s late. Come down tomorrow if you get a chance. It’s just a minor wound.” I was still thinking it was a little bitty cut. But when I got to the hospital, they showed me in this mirror that most of my toe was gone. I was surprised that it didn’t hurt more. In fact, the worst part was when they hit me with Novocain before patching up the toe. That hurt much worse than getting shot. That was painful.

It turned out that the bullet the guy fired entered my boot near the outside, missed the first four toes, hit the big one, and fragmented into the sole of my boot. That’s why the sergeant was so ticked off; they had stayed out there an extra hour looking for the bullet the guy fired, when all along the fragments of it were in my boot.

Officer Down

Although the injuries suffered by the two officers we just heard from were relatively minor, many other officers who are struck down in the kill zone do not fare so well. I pointed out in the Introduction that each year some five dozen or so officers don’t survive the wounds they suffer at the hands of criminals and that scores of additional officers are maimed or otherwise grievously wounded. In this section, we hear from some officers who were very seriously injured, as they talk about their brushes with death: how the incidents went down, what they were thinking when Death came knocking on their doors, what they did to stave off his call, and—in two cases—how what they endured influenced their actions in subsequent situations.

The stories underscore several things already addressed about the dangers of police work. One is that people armed with sharp objects can be very dangerous: two of the officers we will hear from were felled by knives (one in a shooting that was eerily similar to mine). Another is that officers are at extreme risk when they are disarmed: we see in the starkest of terms what typically happens when officers have their guns taken from them. On a different tack, this section also shows how training, lessons officers learned long before coming into law enforcement, mental preparation, determination in the face of danger, and the will to survive can help officers overcome the most harrowing of circumstances.

The stories begin with the tale of the officer who suffered the most severe injuries among those I interviewed, a woman who very nearly didn’t make it out of the kill zone.

My shooting happened real early in the morning. I played softball the night before on a team with my partner and his wife, went out for pizza afterwards, then over to their house to watch a video of that Tom Hanks movie Big. On the way home from their house, I swung by the police station and dropped off my request for days off for the upcoming month because it was now Saturday morning and they needed to be turned in that day. After visiting a bit with the officers at the station, I took off for home at about 1:30 A.M. I wasn’t really thinking much, just heading home on autopilot for the thirty-mile drive. I pulled up in front of my house somewhere around 2:00. My roommate had parked in the driveway, so I parked on the street. Like I usually do, I drove with my gun slid in between my seat and the center console. That way, when I get home, I can grab it with my right hand, step out of my truck, tuck it under my left armpit, grab my ball bag, and head into the house.

Well, as soon as I stepped out of the truck, I saw the barrel of a .357 Magnum pointed right at me. What had happened is that a carful of gangsters had followed me home to rip off my truck. Apparently, the fifteen-year-old girlfriend of the fourteen-year-old boy pointing the gun at me had seen my truck, liked it, and wanted him to steal it for her. So these two characters, along with three of their buddies, had followed me home. When I pulled up, the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old jumped out while the other three waited in their car.

At any rate, when I opened the door and stepped out, there was this fourteen-year-old standing there with this gun pointed at me. Now I never saw him. All I saw was the gun. I had no idea who was holding it. It could have been an eight-foot-tall transvestite or a ninety-year-old lady for all I knew. All I saw was the barrel, the cylinder, the trigger guard, and the trigger. The barrel looked really big. It looked like a cannon.

I hadn’t yet tucked my gun under my arm, so it was still in my hand when I saw the barrel of the .357. I began to raise my gun, and I was getting ready to say, “Police officer—drop the gun!” because that’s what I had been programmed to do from training. I about got “police” out of my mouth when I saw a muzzle flash and heard a loud “BOOM!” The bullet hit me square in the chest, tore right through it, and went out my back. I was dumbfounded. I truly thought that if I said, “Police—drop the gun” that he would drop it, so I simply couldn’t believe that he had shot me. I was so programmed from watching TV and from all the training in the academy where we would tell people to drop their guns and they do it that I was certain that he was gonna drop it. Boy was I wrong.

Well, right after he shot me, the kid turned and ran toward the back of my truck. As he was turning, I cranked off a round at him. I remember thinking, “You little coward, you’re gonna just shoot me and run away?” I was pissed. He fired a few more rounds at me as he was running away. Then he disappeared behind the back of my truck. I started to chase him ’cause I needed to stop him. I figured that if he’d shoot me, he’d shoot anybody, and I couldn’t let him do that. It only took a few steps to get from my door to the back of my truck, and I stopped at the bumper to kind of hide out because I knew that if I went straight out behind my truck that he could light me up because I’d have no cover. I was peeking around the corner when I saw him coming back around with his gun. He started firing, so I fired. I put three rounds into him, and he went down.

At that point, I realized that I needed to get into my house and get some help because I was bleeding out pretty good. I also figured that this guy wasn’t acting alone, that someone had dropped him off, so I was concerned that there might be other suspects in the area. Because I needed to get help and because I was worried about other threats, I just left the kid there and headed toward my house. I made it to my driveway, when I started to pass out from the loss of blood. I was thinking that I had to get to the house, but I was too weak to make it. I grabbed my chest with my right hand and could feel blood running down my side. I remember thinking how warm it was and that it wasn’t sticky. For some reason, I was thinking that blood was supposed to be sticky, but it was real smooth. I was also a little bit pissed off because other people had told me that when you get shot you go numb, but I wasn’t numb at all.

First off, when the bullet went through me, I felt a real bad burning sensation, and it really hurt when it tore through my back. Then, there in the driveway, I just hurt like crazy. But as I was thinking all this stuff, I was getting weaker. I remember thinking that I was about to pass out and that I didn’t want to smash my face on the ground when I lost consciousness. So I just dropped to my knees, rolled onto my back, and laid down there in the driveway. The last thought that passed through my mind before I faded to black was that I was really going to be sore when I woke up.

I woke up in the hospital two days after I was shot. My partner and another friend were there in my room. The first thing I asked them was, “What happened?” My partner told me, “You did a good job. Get some rest.” That’s all he said. I was real groggy, so I went back to sleep. I woke up about an hour later, and my partner was still there. This time, when I asked him what happened, he told me that I’d been shot and that I’d been in the hospital for two days. I couldn’t believe it. I remembered the shooting, but nothing about what happened after I passed out. I asked him how I got to the hospital, and he filled me in.

