Into the Kill Zone

The men and women who shared their stories with me had a variety of responses in the wake of their shootings. Some experienced no problems, a few viewed what happened in a positive light, but most endured at least some sort of psychological, emotional, or physical discomfort at some point, and some suffered extremely severe negative reactions, such as depression and suicidal despair.

The previous chapter provided a glimpse of the sorts of negative reactions that officers can experience in the immediate aftermath of shootings. The remorse of the new mother who shot an unarmed robber, the tears shed by the SWAT officer who shot the gun-toting arms merchant, and the worry about whether he’d done the right thing expressed by the rookie whose shooting led to a riot, all demonstrate the sorts of short-term discomfort that officers can feel. How officers react immediately following shootings is only part of the picture, however, for it can take quite some time for the personal repercussions of these violent events to play themselves out. And officers’ responses following shootings involve more than just reactions to the incident in which they fired.

Police shootings are social events that engender reactions among various individuals and entities besides the people involved directly in them. Both the agency that employs the officer and other elements of the criminal justice system mobilize to investigate the shooting in order to establish whether the officer’s use of deadly force conformed with law and department policy. Police shootings almost always generate some sort of press coverage because the personal drama of individuals locked in potentially mortal combat and the social drama of the clash between state authority and individual liberty that they involve make them inherently newsworthy. Shootings also generate a good deal of interest among the peers and supervisors of the involved officers, so it is not uncommon for other officers to seek shooters out to hear from the horse’s mouth what happened and to offer commentary on the incident.

The ways the justice system, the press, officers’ families, and other third parties react to shooting incidents can exert their own effects on officers following shootings. Support can buoy officers, for example, and a lack of it can leave them floundering. Similarly, positive comments can build officers up, and negative ones can drag them down. And so on. Because the social reactions spawned by shootings can affect officers, it is not possible to understand officers’ experiences in the wake of shootings apart from the reactions that others have to them. Knowing this, I spent a good deal of time talking to the officers I interviewed about their post-shooting reactions, how various third parties responded to their shootings, and the intersection between the two.

The officers I interviewed went through a variety of experiences following their shootings and had a broad range of post-shooting reactions—from extreme delight that they had survived a potentially fatal event to abject despair that they had killed someone. Within this range, there was a strong tendency for officers to suffer some notable short-term disruption, which dissipated markedly as time passed. The stories in this chapter present a representative slice of how officers are treated and how they react in the wake of shootings.

Most of them come from officers we have already heard from, but some are fresh voices. Readers will be able to link some of the stories in this chapter with those in the last, as it is apparent in some cases that a particular story here comes from a particular officer that we heard from there. In order to protect officers’ privacy, however, there is no clear link between most of the stories in this chapter and those in previous ones. Another step that I sometimes took to protect officers’ identity was to break their post-shooting stories into pieces and place them in different sections of the chapter. So the post-shooting experiences of single officers are sometimes spread across multiple sections of the chapter.

In sum, this chapter is structured to provide maximum insight into what happens to police officers following shootings, while protecting the privacy of the men and women who so graciously shared their experiences with me. The stories begin with a section that focuses on officers’ experiences with the way the justice system deals with officer-involved shootings.

Lawyers, Guns, and Justice

One of the first social reactions to officer-involved shootings is an official investigation into the incident, which begins as soon as the scene has been secured. These investigations—conducted by detectives from the officer’s own department, other police agencies, or both—are major undertakings that follow the same basic protocols that are involved in the investigation of major crimes. The detectives collect physical evidence, obtain statements from relevant parties (including the involved officers), and undertake the numerous other investigative steps they would take in any significant case. The information that is developed during these investigations is then used in a pair of formal inquiries that consider the appropriateness of the shots that officers fired.

First, the police department that employs the officer who fired conducts an inquiry to determine whether the shots were within the scope of department policy on the use of deadly force. Some departments have supervisory or command officers make individual determinations about the shooting, whereas others convene special panels (known generically as shooting review boards) to pass collective judgment on the officers who fired. Whatever protocol an agency employs, nearly all shootings are found to be “within policy,” so officers are rarely disciplined by their departments for shooting someone.

The second review is a criminal inquiry to determine the legality of officers’ actions vis-à-vis state law regarding the use of deadly force by police officers. These inquiries are generally handled by the prosecutor’s office in the county in which the shooting occurred and often include a grand jury or coroner’s inquest. Whatever procedures a given jurisdiction might employ to review the legality of shootings, criminal inquiries nearly always find that the police acted within the scope of the relevant law, so officers rarely face criminal charges for the actions they take during shooting incidents.

Whatever local legal authorities decide about whether a given shooting was within the bounds of state law, federal authorities have the power to conduct a separate criminal inquiry to examine whether the officers who fired violated federal civil rights laws that govern police conduct. Unlike the legal review of officer-involved shootings that occurs at the local level, however, federal criminal inquiries are not routine. The federal government opens formal probes in just a small fraction of the police shootings that occur in the nation each year. These queries almost always clear the involved officer(s), so federal prosecutions in the wake of police shootings are extremely rare.1

Even though officers are rarely administratively sanctioned, prosecuted, or punished for shooting someone, the prospect that they might be looms large in many officers’ minds. And there is one other sort of inquiry that makes many officers wary: civil litigation. Suspects who survive their wounds and the estates of dead ones can file civil lawsuits asserting that the shooting was not justified and demanding damages for the injuries they suffered. Such suits can be filed in federal court, state court, or both and can level a variety of allegations against police officers and their departments. There is no national database on these sorts of lawsuits, so it is not possible to say with any precision how frequently suits are filed in the wake of shootings. What is known is that they are filed frequently enough to support a cottage industry of lawyers and expert witnesses who specialize in litigation against police officers and departments.2

The final piece of the justice system’s response to police shootings pertains only to cases in which suspects survive the incident. When suspects survive their wounds, prosecutors will review the incident to determine what criminal charges should be brought against them. In a case in which the police shoot an armed robber who fired upon officers while fleeing the scene of the crime, for example, the suspect might be charged with both attempted murder for attacking officers and robbery for the initial crime. Unless the suspect pleads guilty (or in the rare case in which the suspect is not charged with any crimes), a criminal trial ensues, during which the shooting officer usually testifies as a witness for the prosecution.