My roommate had heard the shots. She came out, saw me down in the driveway, ran into the house, called 9-1-1, called our neighbor who was a cop, and told him to hurry on over. Meanwhile the girlfriend of the kid I shot had dived into some bushes around my neighbor’s house when the shooting started, and the three who were in the car took off and left the other two there. When my neighbor got there, he saw the kid lying behind my truck on his back with the gun up near his head. He checked on the kid, then came over to help me. By the time the ambulance got there, my heart had stopped. They put the MAST suit on me, defibrillated me there in the driveway, loaded me up, and rushed me to the hospital.

I also wanted to know what happened to the kid I shot. I knew he went down behind the truck, and I knew I hit him, but I just didn’t know if he had survived. I needed to know if he was alive or dead. I’m not sure why, but I just needed to know. My partner told me he couldn’t tell me because I hadn’t talked to the detectives yet. He just said, “Relax, you did good.” When he said that, I knew the kid had died. But there were still a few holes about the incident I wanted filled in. I wanted to know how he got there, if other people were involved, if anyone else got hurt, and whether I hit him with all four rounds. He told me that he couldn’t answer any of those questions either because I needed to talk to the detectives first. So I said, “Well then, bring ’em on.” I wanted all the blanks filled in.

The detectives didn’t show up till the next morning, and in the meantime I started feeling better. The nurses asked me if I minded getting a couple of other visitors. I said, “Sure, I don’t care. Is there someone out there wanting to see me?” They told me there was about three hundred people outside my room who wanted to see me. So I said, “Well, send ’em five or ten at a time.” The nurses were all freaking out, but I said, “You gotta let them in.”

After a few hours of that, they gave me a break, and I asked the aide who was in my room why there were so many people there to see me. I mean, I knew I was shot, but people get shot all the time, and they don’t get hundreds of visitors. I just didn’t understand why there were so many people out there. That’s when I found out what had happened to me after I passed out.

The medical people told me that when I got to the hospital, they had cracked my chest open almost right away. Turns out the bullet had gone through the front rib cage; fragmented and nicked the stomach, liver, and intestines; cut some veins and arteries; shattered the spleen; and hit the diaphragm, while the main part of it passed through the base of my heart and cracked a rib as it went out my back. Blood was just pouring out of everywhere. They had to call in a specialist to handle the hole in my heart, and then the surgeons just sewed up all the other holes they could find. At some point, as they were trying to repair all this damage, I flat-lined again. They defibbed me again and kept on going. I was on some major life support. My heart was beating on its own, but I had a ventilator to help me breathe. I had blood being pumped into my system through my femoral arteries, a trach tube in my throat, and a line in my chest so they could directly pump adrenaline or something to my heart if it stopped again.

About an hour after they closed me up, I started to bleed pretty bad inside my chest. I had come out of the anesthesia, but I don’t remember that. Fortunately, I don’t remember anything from the time I passed out until the time I woke up two days later. At any rate, they told me that I was conscious and that the doctor came into the room to tell me about the bleeding. I had so many tubes in me I couldn’t talk, so the doctor told me to squeeze his hand if I understood what he was saying. He told me that I was going through a lot of blood, which meant that they must have missed something and that they were going to have to crack me open again. He asked me if I understood, and I squeezed his hand. Then he told me that because I’d only been in recovery for an hour or so that they were gonna have to do it without any anesthesia. I squeezed his hand to let him know that I understood, and they wheeled me in to the operating room. As soon as they opened me up that second time, my heart went into full arrest. They did a heart massage for about forty-five minutes, till it started working on its own. As they were working on me, they found what the problem was, where the bleeding was coming from. An artery along one of my ribs in the back had been hit, but some muscle spasms around it had initially prevented it from bleeding much. When I started to relax a bit, it just opened up and the blood started to pour into my chest cavity.

After they repaired that and got my heart working again, I was still in real bad shape.

I was on life support big time, machines keeping everything going, and the docs figured that because of the trauma that my body would shut down in about two hours. So they told my family to come in and say their last good-byes. In fact, one doctor took my brother aside and told him that I was already dead, that the machines were keeping me alive, and that they were giving my family a couple of hours so that they could deal with it however they wanted but that I wasn’t coming back.

About an hour or so later, my mom made it to the hospital, and she started yelling at me, “You’re not a quitter. You’ve never been a quitter, so don’t quit on me now!” Stuff like that. She and other family members then started telling me to do things like move my fingers if I could hear them. So I moved my hands, and they ran out and told the doctor, “Hey, she’s going to be OK. We told her to move her fingers and she did.” The doctor told them, “No, what’s happening is her body is shutting down, and she’s doing involuntary muscle twitches. You think she’s responding to you because you hope she’s somehow going to make it.”

My mom said, “No, it’s not spasms, you try it!” So the doc did the same thing. He asked me some questions, and I moved my fingers. He did a few other things, I responded, and he told my family, “You know what? You’re right. I don’t know why, but she’s fighting back.” I slowly started to recover, and they started to take the tubes out. I think they started with the femoral tubes because I was now holding blood. Then they took out some of the zillion tubes in my arms. During that second day, they took the trach tube out to see if I could breathe on my own, without the ventilator. I guess I gasped a little bit at first, then I breathed OK after that. A little bit later, I woke up.

After I got out of the hospital, I was off work recuperating for about eight months. Early on, they had to do lots of testing and stuff. I had a lot of pains in my chest and back, and they had to drain my lungs a few times from the back, and—let me tell you—that was a real joy. After about the third month, I started getting some sharp pains every now and then, like someone was sticking an ice pick in my back. When I asked my doc what it was, he told me that they had left a few bullet fragments inside me because it was more dangerous to cut them out than to just leave them there. Every now and then, they would shift, and I’d get little sharp stabs. The doc just said that was normal. They’re still there. They just float around and poke my ribs and my back every now and then. It’s a pain, but to me, it’s just like a trick knee or a trick ankle; you just gotta shake it off, just move around a bit and it goes away.

After completing my probation, I did a year in communications, then got wheeled out to a pretty busy division. The radio was always hopping, so it was a fun place to work after spending a year answering phone calls. I was working with my regular partner when we got a call of a family dispute with some fighting going on. It was at some apartments on the north side of the street, so I pulled up on the south side.

There was a long driveway that led up to the apartment in question that went alongside of the building all the way to the back of the lot. As I was getting out of the car, I saw these three people: this man, this woman, and a little kid—maybe two or three years old—between them coming down the driveway toward us. I figured this was our disturbance because the adults were shouting at each other, and there was some kind of hustle and bustle going on between them. As I walked over toward them, it looked like they were arguing over the kid, like they were playing tug-of-war with him. They were almost shoulder to shoulder, just kind of fighting back and forth over the kid as they walked along. When I got about two-thirds of the way across the street, they stopped on the sidewalk at the end of the driveway. They hadn’t spotted me, but I was watching them real close.

At that point, the guy pushed the kid away, grabbed the woman, and coldcocked her right in the face, which sent her right down to the sidewalk. When she hit, he reached down and pulled this big old fourteen-inch butcher knife out of the waistband of the baggy blue jeans he was wearing. To this day, I’m amazed that he didn’t cut his dick off when he pulled that knife out of there. I don’t know how he did that. That was a pretty good trick. He must have been a magician in a past life or something.

Anyway, this thing was going to shit in a hurry. She’s down on the sidewalk, the kid is screaming, “Mommy! Mommy!” and the guy is standing over her with a huge butcher knife. Then it got worse. He jumped down on her and brought this knife over the top of his head like he was going to just plunge it into her chest. He had his knees on her arms, pinning her down on the sidewalk, getting ready to do her.

I started running as soon as I saw the knife, so I was pretty close when he jumped on her. I had my nightstick in my left hand—I hadn’t even been out of the car long enough to put it in the ring on my belt. I didn’t feel like I had time to draw my gun, so I just grabbed my stick with my right hand. It happened so fast I didn’t even have time to grab it by the Uwara handle. I just took it and smacked the guy across the back of the neck and shoulders, just as hard as I could on a backstroke. I was aiming for just his neck, but I missed by a little and ended up hitting him right on the big vertebrae where the neck joins the torso. But I still caught him pretty good.

Now I go about six foot two, 225 pounds, and I hit him as hard as I could, but it didn’t faze him much. But it did get his attention and get him to stop his attack on the lady. It also pissed him off. He jumped up real quick, spun around with the knife, and slashed me on the inside of my left forearm. Just like that, I was cut before I knew it. I felt the knife hit my arm, but I didn’t even feel it slice me. In fact, I didn’t know I was actually cut until I looked down afterwards and saw the blood.

As soon as the knife hit, I took a couple of steps back to put some distance between me and the guy, and I drew my gun. The guy was faceup on me, about five or six feet away. I didn’t want to be cut again, so just as soon as I cleared leather, I fired my first round from the hip. It hit him in the lower abdomen. He was still standing there, so I decided to shoot him in the head because the first shot hadn’t dropped him and I didn’t want him to slash me again. So I brought my gun up, found my sight picture, put it square on his face, and popped him between the eyes with my second round. I squeezed it off just as soon as I got that sight picture on his face. So it was real quick—clear leather and “boom,” first round in the gut, then continue up with the gun and “boom,” second round in the face. Caught him right on his nose. Then he was down. I don’t remember seeing him fall or anything, he was just lying there on the sidewalk.

As soon as he’d cut me, I felt something change. Everything came into clearer visual focus, and it seemed like time sped up. Then, when I fired, the rounds didn’t sound loud at all. I saw the muzzle flashes real clearly, but the rounds didn’t bother my ears at all. Not like they would if I fired my gun right now. I was also thinking how weird it all was as I was shooting. I was thinking this can’t be happening. Like most cops, I’d pictured circumstances in which I might become involved in a shooting, and this wasn’t one of them. As I was walking across the street, I was thinking that this guy was just going to let me put the handcuffs on him, and we’d sort things out. Then it went so sideways, so quickly, that I just couldn’t believe it. I’d been on a lot of family disputes that were a lot more contentious when we arrived, and they turned out OK. This looked to be an easy one, and it just went to shit. I was thinking that this was just too weird. Guys shouldn’t be pulling out knives to murder their wives in front of me, and when I try to stop them, they shouldn’t hurt me. It was like things weren’t adding up. There was something illogical going on. It was Twilight Zone stuff.

Once he was down, all that strange stuff receded, and I noticed that my side was getting wet. So I looked down and saw I was bleeding like a stuck pig from my left forearm, that I was standing in a pool of my own blood. It was really bleeding a lot. I started thinking, “Oh, man, this isn’t good.” The blood wasn’t spurting out, so I knew he hadn’t caught an artery. But it was coming out pretty good, like somebody had a hose on with a serious trickle coming out. I hollered to my partner at that point. Told him I was cut. He didn’t know what the hell was going on because this had all happened so fast. He was on the radio putting us out at our location when it went down, so he didn’t know why I fired the rounds. That’s why I told him I was cut, to let him know why I just shot this guy.

He put out a help call and requested an ambulance. As we were waiting for the other units to show up, my partner went up and cuffed the guy. He wasn’t moving at all, but we weren’t going to take any chances. In fact, I thought he was dead. The woman must’ve thought so too because she was screaming, “Adios, mi hijo,” and other stuff like that in Spanish. She had gotten up and grabbed her kid. Had her arms around him. Just standing there holding the kid and screaming stuff in Spanish as I was trying to figure out how to stop the bleeding.

I took a deep breath, told myself not to panic, that I was going to be OK. I felt myself to make sure that the knife hadn’t hit me anywhere else. I looked at my shirt and didn’t see any cuts besides the one on my sleeve. I had my vest on, so I was quite certain I wasn’t cut on my torso. I didn’t feel any pain anywhere besides my left arm. I figured from all that that I wasn’t cut anyplace besides my arm, but I knew I was going to be in trouble if I just let the blood keep coming out. I had to get the bleeding stopped.

About then, Jan Nelson, one of my classmates from the academy, came rolling up with his partner. He grabbed a handkerchief or something and started some direct pressure on my arm with that. It didn’t do shit to stop the bleeding. I knew that I couldn’t let much more blood leak out of my body, so I pulled out my cord-cuff restrainer from my sap pocket, wrapped that around my forearm just above the gash, and cinched it down real tight. That stopped the bleeding. Once the bleeding stopped, it was like, OK, whatever happens from here, at least I’m not going to die. I knew I was going to make it. So I just relaxed a little bit and watched as more units and some supervisors arrived while we waited for the ambulance. After about three to five minutes, we got word that the ambulance was going to be delayed for some reason, so Jan and his partner tossed me in their car and took me to Presbyterian Hospital.

After I got to the hospital, one of the sergeants came in and told me that they had sent another supervisor to get my wife and bring her over to the hospital. I had been worried that she might hear about it from someone outside the PD, so knowing that the other sergeant was going to get her set my mind at ease. He could tell her what happened and explain to her that I was OK.