The previous chapter included a bit of information about the investigations that follow shootings (in the form of officers’ reports about things such as handing their guns over to supervisors and heading to the Homicide office to give their statements to detectives) and the concern that officers can feel about the inquiries that follow (for example, the rookie who was worried that the gun the suspect used to shoot at him and his partner had gone missing). The stories in this section flesh out the picture of shooting investigations, the various inquiries that can follow, and how officers respond as these aspects of the social reaction to their shootings are played out.

And they do much more. They also show how factors besides post-shooting inquiries can play critical roles in framing officers’ experiences and reactions in the wake of shootings. Most prominent among these factors are race and religion.

Police officers, like all people everywhere, tend to draw upon what ever religious faith they have during trying times, especially those involving injury or death. Thus do many officers call upon their religious faith to help them deal with their shootings. But religion can cut both ways in the wake of shootings. Because all faiths have some variant of the biblical admonition that we should not harm other humans, religious officers must make peace with what they did in terms of the teachings of their faith about the sanctity of human life.

Where race goes, the previously discussed historical tensions between the police and minority communities over the use of deadly force can translate into a source of personal difficulty for officers who shoot black suspects because they may be accused of having shot based on racial animus.

This chapter contains several stories that provide the reader with some notion of how race can become an issue following shootings and the sorts of responses officers can have to it. But the stories do more than that; they also shed light on the role that race plays in deadly force decision making, as well as police perspectives on the role that race plays in law enforcement more generally. Stories that touch on race are interspersed throughout many of the sections of this chapter. They begin in this first one for the simple reason that racial concerns often arise during the investigations and inquiries that follow shootings.

The supervisors took our guns from us at the scene, then put us in a room, and cleaned us up a little bit because we had some blood on us. I think the first thing I did was take my gun belts off, then I took my T-shirt off, and I got some tears in my eyes. I was scared. The fear started right after I stopped shooting. I was worried for two reasons. First of all, I’d never killed anybody before, never shot anybody before, and I was thinking, “God, I lost my job.” I wasn’t sure how the administration was going to react because officers in my department hadn’t killed anybody in a long time, and the last one was a bad shooting.

The other reason I was scared was that this was a black guy. I was worried that all the black people were gonna say was, “White cop kills black man.” That went through my mind. It didn’t matter that he had a gun; just, “White cop kills black man.” So I was worried that there would be some community outcry and that I would be accused of shooting someone who didn’t need to be shot. I was worried that the department would use me as a scapegoat, that I would lose my job for political reasons. I was also scared for my family because I was worried about what people were gonna think of them. I live in this diverse neighborhood, and my kids were going to the elementary school there. I was really worried about a racial issue coming out of the shooting, and I wondered what would happen to my kids in school if it did. I was probably more worried about them than I was me.

Everything worked out. The department’s review came back that we’d done exactly what we were supposed to do, and there were never any problems on the racial angle. But I was sure worried about that stuff for a while.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problems with the Press

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

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

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

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

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

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

The press always plays up the racial angle on police shootings around here, and that used to affect my thinking about things. I remember this one time before my shooting, a black guy took a shot at me and my partner and then took off running. When we caught up with him, he was walking toward some citizens with his rifle. I told him several times to drop the gun, but he just kept moving. I was about twenty feet behind him when he turned to go into this apartment complex. I yelled, “This is the last time I’m gonna tell you to put the gun down. If I have to shoot you in the back, I’ll shoot you in the back. I don’t want to shoot you in the back, but I’m gonna shoot you in the back right now!” As soon as I said that, he threw the rifle down.

The whole time I was telling him I was going to shoot him, I was thinking, “They’ll crucify me on the news tomorrow if I shoot this black guy in the back.” That was all it was gonna be: “White cop shoots black man in the back.” That was gonna be the extent of the story because that’s just what the press preys off of.

The racial thing even came up with my buddies after my shooting. I grew up in a very diverse area, so I’ve got a lot of black friends and Mexican friends from where I grew up. After my shooting, one of my Mexican buddies said, “Tell me the guy was white, because if not, I’m gonna have to go to the news station and tell ’em you’re not a racist white cop.” That issue even crossed my mind. I thought, “God, that sucked. I had to shoot and kill somebody, but thank God it was a white guy.”

That thought should’ve never gone through my mind, and it wouldn’t now. Now I just ignore the media for the most part, because the press always changes the facts to make stories cater to their views. The one thing I do look for is stories about officers getting hurt, because I want to learn from what happened. But I’ve noticed lately that when officers are killed and I see it on TV, I get really depressed for three to four days. It usually takes me a few days to pull out of it and get dialed back in. So I’ve found that the less newspapers I read, the less news I watch, the happier I am.