After they numbed my arm up a bit, the doctor took a good look at the wound. The long side of the knife blade had hit about the midpoint of my forearm, moving from the wrist toward the elbow. It dug in, all the way to the bone, then came out, leaving about a three-inch semicircle wound. It was a pretty clean cut, wasn’t mangled at all. The best way I can describe it is to picture a turkey leg that you started to cut the meat off from the foot end, but you stop maybe halfway down. As long as the flap you just cut is laying flat on the bone, it looks like a thin semicircular cut, but once you flip the flap back, you’ve got a good hunk of meat exposed. That’s what my arm looked like. Just a thin cut until the doctor laid the flap back to work on it. I looked over, and I could see bone and nerves and all the vessels in there. The doctor was amazed by the wound. He said it looked like a surgeon had gone around the nerves and blood vessels, except for that one big vein that had been cut open. He also said that the long sleeve of my shirt had probably prevented some serious damage. He said the thickness of the wool likely kept the blade from going a millimeter or two deeper. If that would’ve happened, it would have almost certainly cut some of the nerves leading to my hand, and I would have lost motion in a few fingers. It would also probably have snapped an artery, in which case there would have been a real good chance I would have bled out and died before they got me to the hospital.

It was pretty interesting watching the doctor work on my arm and having him explain all that stuff to me. As I was lying there, the ambulance showed up, and they wheeled the guy who cut me into the cubicle next to me. I couldn’t believe he was alive. I knew I hit him real good with both rounds, one right between the eyes, plus he wasn’t moving one bit when he was lying on the sidewalk. I figured he had to be dead, so I was curious about how badly he was hurt. They told me that he was hurt very badly, that he probably wasn’t going to survive because his blood pressure was way down. He ended up surviving after a long hospital stay, so we all guessed wrong about him.

The supervisor who drove my wife and me home after they were done with me at the ER filled us in on what led up to the shooting. The guy I shot had almost killed somebody else at this party that was going on at the apartment we were sent to. He had gotten drunk and gone completely fucking bonkers at this party on the second floor of this apartment. He just went completely ape shit and pushed this other guy through a plate glass window. The other guy was damn near dead when he hit the deck down below.

None of this information got relayed to Communications Division and on to us because none of the people at the party spoke English—they were all El Salvadorans. Plus whoever called didn’t communicate exactly what had happened, and the operator who took the call didn’t get all the info. The caller just told the operator that Louise’s husband, Joe—or whatever their names were—was on a rampage. So the operator just assumed it was a family dispute. So we didn’t know this guy had just gone completely ape shit, violent bonkers before we got there.

After he shoved the other guy through the window, the guy I shot wanted to leave the party before the buddies of the guy he almost killed could kill him or the cops came to put him in jail. His wife wanted him to stay because she figured that he was safe with their friends at the party. So what I saw when I spotted them was him trying to drag her and their kid home, not a fight over the kid. Because the guy was unconscious back at the hospital, the sergeant couldn’t tell me why he decided to try to kill his wife. I didn’t care. I was just glad that I was able to stop him.

I’d been on the job about five and a half years when we got a kidnapping call that came out as a kidnapping-neighborhood disturbance. When we got to the call, a teenage girl—probably about sixteen or seventeen—met us and told us that her child had been taken by a lady that lived in the house we had come up to. We asked the girl some questions, and she told us that the woman supposedly had some kind of mental impairment, that she sometimes baby-sat the child, but she had taken the child from the girl and told her she wasn’t gonna give it back. She was really afraid. She kept saying that the lady was crazy, that she could kill the kid, that she was going to kill the kid.

We didn’t really know what we had, so we started walking up to the house to see what the woman had to say about what was going on. As we were walking up the driveway to knock on the door, this female—I think she was in her late twenties—came out of the house. She came down the driveway toward us, and I started talking to her, just some nonsense chitchat, trying to make conversation with her, trying to figure out what was going on and what her attitude was. So we were standing about five feet from each other in the driveway, talking for a bit. I finally got to the point where I asked her, “Do you have this young lady’s daughter?” She said, “Yeah.” Then I told her, “You’re going to have to give the child back. It’s not your child.” She replied, “No, I’m not. I’m not giving her back.” I tried to explain the situation to her, but she just continued to say, “No, I’m not going to give the child back.” Finally, I said, “Look, we’re going to have to take you to jail if you don’t give the child back.”

When I said that, she pulled a box cutter out of her pocket. I already had my nightstick out, so I hit her arm with it, and she dropped the box cutter. Then she stumbled back, and before I could grab her, she made it to the front door. As she went through the doorway, I could see this little baby, this two-year-old child, standing just inside it. Then the lady shut the door and locked it. So now we had this lady who was extremely upset—much more so than when we were talking in the driveway—locked inside this house with the child. We had a real problem now.

I stayed at the front of the house, and my partner went around to the back to make sure that she didn’t get out that way. As I was looking through the front window, I could see the woman standing in front of the little two-year-old, screaming at her. She was hysterical, and I was thinking, “Oh, this is not good.” I was worried that she was going to hurt the child. Then she started dumping over furniture. The baby just stood there screaming—crying and screaming—while the lady was going ballistic. So I knocked on the window to get her attention, and she looked at me. I said to her, “Let us have the baby and we won’t take you to jail.” I mean, at that point I was willing to tell her anything to get that child out of there.

She said, “No.” I kept telling her we wouldn’t take her to jail if she gave us the kid, but she kept saying, “No.” After a couple of minutes of this, she came to the door, opened it a little bit—just kind of flung it open—then took off running back toward the kitchen. Well, the baby was standing just inside the doorway—about six feet away from me—so I went in, grabbed her, and headed back out.

I radioed my partner and told him that I had the kid. So he came around front, and we started walking down the driveway. When we got about halfway down the driveway—maybe twenty-five feet from the front door—the lady came back to the front door with a knife in her hand. It was a big deboning knife—about thirteen inches total, with an eight-inch blade. Then she started shouting at us, “I’m gonna kill you! I’m gonna kill you!” She had the knife raised above her head, but she wasn’t moving toward us. She was just standing in the doorway.

Both my partner and I drew our weapons at that point. I was still holding the kid, and I was thinking that if the lady started to come at us that I was going to shoot her. My partner and I yelled for her to put the knife down several times, and she finally lowered it from above her head and moved it down by the side of her leg. The child was still crying and screaming and wiggling around in my arms, so I decided to set her down. As I was bending over to set the kid down, the woman brought the knife back up over her head and threw it.

Next thing I knew, I felt this impact on the right side of my head. It felt like somebody had taken a brick and hit me with it or just punched me in the right side of the head as hard as they could. When the knife hit, I released the child. My gun fell out of my hand. I was stunned. I was feeling this dull pain with a lot of pressure on the right side of my head—not a real sharp pain like you think you’d have if you got cut or stabbed. It took me a couple of seconds to get my bearings, then I started looking around. I saw my gun on the ground, so I picked up my gun. I looked at the house, but the suspect had gone inside and shut the door, so I put my gun back in my holster. I knew the knife had hit me, so I started looking around on the ground for it.