Psychological Services

Most police departments across the country are aware that officers can experience negative reactions in the immediate aftermath of shootings. Consequently, it has become commonplace for law enforcement agencies to give officers who have been involved in shootings a short paid leave to gather their thoughts and to send them to mental health professionals (MHPs) for an evaluation prior to their return to duty. Many large departments maintain in-house psychological-services units that can conduct this checkup, whereas other departments contract post-shooting mental health services to outside sources.

Whatever their affiliation, MHPs who debrief officers in the wake of shootings have a tough job, because several factors conspire against successful counseling sessions. Police officers are notoriously insular and suspicious of outsiders. They also tend to distrust police administrators and are fearful that their supervisors are “out to get them” (or are at least willing to sell them out if it will benefit them).3 Unless an MHP has a solid reputation among the rank and file as a stand-up professional, officers sent to them for duty fitness evaluations will likely withhold information out of fear that any hint that they are having difficulties will get back to their superiors, who, in turn, will punish them. Indeed many of the officers I interviewed told me that they had lied to the MHP about how they were doing for this very reason.

Conversely, many officers had high praise for the MHPs to whom they were sent. The stories that follow include tales of both positive and negative encounters with MHPs, starting with a visit to a clinician who has the reputation of being one of the best police psychologists in the business.

The first few days after the shooting, I had this sense of sadness. I knew that what I did had to be done, but still I had taken somebody’s life. It’s mandatory in our department to go see someone down at psychological services after a shooting, so about three or four days after, I went to see Dr. Steadly.

He asked me general questions; then he asked me how I felt about the shooting. I told him I felt bad for taking somebody’s life. Then he asked me to put what happened in some perspective. He asked me what alternatives I had. I told him it was either me or the guy. Then he asked me if I would give up certain things to bring him back. Would I give an arm? A leg? I said, “Well, no. I wouldn’t.”

Then he said, “Look at what you just said. It’s not like you shot some ninety-year-old lady pushing a grocery cart who has just won the Citizen of the Year award and was just standing there. The guy was trying to kill you.” He told me to look at the situation, to look at the facts. When I did that, it helped.

The first few days afterward, I had this sense of elation. I was pretty satisfied with the fact that I was just involved in a very high-profile operation where I reacted in the way I was supposed to. I was placed in a situation where I could’ve gotten shot, and I was very satisfied that I reverted to my training and that it had helped me get through the situation without getting shot. None of the good guys got hurt. We did exactly what we planned to do, what we were trained to do, so I was very elated.

Before I could go back to work, however, I had to see the department’s psychological-services people. The guy that I met with wanted to know what my feelings were. I basically ran the scenario down for him and expressed my satisfaction with the way it went. He asked me, “What do you know about the guy you shot?”

I said, “I don’t know really anything about him other than the information that was given to me by the case agent.”

He asked, “Well, does that concern you that he might have kids and that you might’ve destroyed his family and his life?”

I said, “I have a family too, four kids and a young baby, so I’m not thinking about that at all.”

When I was in there, I felt like, “Why in the world is he asking me this stuff?” I was never really angry about anything that happened about the shooting, but if I was a little pissed at anybody through the whole deal, it would’ve been this guy, because he asked me those questions.

The PD sent me to the fit-for-duty interview that they send everyone who kills someone to. It was really strange. First, when I got in the elevator to go up to the guy’s office, two beautiful women got on with me—really hot, maybe sixteen or seventeen. They got off with me, and we all went into the same small waiting room. The room was set up so you have to flip a switch to tell this doctor that you’re there. I flipped my switch, and then these two chicks went and flipped another switch. I didn’t want to stare at them because we were in a shrink’s office, but I couldn’t help but look at them. Then it hit me that they were transvestites. It made me feel a little uncomfortable, like the PD thought like maybe I was messed up and confused like guys who want to be girls. I was thinking, “Oh, my God, what’s going on here?” I found out later that the guy I was going to see shares an office with someone who does pre- and postop counseling for transsexuals, so that’s the answer to my question.

Then, when the wait was over and I went in to see the guy who worked for the PD, the first thing I noticed about him was that his glasses were falling off his head because the temple going back to his right ear was missing. He was a younger guy—not some doddering old Sigmund Freud—probably about my age. There were boxes and other stuff piled up to the ceiling all over the place. His sofa was all tattered. It had foam and some other stuff sticking out of the cushions, all messed up.

When I saw all this, I asked him, “Gee, are you moving out of this office, or did you just move in?” He replied, “Neither. Why?” And I thought, “Oh, man, this is going to be a circus sideshow. This is the guy who’s going to certify me as being fit for duty?”

When we talked about the shooting, he was cool about it, but it was just a joke. It struck me that anybody who had any wits at all could pass that interview because it’s obvious what the answers to the questions are supposed to be. I think the only way someone might fail is if they were just a raving lunatic. The guy might be able to pick that up. I felt like it was a waste of my time and a waste of the city’s time. If there really was some officer who needed help after a shooting, who shouldn’t go back to work, I don’t think this guy would be able to catch it. I don’t know. Maybe I was just so OK with what happened that he was just kind of being real mellow about it. I don’t know how successful he is in his practice or what the city’s standards are to hire someone like that. But I talked to other officers who had to go see this guy, and they said the same thing, that it was a strange experience. And these guys didn’t even get to see any transvestites.

Then, about a year and a half later, I got in another fatal shooting, and the PD sent me back to see the same guy. He wasn’t wearing his one-armed glasses, so I asked him, “Hey, you got contacts on?” He replied, “Yeah, how’d you know that?” I told him not to worry about it. His furniture was still all in tatters, but most of the boxes were gone, and there were no transvestites to be seen. So it was a little bit better, but it was still pretty bizarre.

I had to go talk to the department psychologist because the guy I shot died. They make everyone who’s in a fatal shooting go talk to the shrink before going back to work. It was no big deal, pretty much just a matter-of-fact thing, but he did bring up a couple of neat points about talking to other people about it. He said that a lot of people were going to ask questions about the shooting and want to talk with me about it. He said to go ahead and talk with other policemen if I wanted but that I might want to think about handling it different when I was around people who aren’t police officers because they don’t think like me; they probably wouldn’t understand it in the same terms cops do. So he said it’s up to me, go ahead and talk to noncops if I wanted, and then he gave me a suggestion about how to deal with questions if I didn’t want to talk. He said I should just say, “Hey, you know how every once in a while you have a bad day at work and you don’t really like to talk about it, you would just as soon forget it? I’m sure you’ve had days like that. Well, that was one of the worst days I’ve ever had at work.” He said that people usually understand that.

The other thing he talked about had to do with my son, who was five at the time. He asked me if I had told my son about it. I told him that I hadn’t because I felt like he was too young. He asked me if I thought that later on some other kids who heard about the shooting might tell him about it. I told him that was possible. Then he asked me if I thought he’d rather hear it from me. I said that I guess he would but that I still wondered if he was old enough to understand. The doc replied that he should be able to if I explained it to him in the right way. Then he encouraged me to tell my boy when I got home.

So I did. I went and I told him about it. Just the basics. It went pretty well. The only question on his mind was he wanted to know if the man that I killed had a son. I sure wasn’t expecting that. I was kind of curious why he wondered that. But I didn’t ask him about it. I just told him that I didn’t know but that I didn’t think the guy had kids. Then I asked him if he had a problem with anything I told him. He said, “No, Daddy. I don’t have a problem with it,” and that was it.

Family Matters

As demonstrated by the preceding story, the personal impact of shootings does not stop with the officers who pull the trigger. Shootings also have ramifications for the families of the involved officers. Those close to officers can be strong, uncertain, and fearful as they watch and participate in the post-shooting process. They can be supportive, indifferent, and even antagonistic toward officers as they try to make sense of what has and is happening. And these various responses can, in turn, affect officers’ adjustment as they traverse the post-shooting landscape.

The stories in this section address the twin issues of how officers’ loved ones reacted following shootings and how these reactions played themselves out in the lives of the involved officers. One thing that stands out is the key role that intimate partners can play in officers’ post-shooting adjustment—for both the good and the ill. Some partners provided officers a safe harbor for working things out, whereas others were a thorn in their side. For the most part, the difficulties that officers experience in this connection stem from their spouses’ fears about the dangers of police work, fears that are brought painfully close to home by shootings. Such was the case for the wives in the initial stories that follow.

My wife took it much harder than I did. She was pretty upset for a while. A day or two after the shooting, the gravity of what had happened hit her. She’d never really thought about me getting hurt or killed at work; then she answered the door one night, and it’s this sergeant telling her that her husband just capped a guy who stabbed him. She said that prior to the shooting she understood on an intellectual level that something bad could happen, but she never worried about it. Then, when this happened, it made her realize deep down just how real the danger was. So the shooting gave her cause to think about what I do for a living more carefully and in much more detail than she really wanted to.

The shooting made me take my job a little bit more seriously. I’ve always taken it seriously, but the shooting pushed me to an even higher level. I played college baseball, and it’s the fine little things that make the difference on the diamond. I think the same thing applies here in SWAT; it’s the little things that make the difference, and the shooting just reinforced that. I realized that if I’d been a fraction of a second slower, the guy could have gotten a round off at me, so I started paying even more attention to what I do when I train, and I spent even more time on job-related stuff.

This didn’t make my wife too happy. I wasn’t a cop when we got married, and she’s reminded me more than once that she didn’t marry a police officer. But this detail is a little bit more than just the job—here, I’ve got all these guys who depend on me for their lives—so I feel that I always need to be at the top of my game. I know that I put a little more into it than my wife would like, especially my spare time. For example, I just now got a good computer at the house. It’s better than the ones at work, which can’t run a lot of the software I like to use, so I do a lot of my work stuff on the home computer. That’s time she wishes I’d spend playing with the kids and things like that. And the time stuff is on top of the general concern she has about my safety. If I left police work tomorrow, she wouldn’t blink an eye; she’d be happy. She’s not too thrilled about me doing this job, but I don’t know if any wife would be.

My family was real supportive, all but one sister-in-law, that is. She was nineteen or twenty at the time, really into the liberal scene. We were having a family dinner a short time after the shooting, when she asked me if I minded talking about it. I said no, so we started talking about it. I was being real mellow about it, just describing what happened. When I mentioned how I shot the guy five times, she went off. “Five times! Five times! Why did you shoot him five times? Isn’t that pretty excessive? Didn’t the first one kill him?” and all this other stuff. Just went on and on about how I shot too much. That just set me off. We went around and around and around. It led to a big argument about police brutality and the whole business. But what set me off was her saying it was excessive when she wasn’t there.

But that was awhile back. We get along now. We just don’t talk about the police. I’m very interested in what she is doing. She’s a great kid. She’s going to law school, and she actually went down to Mexico to help out with the Chiapas deal. She went down there and was almost put in prison. I mean, she’s a great kid but she’s just—let’s just say our values are different.