I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find it. Then I looked up at my partner. He looked at me and said, “Holy shit!!” I asked him, “Where’s the knife?” He just repeated himself, “Holy shit!!” Then I noticed that he was looking a little bit off to my right side, so I raised my hand up, and I felt the knife sticking in my head. Then I said, “Holy shit!!”

My partner and I got on the radio and put out an assist the officer call. Then my partner told me to walk the rest of the way down the driveway and get next to the patrol car in case the lady came back out of the house. A citizen who was passing by came up the driveway and then helped me walk to the patrol car. I was thinking, “God, I hope this isn’t it. I’m just twenty-five years old. I hope I’m not dying here in somebody’s driveway at twenty-five.” I mean, I could feel the knife, I knew I was stabbed in the head, and I wondered, “How far in did it go?” So I was real worried there for about ten or fifteen seconds, thinking it was all over for me, until I got back to the patrol car and sat down next to it.

My mom’s a nurse, and she’d told me more than once—I don’t know why—but she’d told me several times that if I ever got stabbed and had something stuck in me, don’t yank it out. She told me that you never know what it has hit, what it hasn’t hit, what kind of damage can be done if you pull it out. I knew not to try to take it out, so I sat there, and I held the knife to try to relieve the pressure I was feeling. It wasn’t just from the fact that I had a knife sticking in my head. It was also from the way it was stuck in there. It turns out that the knife went into my head about seven-eighths of an inch, so the other almost twelve inches were just hanging down from my skull. With the pressure of the weight of the knife pulling down, it felt like someone was taking a crowbar and trying to pry my skull open. So I held the knife to kind of relieve a little bit of that pressure as I was sitting there by the patrol car.

After a little while, some other officers started to arrive. They just looked at me with amazement: like, “Oh, God!” Then one of the veteran officers, who’d been on about twenty, twenty-five years, came over and talked to me. He told me some stuff about how he’d been shot in Vietnam and that from his experience he could tell that I was going to be OK. He said, “You’re still talking, you’re awake, you’ll be fine.” As he was talking to me, this other officer came up, looked at me, and said, “I’ve got a first-aid kit in my car. We’ll pull the knife out and bandage it up.” I thought, “Oh, my God, no,” and told the veteran officer, “Keep that guy away from me! Keep him away from me!” He told me, “Oh, yeah. Don’t worry. We’re not doing anything.”

Then the ambulance got there. They got there even before Life-Flight could get off the pad. As they were working on me, the lady who’d stabbed me kept coming to the door—back and forth, back and forth. The scene still wasn’t under control. We didn’t know what other kind of weapons she had, whether she had a gun. The ambulance was still working on me, so the other officers decided to try to get the lady into custody next time she came to the door. Well, next time she came to the door, my partner and three or four other officers rushed her. She got the door partway closed and was bracing herself against this little half-wall right behind the door, trying to keep the officers from forcing the door open. As the officers were making some progress pushing the door back, they could see her arm coming around. She had another knife. My partner yelled, “Knife,” and ended up shooting her through the door before she could stab this one officer who was closest to her. I heard that happen, and then they loaded me up into the ambulance and took me to the hospital.

When they brought me off the ambulance, there were about fifty officers waiting outside the hospital, all looking at me. Now I was still hurting pretty bad, but I wasn’t thinking, “I’m hurt bad, I could die,” or anything like that. I was thinking, “This is the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever been in.” I mean, everyone there was staring at me, and I’ve got a knife in my head. I felt like Friday the 13th or something.

So the medical people got me into the emergency room, where they took some X rays. They couldn’t get me into the CAT scan because the knife was sticking out. The ER doctors and a couple of the neurosurgeons who were there decided from the X rays that the knife hadn’t penetrated into my brain. It went all the way through the skull, and later on, through angiograms and MRIs, they concluded it came one-sixteenth of an inch from going into the brain. But that day, they decided it was OK to remove the knife and that the best way to get it out was to simply pull it. So a bunch of people just braced my upper body, my head, my neck, and they pulled it out.

It actually hurt more when they pulled it out than when it went in. I was wide awake. The doctors didn’t give me anything for the pain for thirty-six hours. They told me that medications like that could have a similar effect of hemorrhaging in the brain. They wanted to make sure I was awake and alert so they could keep track of my vital signs and everything.

I recovered just fine. Then, just over a year after I got stabbed in the head, I was working with a different partner when we got another call involving a nutcase with a knife. It came out as a family disturbance just before dusk on a Tuesday evening. Radio told us that the son was going crazy with a knife, threatening his family, threatening some neighbors, destroying the house he lived in.

Now I’d had some calls involving knives in the year since I got stabbed, but most of them turned out to be nothing. Most of the time, nobody had any weapon, and in the others it was just a knife on the kitchen table or something like that. But every time calls about knives dropped, I’d be thinking, “Holy Christ,” on the way there because I knew that I could get hurt even if I kept my distance; twenty-five feet away from that woman meant nothing. She wasn’t moving, and she still got me. So when I got that call about the son going crazy with the knife, I thought, “Oh, great.” Just what I needed.

A one-man unit checked by with us. Then the three of us went to the scene. When we pulled up, there was a big group of people outside in the yard of the house where the call came from. We stopped one house away and got out. We could see that the windows in the house were all smashed and that the windows of the car parked out front were all smashed. As we walked up to the location, the guy’s mother started yelling at us, “Shoot him! Shoot him! Shoot the son of a bitch!” When I heard that, I was thinking, “Lady, shut up. Come on, this is your kid here.” So I told her that we’d handle it, and we continued up toward the house. As we went up, the guy came around the side of the house holding a three-foot-long machete. When I spotted him, I thought, “Great, here we go again.”

So we drew our guns and kept our distance. We were behind a car about thirty feet from the guy, so we started talking to him. I said, “Hey, man, put down the machete.” He just started cursing at us, using every word in the book. “Screw you, motherfucker. You want this? Come get it.” Stuff like that. As he was carrying on, he was smashing stuff in the yard, so we asked for some more units to check by.

By now, the whole street was filled with people—families, kids, all in the street watching what was going on. As we were talking to him—I was doing most of the talking—he left the front yard and started walking down the street. Now, luckily for us, there were a lot of cars parked in the street, so we could keep some cars between us and the guy as we tried to contain him as best we could. While he walked down the middle of the street, we were walking through front yards next to the curb, keeping the parked cars between us. When we got three or four houses down, we ran out of cars. We were coming to a point now where we couldn’t let him go any farther. There were people all over the place. He was going crazy, threatening to kill everybody, and telling us that if we came near him he was going to kill us.

When we ran out of cars, I was in the open, about twelve feet from him. I knew I was too close for safety—I mean, I knew from getting stabbed the year before that twice the distance wasn’t safe—but I couldn’t move farther away because I needed to be able to protect all the people that were milling around. I knew we couldn’t let the guy go. Well, he stopped in the middle of the street, and I just kept my twelve-foot distance with my gun drawn while he held the machete in his right hand. My partner was about ten feet behind me, trying to keep the people back there away, and the officer from the one-man unit was in the street off to our left, trying to keep the guy from going back down the street where some other people were. I was closest, so I kept talking to him, repeatedly telling him to put the machete down. The officer from the one-man unit got on the radio and told them we needed a supervisor, we needed a TASER, we needed those other units we requested, stuff like that.

I could tell the guy was reaching his boiling point. The tone of his voice and his behavior became more aggressive. I wasn’t gonna stand there for a substantial period of time twelve feet away from this guy holding a three-foot machete when I knew what a one-foot deboning knife did at twenty-five feet.

The next time I told the guy to put the machete down, he said, “You want this? You want this? Here you go. You got it.” Then started to move toward me. When he took his second step, he drew the machete over his head. I wasn’t gonna let what happened before happen again, so I fired at him. I saw him sort of dip after the first or second round, but he was still coming at me, so I kept shooting. The next thing I remember was seeing him on the ground a few feet in front of me.

I had heard from other officers who’d been in shootings that things slowed down for them, and they didn’t remember how many rounds they fired. That’s what happened to me. Everything slowed down when he started coming at me—then, when he hit the ground, everything went back to regular speed. I had no idea how many rounds I’d fired. I just kept shooting until he fell down, until he was no longer a threat. It turned out that I fired four rounds—all hits—but I had no clue how many rounds I was firing as I was shooting.

When he fell, the machete was still partially in his hand, so my partner ran up and kicked it out of his hand. Then the other units got there. A little while later, an ambulance showed up. By the time they got the guy to the hospital, he was DOA.

The investigators started showing up not too long after the ambulance took the guy away. Homicide came out. Internal Affairs, the DA’s office, Civil Rights Division, they all came out, and I think almost everybody who came out to that scene had made the scene where I got stabbed. Nobody said anything about it, but a couple of guys just kind of looked at me like, “Good Lord, what is it with you and edged weapons.”

I was working morning watch as a training officer in February when I got a brand-new trainee fresh out of the academy. We worked a couple of shifts, and he seemed like a very good trainee. He was intelligent, had good common sense, would observe things. I took note that he was quick to notice things that were happening and that he paid attention to what was going on.

We were working an area that had a lot of criminal activity. A lot of prostitutes and pimps lived in the apartments there, so we had a lot of prostitution, a lot of narcotics activity, whatever. One night at about three in the morning, we spotted this Cadillac Eldorado that had no front plate and no current tabs on the back plate. The car was occupied by three males and one female. There were two people in front besides the driver—so three people in the front—and one person in the back. We’d been having a lot of Eldorados stolen in the area we were working. We’d find them up on milk crates, stripped, with their seats and whatnot gone. I told my partner that we should stop the car and check it out to see if it’d just been ripped off, so we did.

I told Jim to get the driver out of the car and pat him down, because when I ran the plate, it indicated that there were outstanding warrants associated with the car. It was late at night, so I wanted him to get the driver out and pat him down for our safety. After Jim got the driver out and patted him down, the guy got very belligerent and began to challenge Jim to the point where it became more than he could handle. I decided to intervene, so I went up to my partner and got the driver’s license from him. I wanted to run the guy to see if he had any of the warrants that were associated with the car. After I got his license from Jim, I chatted with the driver and told him the reason we were stopping him. He started to get a little strong with me, so I explained to him that we just wanted to check on the status of the car, that we were just doing our job, and that if the status of the car was cool that he’d be on his way.

He calmed down somewhat at that point, but then I could see that something wasn’t right. There was a lot of rubbernecking in the car. The people in the car looked very nervous. I said to myself, “You know, this isn’t fitting exactly right,” so we placed the driver to the back of the Cadillac. My partner stood behind him, and I started calling the other people out of the car from the right door. I got the two males out, patted them down, retrieved their licenses, clipped them to my tie, and sent them over with the driver at the back of the car. That left the female in the car. She seemed extremely nervous. She had a purse that she picked up, then set down. She was looking around, rubbernecking back as if she was thinking, “What do I do?”

When I told her to slide out of the car, the driver said, “No, bitch, you stay in the car!” I told the driver, “Be quiet, she’s getting out of the car,” then started to call her out again. At that point, the driver pushed past the other two guys and moved toward the open passenger door. I grabbed ahold of him from behind in an upper-body control hold, and we went down onto the ground. I was trying to choke him out, but I couldn’t do it. It was cold out, and I was wearing what they call a Melton jacket, real thick, and the driver had on a crushed-velvet jacket with a big collar, so I couldn’t get enough pressure to get him out. He was talking to me as we were fighting. At first, I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Then he said something very distinctly. He said, “You don’t know what you’re doing. I’ll make you have to kill me.”

When I realized I wasn’t going to be able to get him out, I called Jim over to have him help me with this guy. He came over to my right side, grabbed the guy’s right arm, and helped me pull the guy’s arm back to cuff him. As I was trying to get the cuffs on, the guy yelled, “Brothers, come on over and help me!” The other two guys started moving toward us, and at that point I told Jim, “Get on the radio! Jim, get on the radio!” Things were turning ugly, and I figured we needed additional units. We didn’t have handheld radios back then, so Jim pulled his baton to push his way through the two guys in order to get to the radio.

As I was watching Jim strike out at the other two guys to get to the radio, I felt the driver tugging on my gun, trying to pull it from the holster. He was talking to me again, saying, “I’m gonna kill you, pig”—things like that. At that point, I felt my life was in danger, so I released him and pulled my gun out of my holster. But as I did, he grabbed onto it, so now we were in a life-and-death struggle over my gun. I heard some commotion over where my partner was. I couldn’t see him any longer, but I could hear him screaming, “Officer needs assistance! Officer needs assistance!” calling on the radio to get us some help. I could also tell from the noises that he was fighting back and forth with the other two suspects.