Talking to my dad about what happened, I learned some stuff about him that I’d always wondered about. He was a captain of a fighter squadron in Korea, but when I was growing up, he never talked about any combat he’d been in. Us kids would ask him about his time in the military, but he only talked about things he did in training with his buddies and some of the fun things they did in their deployment. I never understood why he wouldn’t talk about combat, but I found out after my first shooting. I was going through some tough times, and he told me that he’d gone through some tough times, too.

He told me that one day they scrambled his squadron for ground support of some troops who were pinned down. As they were running out to their planes, he was given the coordinates. They jumped in their planes, went to the coordinates, and dropped their bombs. Later on, they learned that the guy who had written down the coordinates had them wrong, and they had bombed and killed three of their own soldiers. He told me that they sent his squadron to counseling and that they were told to deal with it by putting it in a vault, shutting the door, and locking it. They were told, “Don’t bring it out. Don’t do anything. Keep it locked in that vault and don’t think about it.” That’s what he told me that they told him, and that kind of explained why he would never talk about his combat experiences.

I called my wife at her work, told her what had happened. Now the guy ended up living, but at that time if anybody would’ve bet me that that guy was going to live, I’d have lost a year’s wages. In fact, everybody who was at that scene would have lost a lot of money ’cause we all figured he wouldn’t make it.

I replied, “Well, you know, I’ll probably be home late, but they’re gonna give me five days off for it,” the standard five-day administrative leave.

My wife, the understanding individual she is, said, “Oh, good, I’ll have a list of stuff for you to do.” Now my lieutenant was standing right behind me when I was talking to my wife, so I turned around and told him what she had just said. He about wet his pants laughing.

I fired as the guy swung his gun toward me. I knew I hit him because I saw him flinch as I was firing. He flinched up and back. With my experience hunting, I know that that’s what happens when something—an animal or whatever—has been hit by a bullet. So when I saw that flinch, I knew that I had hit him. Then he took off down the stairway where the shooting took place and made it outside where some other officers caught him. The second robber got away, so I went downstairs to where the suspect I shot was. He was lying on the ground in handcuffs. I asked the guy who was watching the suspect, “Is he OK?” He said, “No, he’s been hit.” I reached down, pulled the suspect’s shirt back, and saw that there was a hole in his right side. It wasn’t anything like you would picture; it was just a small hole with no exit. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had also shot him in the leg and in the back. All I saw was the hole in his side.

After that point, it kind of started cycling through my head that my wife was seven months pregnant with our first child. That got to me. I knelt down, and I got beside the suspect, and I told him, “You and that other son of a bitch aren’t going to keep me from seeing my child. You’re lucky to be alive.” I was angry at this guy for coming at me with a gun. What if he would have shot me, and I never would have seen my child, never would have seen my wife again? I was pissed.

After that discussion, I realized that the other guy was still on the loose, so I went to help look for him. I was helping the other guys look for about ten or fifteen minutes, when I realized, “Shit, I was just in a shooting. I need to call somebody.” So I quit looking for the second suspect and called my wife. I explained everything to her, basically told her that I was involved in a shooting and that I was OK. The next thing I did was call my attorney and basically explained to him what happened.

As I was waiting for my attorney and the investigators to show up, I went through a stage of anger because of what this guy did. He would have shot me if I hadn’t shot him first, so I was thinking about my kid. I was determined to see my family, but I was also angry that he put himself in this predicament. I thought, “What about his family?” Here he doesn’t think about himself, but what about his family that’s got to go through all this stuff? So I started thinking about that, but then I came to the conclusion that I should forget about that. If the table had been turned and he shot me and got away, would this guy be thinking about my family the way I was thinking about his?

I really didn’t think so. Especially now, knowing what I know about his extensive criminal background, I don’t think that he would have. I guess maybe I had those thoughts because my religious faith made me more concerned about the other people involved. On top of all that, I was also pissed at this guy for making me shoot him. I could have gone through my whole career without having to shoot somebody, and that would have been great. But I didn’t have any other recourse but to shoot him.

The emotions really hit me when I was done giving my statement and I went home to my wife. Just seeing her pregnant with my child, I broke down and cried. We discussed the situation and what happened and that I was pissed. Even at that time, I was still pissed that that guy had placed me in this situation. What in the hell over? Freaking money? He was willing to lose his life over that money and risk the things that that would do to his family? We talked about all that. I ran the whole situation down with my wife, told her everything about it and what I was feeling. Later that day, I talked about the shooting with friends on the PD. After that, I didn’t experience anything like waking up in the middle of the night, crying, or being real depressed. Nothing like that. So I guess I just felt better after getting the story out to my wife and my friends. It helped me out.

Right after the shooting, my wife was worried about me. She was wondering how it was gonna affect me. Matter of fact, she told me about a year after it happened that I really changed, but she never would tell me how or why. I know that I did to a point, but I don’t know to what extent, and she never would tell me. Still, to this day, nine years later, she won’t tell me, and we’ve been married for seventeen years.

I got in two shootings within five months of each other my first year on the job, and my family started to worry about me. In fact, my mom’s younger sister to this day is just deathly afraid of me being a policeman. She just goes nuts whenever we talk about my job. She doesn’t want me hurt. She and I are about probably twelve or thirteen years apart. We’re the closest kids in age in my entire family, so as we grew up, I was almost her younger brother rather than her nephew, and she just didn’t want to see her nephew go through that stuff. And then my mom and my grandma would say stuff like, “Oh, please be careful. I worry about you.” So it’s like your typical sheltered family that really wants to hold on to memories of Frank the altar boy, and Frank singing in the choir, and Frank the Boy Scout, not Frank the policeman who’s having to cap these people coming after him with guns.