As he was putting out the broadcast and fighting with the other two guys, I was still in this life-and-death struggle over my gun. At one point, the guy had his finger in my eye, trying to pull my eye out. He kept telling me, “Let go of the gun. Let go of the gun.” No way was I going to let go of the gun. I just kept fighting. I was biting his hands to get him to release the gun, doing whatever I could. We were on the ground. Then we were up, then back down on the ground, just fighting over the gun. We ended up on the ground between the two cars. I managed to roll up underneath the Cadillac and break the driver’s grip on the gun because he couldn’t reach in between the bumper and the ground as far as I could. So now I had the gun, but my body was between me and the suspect because he was behind me, kind of holding me in a bear hug.

He kept trying to grab the gun. Then he said, in a real deliberate voice, “Get the bitch out of the car with the gun.” Now I was trapped in this little space under the car with the suspect trying to grab the gun, and I was thinking that the female was gonna come up and just put the gun up to me and shoot me in the head. That’s what went through my mind. I wanted to have some mobility, so I rolled back out from under the car to where the driver was on his back, and I was lying on my back on top of him. Now that I was out from underneath the car, the guy reached back up and grabbed the gun again. Then he started yelling, “Shoot the fucking pig, shoot him!”

I looked up and I saw the female appear above my head. As I watched her, she reached into her bra area and pulled out a gun. I know she did it real fast, but as I was watching, it went real slow. The driver was screaming, “Shoot him, shoot him!” When she got the gun out, the female pointed it at me. I started kicking at her, rolling around, thinking that way if she shoots, maybe she’ll miss me and hit him. Then she fired—two, maybe three rounds. I could feel the pain in the right side of my upper chest. It was like maybe someone held up a cigarette and burnt me, but I just kept fighting. I knew I was hit, but I just kept on going.

Then the driver started yelling, “Come over here! Help me, brother! Get over here!” Stuff like that. Then one of the other guys came over and grabbed my legs. So now the driver and this other guy were holding me down, and the female was still standing above me holding this gun. I was yelling at her, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” My gun was pointed up at her, so she would jump back, then move in, then jump back again as my gun moved around as the driver pulled on it and I fought him. I was trying to shoot the female, but I couldn’t squeeze off a shot because the driver had his hands on the cylinder of my revolver.

What happened next went real slow. The female reached down, put her gun right down into my abdomen, and pulled the trigger. I just blacked out. I don’t know how long I was out, if it was a fraction of a second or what, but the next thing I knew, the driver was pushing me off of him like I was a dead weight. I realized that my gun was gone, so I jumped up.

The driver was still on the ground. He was sitting on his ass, holding my gun. He didn’t have a good grip on it, but he was trying to manipulate it in his hands to get to where he could shoot me. At that point, I pulled my baton and started whaling back and forth at him with it. I don’t know how it is that my baton stayed in the ring all the time we were fighting, but it did. At any rate, as I was swinging at him, he was trying to get away from me, scooting back on his butt. He managed to get far enough away from me to where he could point the gun right at me, so I threw my baton at him. As I threw it, I turned, sort of ducked down, and moved away from him to get behind the patrol car. As I turned, he started cranking off rounds at me. He caught me in the left buttocks, and I don’t know if it spun me around or what, but I went down over by the front of the car. Then I dove to the other side of the car to get away from him.

I found out later that my partner was in a fight of his own the whole time I was fighting. When he went to the car to put out the broadcast, one of the other suspects managed to take his baton away from him. As he was putting out the assistance call, the suspect was hitting him in the head with the baton. After Jim got the broadcast out, he pulled his pistol. The suspect grabbed it as Jim was bringing it up, so Jim was in the same struggle that I was in for his weapon. They wound up fighting up against the other side of the car that was parked in front of the Cadillac where I was fighting.

After the suspect who took my gun shot at me, he stood up and fired a round at my partner. It missed and hit the car. Then the guy went up to my partner, stuck the gun into his abdomen area, and pulled the trigger again. So my partner received one round dead center from my gun; then he went down.

At that point, I heard somebody say, “Let’s get out of here!” I didn’t know if it was the guy who shot me and my partner, or if it was one of the other suspects, but when I heard that, I came around the back of the squad car and stood up a little bit to try to look through the windows to see where they were at. When I did this, the driver started firing my gun again. I didn’t know if he was firing at me, but after it was all over, there were bullet holes in the lights up on top of the police car. When I heard those shots, I just ducked back behind the car. A few seconds later, I heard the squeal of some tires.

At that time, I figured, “Hey, they’ve left,” so I ran over to my partner, who was lying in the street in a fetal position. I said to him, “Jim, are you OK? Jim, are you OK?” He was moaning in that fetal position on the ground, but he didn’t answer me. I could see blood all over his head. I didn’t know that it was from the baton blows, and I thought that maybe they had shot him in the head. I told him to hang on. Then I went over to the police car and started pulling on the shotgun. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t get the shotgun out of the rack. I was just struggling with it. Then I went to grab the radio mike to put out a help call, but I couldn’t find it. I thought to myself, “Where the hell is the radio?” I was pretty desperate now, and I realized I needed to get my composure. I told myself, “OK, you can’t find the mike, start at the base where the cord is. Get the cord.” So I reached down, grabbed the base of the mike cord, and went hand over hand looking for the mike. All I came up with was a couple of wires on the end. The cord had been severed in the middle someplace, and all there was was a couple of wires. It turns out that during the fight with Jim that the door closed on the wire, and one of the guys he was fighting ripped the mike off.

When I saw the mike was gone, my heart just sunk. I knew I was shot. I knew I was shot several times. It was getting difficult for me to breathe. I was starting to feel kind of faint. I knew I was in trouble. I didn’t want to sit down, so I moved to the back of the police car and stood there, just kind of leaning against the car.

Then I heard some sirens in the distance. I was hoping they were coming to me. A little bit later, a car pulled up and two guys in uniforms got out. They were security guards. I immediately gave them some information, and they told me to sit down. So I kind of did what they said. A few seconds later, some police officers arrived. As soon as I saw some people I recognized, I gave them the information. I said, “Hey, the guys who shot us just left. They are in a Cadillac, a black Cadillac.” The other officers broadcast that immediately. Then they started pumping me for additional information. I was giving it to them, and they were putting it out on the air.

After a while, an ambulance finally arrived. They went to my partner first. I kept asking them, “How’s Jim? How’s Jim?” They told me that he didn’t look real good, and my heart sank again. Then they loaded us both up into the ambulance, and the next thing I knew, we were at the hospital.

I was having difficulty breathing, so they put a chest tube in me. The first thing that they did was cut my clothes off. Then I remember seeing the scalpel. They poked a hole right into my chest while I was still awake. I’m sure they numbed it first, but I remember watching the tube go into my chest and then, whoosh, blood just shooting out the other end. I just remember looking at that tube and then being able to breathe again. The next thing I remember was them stuffing another tube down my throat. As they were doing that, I started vomiting. I just leaned over the side of the table, and when I was finished, I lay back down.