The shooting went down around three in the morning, and the detectives released me about eight or nine. I hadn’t had a chance to talk to my husband, but another officer called and told him what happened. He passed the information on to our twelve-year-old son, who was home because it was summertime. Then he went to work. When I pulled into our driveway, my son came running out to the car. He was crying. He’s really sensitive at times, and as soon as he saw me, he just lost it.

I calmed him down and told him I was OK. I told him that everything was fine, that Mama’s not hurt, that I did what I was supposed to do, and that I didn’t kill the guy. I knew that beyond my safety, he was a little concerned that I maybe killed somebody. I said, “No, I didn’t kill him, but if I had killed him, it would’ve been because he pointed a gun at me, but I didn’t kill him. He’s gonna be all right, so there’s nothing for you to worry about.” After that, he was fine.

My son loves to walk our dogs, so we got the pups, went for a walk, and when we came back, I let him pick what he wanted to eat for breakfast. That was a mistake, because he picked egg burritos and French fries. I thought, “Well. Whatever. That’s fine,” and we went out to get some breakfast. So I consciously spent a lot of time with my son that morning.

Deadly Dreams

Psychologists tell us that dreams are the place where we deal with emotions and conflicts that we have not worked out consciously and that nightmares are the expression of fears and anxieties about particular aspects of our waking lives that trouble us.4 Given the traumatic nature of police shootings, it should come as no surprise that it is not at all unusual for officers to experience nightmares in the wake of shootings.

The stories in this section provide some insight into the sorts of bad dreams that officers have, the contexts in which these nightmares emerge, and what these episodes might mean. We will hear of dreams in which officers did not fire soon enough, could not get their guns to work, or watched assailants press their attacks despite a hail of accurate gunfire. If the psychologists are correct about the sources of nightmares, the fact that officers sometimes have such dreams indicates that shootings sometimes produce fear and anxiety about their safety that officers do not know how to process during their waking hours. Whatever the case, it is clear from the stories that follow that officers who shoot sometimes experience substantial horror during what is supposed to be the peaceful time of slumber.

The first day, everything was so pumped up that I couldn’t get to sleep. I’d been up well over twenty-four hours when I finally got back home. I wanted to go to sleep, but I was just so pumped up that I couldn’t. I was zombied into the TV, just clicking channels, not even thinking about it. The next few days were like that, too. I’d try to go to sleep, but then I’d start to think about the shooting, and boy, there went my adrenaline right back up to that spot where it was right after it happened. Then, when I finally did fall asleep, I’d wake up after about four hours, think about the shooting, and get charged up again, which made it hard to go back to sleep.

I was having some dreams too. I remember one night, I think it was about a week and a half after the shooting, a guy I grew up with came to visit. He brought some drinks over, so we just sat around, watching a game or a movie, talking and drinking some beers. We finally went to bed. He was sleeping on the couch, and I went in and fell asleep on my bed.

All of a sudden, I heard this “BOOM!” and I came sailing up out of my bed, grabbed my gun, and went over to the window.

He woke up, saw me stumbling around in the dark, knocking everything over, and asked me, “What’s going on?”

I asked him if he heard that gunshot, and he replied, “No.” So then I was thinking, “Shit, maybe I capped a round off in my sleep!” So I opened my gun up, saw six rounds in the cylinder, and knew the shot wasn’t from me. I’d apparently been dreaming about the shooting and heard my gunshots go off. It just sent me straight up out of bed.

I never had any dreams about the shooting incident—none that were even similar to it—but the dreams I do have have changed since the shooting. I used to get these recurring dreams where I’d either go to pull my trigger and it’s so rusted that I can’t pull it, or I’m pulling and the bullets are coming out in slow motion, or I’m pulling and I’m hitting the shit out of the suspect but he’s just laughing at me. I had these dreams even before I was a cop, when I first started getting interested in law enforcement. Once I got hired, I had probably three or four of these dreams a month. Well, since the shooting, I don’t have those dreams anymore. I haven’t had them for two years, but I recently had two dreams where I got shot.

In all the dreams before the shooting where my equipment doesn’t work, or I was shooting the suspect but he’s laughing at me, or the rounds just aren’t working, I was never shot. I guess the recent dreams about getting shot are because of all the cops that’ve been shot back East and up North. There’s been so many incidents of officers shot and killed lately; one that really bugged me was where two deputy sheriffs were shot and killed. Both of my dreams happened since that incident.

In the first one, I got shot in the leg, and I remember going down on the ground, but I don’t remember reacting before I woke up. I was pissed I didn’t get a chance to respond, because I took a law enforcement survival class a long time ago where they told us that we can take control of our dreams and survive those bad ones. The second one was different. In the second dream, I got shot really bad. I got shot in the leg, and I remember the round burning really bad; then I took two hits to my chest. I got so fucking pissed, I started to wake up. But I told myself before I woke up, “Uh-uh, this shit ain’t over. The son of a bitch is going with you.” So I stayed in the dream and shot this guy probably eighteen times. When I woke up, I thought, “At least I survived this one. I got shot, but I didn’t die.” That’s what I always tell myself in the field: “If you ever get shot, you’re not gonna die. You’re not gonna frickin’ die. You’re gonna get rounds back downrange.” And that’s what I did in that dream. Since that dream, that second dream about getting shot, I haven’t had any more of ’em.

It’s been eight years since the last incident happened, but I still dream about my shootings. I don’t think that stuff will ever go away. I also have dreams about shootings in general, like having to shoot somebody and my gun won’t fire because I don’t have the strength to squeeze my trigger. I’m in justifiable shooting situations, where there’s absolutely no way that they could ever hold anything against me, and then, all of a sudden, I try to shoot, but I can’t pull the trigger, or I squeeze and the gun just clicks, or my gun falls apart, or I shoot the person and it doesn’t even phase ’em. I can tell I’m hitting ’em in the head because part of their head is blowing off, and I see their brains and all this stuff, but nothing happens. They’re still talking normal; they’re still coming toward me. I’ve had those dreams quite often. It’s not something that happens every night, but it happens pretty regular, maybe a couple of times a month.

Nerves

The fear and anxiety that officers sometimes experience about dangerous encounters is not limited to the subconscious venue of their dreams. Conscious concerns about shooting situations, moreover, are not limited to fear and anxiety about their personal safety. Some officers become quite concerned about whether they will be able to pull the trigger again if circumstances call for them to do so, usually worrying that their potential inability to act could jeopardize their fellow officers or innocent citizens.

For most officers who experienced them, worries about their safety and their ability to shoot again arose during their time off following their shootings, manifested themselves most strongly when they first returned to duty, and then dissipated as they got back into their work routine. For other officers, however, such concerns lasted long after they went back to work and as a result became a persistent thorn in their side. The stories in this section address the fear and anxiety that officers who shoot sometimes experience during their waking hours, how these concerns affect their behavior, and how these problematic reactions play themselves out.

The shooting happened on a Friday, and I had the next three days off. During that time, I was pretty anxious about going back to work. In fact, I wanted to go back to work. I wanted to get with my partner and talk to him about it. I also knew that everybody else in the division was going to have been talking about it. I was still pretty new on the job, and I wanted to see how the veteran officers responded. The older guys don’t know what to expect from the young guys like me, who haven’t been tried and tested. I figured that because I showed I could do the ultimate thing if I needed to, that I was gonna be accepted by a lot of the older guys.

As I recall, the other cops did offer a lot of support when I did get back to work. The thing I remember the most about the first shift back, though, is that I was what I call “holster happy.” My partner and I both were. The guy I shot had kind of got the jump on us, so we were nervous about it happening again. Anytime anyone reached for their wallet, we had our hands on our guns. Anytime anyone did anything sudden or unexpected, we drew our guns. It was the longest night I ever had at work. I was physically and mentally exhausted at the end of the night. We stayed busy that night. We were answering calls, we were stopping cars, but anytime anybody did anything sudden—like reaching to pull up an emergency brake—we drew down on them. You know, “Let me see your hands.” It was real intense the first night back to work.

I slowly got back to normal after a few weeks to where I’d see a movement and tell myself, “OK, he’s reaching for his wallet,” or whatever. I’d still keep a sharp eye out. I was still ready, I just wasn’t drawing down on people all the time.

After my first shooting, I was worried about how I’d perform if I got involved in another one. The local newspapers had reamed me, saying that I’d shot too soon, so I wondered, Was I gonna hesitate and risk somebody else’s life? Some other citizen’s? Some other officer’s? Then, a little while after the shooting, I had a rookie that I was training, and we came upon a guy that had a gun in his car. It was on the front passenger’s seat, hidden underneath a sack of beer, and when he started to reach for it, I drew my gun, ready to start shooting if I had to. I wasn’t even thinking about anything else. I said to myself, “As soon as he touches it, I’m going to cap him.” We were yelling at him, “Don’t touch the gun! Don’t touch the gun!” He finally quit reaching before his fingers touched the gun, and we got him under control.

After we took the guy into custody, I thought, “I didn’t even think about my other shooting. That’s good. I’m not going to hesitate.” That really helped alleviate my fears that I might hesitate to shoot again because of all the crap that had happened in the media with the first one. Once I realized I wasn’t going to hesitate, I was fine.

The shooting happened on my Friday, and I started back to work on my Monday. So I didn’t miss a single day of work. My regular partner took that day off, so I was with another officer, a newer officer, that first day back after the shooting. Our very first call out of the barn was just a “preserve the peace” call. It turned out to involve three guys that were living together, with some type of love triangle that involved some type of DV. We met one of the guys outside, and he told us what was going on and that he wanted to get some stuff from inside the place. We said, “OK, we’ll go see if they’ll let you get your property, and if they do, great, we’ll just stay back and make sure no one causes any problems. Otherwise, you’ll have to take it to court, because it’s a civil issue.”

We went inside, and the guy in there was being real nice, letting the other guy get his stuff. We were standing against this wall near the front entry, just watching this going on, when all of a sudden what looked like maybe the feminine partner of the other two came out of a bedroom. He had long, long stringy hair, long fingernails, was very skinny, and he was screaming like a banshee, saying stuff like, “Get him out of here! He hurt me!”

I said, “Hold on a second. It’s OK, he’s not gonna hurt you. We’re right here. Your friend let him get his stuff. He’s just gonna get his stuff and go.”

I said, “He’s gonna get out of here shortly. We’re just getting his stuff and then we’re leaving.”

He said, “No, he hurt me. I’m gonna kill him,” and took off running toward the kitchen. I ran after him because everybody knows what’s in kitchens, and sure enough, right when I turned the corner into the kitchen, here was this guy—I mean he was just totally pathetic looking—holding this big ole butcher knife up in the air.