Jim was on a table right next to me, and a friend of mine named Danny Schroenburger was standing there between us. I asked Danny, “How is Jim?” He told me that they were working on him now, but that he was going to be OK. Hearing that kind of put my mind at ease because I was really worried about my partner. Then they took me into X ray, brought me out, said they were gonna take me into surgery, and the next thing that I remember was waking up the next day.

When I woke up, it took a little while for things to start registering with me. I remember that I looked down at my abdominal area and saw a mess of meat on my stomach. That’s what it looked like. They had just kind of loosely stitched together the incision they made over the contact shot, so I could see all this meat from my abdomen. When I saw that, I realized that I was alive. Then I saw Rob Johnson, the guy I had for officer survival in the academy, standing on my right side. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, you did a good job.” Then I remember Danny Schroenburger coming in and giving me a message that some guy had called to wish me luck. Then my wife came in, and everything was starting to register.

I don’t remember too much after that except that I asked how my partner was doing. They told me that he was doing OK, that he was next door in the intensive-care unit we were in. I was really concerned about Jim because he was my responsibility. He was a probationer and I was the trainer. Here was somebody that was in my care, and he got shot with my gun. I assumed the responsibility for him getting shot because it was my fault. I knew it was.

There were things I could have done to prevent him from getting shot because I saw the warning signs and I didn’t react to them. I was going to call for a backup unit as soon as I saw the guy was getting a little bit belligerent with Jim, but as I started to use the radio, I heard another car calling for assistance. So I thought about what I had—I figured that this is probably not gonna be a problem; maybe we’d just be kicking them loose, maybe just taking the driver to jail, no big deal. If I called for backup, all these units would be rolling down to me when there was this other assistance call. So I decided to let the other units go assist the guy who had already called for assistance. I shouldn’t have done that. I should have put the call out. I needed the assistance. If we would have had a show of force with other officers, the situation never would have escalated into a shooting.

One other thing I could have done differently was handcuff the driver right away. He was very challenging. It would have been reasonable to put the handcuffs on him. If nothing turned up on the warrant check, we could have dusted him off and sent him on his way, or if we needed to, we could have called for a supervisor to the scene to explain to the guy why we did what we did. We could have dealt with that easily, but the driver needed to be neutralized. He needed to have handcuffs on him. I realized that at the time, and I didn’t do it, so I could have done some things differently. I didn’t, we got shot, and it’s my fault. I decided that when I got back to work that I wouldn’t make any more mistakes like that.

It took a few months for me to get back into shape and get back to work, but I made it back to my old slot as a training officer in the same division where the shooting went down. Same watch, same car, same everything. About three months after I got back to the field, I got a brand-new probationer from the academy. This particular officer had a background in law enforcement. He had worked for another agency, so I felt real comfortable with him.

We were out on patrol, real late in the shift, the sun was just starting to come up, when I spotted this Chevrolet. It was still dark out, and the guy didn’t have his lights on. We were heading toward the guy, so I flashed the lights on the police car to get the guy to turn his lights on, but he didn’t, and it seemed like he sped up to get away. I told my partner, “Say, something is wrong here. This guy is rabbiting on us, so be prepared.” So I made the U-turn to get behind the guy, and he turned off the street and pulled into this subterranean parking area. I pulled in behind him, so now we were chasing this guy around the parking lot. We went around and around the lot several times. Then the guy turned back onto the street and took off. I figured the car was stolen, so I told my partner to get ready for a foot chase if the guy bails out. So now we’re chasing this guy up the street, red lights and siren on. He went a few blocks, then hung a left and lost control of the car. It was fishtailing, then it jumped the curb and crashed into a building.

The car bounced back off the building and started to roll back a little bit. Then the door popped open, and the suspect fell out onto the pavement. I stopped the police car, and we jumped out to take him into custody, but he jumped up and started to run down the middle of the street. He got a good head start on us, because we were just in the process of getting out when he took off, so we jumped back into the car and started following him down the street. He made a right onto a side street, then a left into an alley. Then he ducked behind this one building. I told my partner to jump out and wait where he was while I circled around to the front of the building to pin the suspect between us. So he jumped out, I went to the front of the building, parked the car, put out a broadcast for more units to come to where we were, got my flashlight and drew my gun, then went to look for the suspect.

I went through some bushes, then spotted the suspect hiding under this car parked up against the building. I stopped about fifteen to eighteen feet from the car and told my partner to come to the front because I had the suspect. When Fred got up there, I started telling the suspect to put his hands where I could see them and for him to get out from under the car. As he was moving from under the car, Fred moved up to him, and the next thing I knew, the suspect and my partner were in a fight. Now this suspect was a real muscular guy, and Fred was small in stature, so I was sizing this up in my mind real quick: big suspect, little partner. What happened several months before flashed in my mind, and I thought, “No way is this going to happen again.”

At that point, things started to slow down just like they did when I got shot. I knew I couldn’t let the guy overpower my partner, so I ran up to the suspect and—“boom”—hit him over the head a couple of times with the butt of my gun. That knocked him down, but he reached up and grabbed my gun. I wasn’t about to let this guy get my gun. I wasn’t about to go through what happened before again, so I immediately pulled the trigger. I shot a hole through the suspect’s hand and he let go. Then my partner jumped up and shouted, “I’m shot!” I wasn’t sure what had happened, but the suspect was still struggling, so I had my hands full. I put my gun away and got the suspect handcuffed, then stood on top of him while I asked my partner where he was shot, how he was doing, this and that. I was really worried about him. I was thinking, “Oh, my God, here’s another partner, another probationer, shot.” The only shot I heard was mine, but the suspect hadn’t been searched, so I thought maybe somehow he had shot Fred. Fred told me he was shot in the hand, so that put my mind at ease somewhat. Some other units showed up pretty soon after that; then an ambulance came and took the suspect away. Then another ambulance came and took my partner to the hospital.

I found out later that the suspect had raped a woman just before we spotted him. The car wasn’t stolen. He was just trying to get away from the alley where he’d raped this woman. He was on parole for some other things, just out of the joint, so he was a real bad guy. The investigators also told me what had happened when I shot the guy. The bullet went through his hand, hit him in the head, ricocheted off his head, and lodged in my partner’s hand. So that explained how my partner got shot. After it was all over, some of the guys gave me a hard time about it, kidding around. They said stuff like, “Hey, second probationer? You’re kind of hard on rookies, aren’t you, Carl?”

Chapter Four

Pulling the Trigger