I drew my gun and said, “Drop the knife!” He said, “No, he hurt me.” Legally and technically and everything else, I could’ve shot him if I wanted to, but I just kept telling him, “Drop the knife! Drop the knife! Put the knife down!” Finally, he dropped the knife and he started crying. I went into the kitchen, put the handcuffs on him, and gave him to my partner. I said, “You take care of this guy,” leaned against a wall, and started taking some deep breaths. I was thinking, “I can’t believe this. First call out of the barn, first day back from the shooting, and here I am, almost getting in another shooting.” I was also thinking, “The press would have a field day with this.” You know, here’s this guy with an itchy trigger finger.

As I was against the wall, thinking, “God, I can’t believe this!” the guy who was being very cooperative said, “Officer, can you come here for a second?” and motioned me into the bedroom. When I started walking into the room, he was on the other side of this small, maybe ten-by-twelve-foot, room facing away from me. He started to turn toward me, and as he did, I saw that he had a Smith & Wesson semiauto in his hands. I said, “No!” That’s all I could do. I couldn’t react to pull my gun again, and the guy said, “No, no. I want to give it to you, I want to give it to you.” He didn’t want this skinny guy to have it in the house. I took it from him, and I was so pissed that I started lecturing to this guy, “Don’t you ever . . . !”

When my partner saw what happened, he called for a supervisor. When the sarge got there, he asked me, “Billy, you want to go home today?” I should’ve, but I was thinking that I handled what happened properly. Even though my heart was going a mile a minute, I figured I could handle it. Since then, I’ve always been able to handle dangerous situations properly. It’s just the aftereffects. It takes me a little while to calm down after something like that happens. It just takes some time.

I was scared to death to go back to work. Absolutely terrified. I did not want to go back. The administration hadn’t given me the prosecutor’s statement saying that they weren’t going to file charges on me. I knew that that had happened on all the other shootings involving our officers since I came on the job, but I still had this situation pending on me. I was worried that I’d get in trouble if I had another shooting before the prosecutor cleared the first one, so I questioned my ability to pull the trigger again. Then, one of my first days back in the field, a call came out that there was a man with a shotgun in the cemetery threatening to commit suicide. All the other units got on the air. “Unit 24 en route. Unit 21 en route. Blah, blah, en route.” But I didn’t respond. I was thinking, “I’m just happy right here.” The guy I’d shot was suicidal, and I was scared, absolutely terrified, that the same thing would happen again, and I didn’t know if I could shoot if I had to.

Before I’d gone back to work, the department sent me to a psychologist for a mental-fitness evaluation, but I kept my feelings bottled up, didn’t tell him the truth of what I was feeling. He went ahead and signed me off for duty, and I thought, “You stupid fool. You don’t have a clue.” I didn’t tell him because I didn’t trust the fact that he was working for the department. I was afraid that if I’d sat there and told him all my emotions, all my fears, all of what I was going through, that he would say, “You’re not fit to go back to duty,” and I’d lose my job. So I didn’t tell him I was still having an emotional time dealing with it, that I was afraid to go on calls. That fear lasted for a very long time, even after I was cleared by the prosecutor.

Tough Adjustments

Even though the stories presented thus far have focused on specific aspects of officers’ post-shooting responses, some of them also make the point that officers can experience more than one reaction in the wake of shootings. Some officers who experience several difficulties resolve them in rather short order, whereas other officers are not so fortunate.

The stories in this section focus on the tough times that officers have when troubling reactions gang up on them. They include stories from officers who managed to put the difficulties they experienced behind them rather quickly, officers who took considerably longer to work things out, and officers who were still suffering quite a bit at the time they shared their stories with me.

All of the stories in this section illustrate just how deeply disturbing shootings can be for officers who pull the trigger. Those from the officers who fell into the latter two adjustment categories show that shootings can even bring some officers to points of anger, guilt, and despair that quite literally place their careers, their peace of mind, and even their lives in substantial jeopardy.

My second shooting hit me a lot harder than my first. About an hour after it happened, I felt like I was going to vomit. I don’t know why. Maybe it was something I ate for dinner, but I don’t think it was, because I felt lousy for about three days—lost my appetite and got diarrhea. I was pretty bad off. I don’t know what happened to me. I suppose it could have been that I was going to get sick anyway, but about an hour after I killed the guy, I told the investigators, “Somebody get me a bag because I feel like I’m going to puke.”

Then, after I got home, I was really tired. The shooting happened at 10:00 P.M. I got home at about 7:00 the next morning, and I slept like a rock until about 2:00 P.M. Then I got up to go to my daughter’s softball picnic, came back home, went back to bed about 9:00 P.M., and slept till about 7:00 the next morning. I probably could have slept even more that first day, but the phone was ringing constantly, and my pager kept going off between 2:00 P.M. and when we left for the picnic. Seemed like everybody I knew wanted to check up on me and find out what happened.

The picnic didn’t go real well. I was sitting there with all the other parents, feeling real pensive, thinking about the night before. My wife asked me a few questions, and I responded with real short answers.

I lost it right then. I stood up and said, “Goddamn it, Sally, I just fucking killed somebody last night. You think that might be weighing on my mind a little bit?” Then I just started walking to the car, and as I was walking, I started crying a little bit. I couldn’t believe my wife’s attitude. I’d been married to her for all these years. She’s a cop’s wife, and she asked me what’s wrong with me the night after I shoot somebody? I couldn’t believe it.

Sally caught up to me just as I got to the car. I was still crying. I wiped away the tears and said to her, “You, of all people! I thought you would understand. I can’t believe you said something stupid like that.”

Her response surprised me. She told me that she didn’t know how to deal with what I was going through, that she didn’t know what to say. Then she said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It was the stupidest thing I have ever said in my life. I don’t know why I said it. I’m sorry. Forgive me.” I told her that I did, and that’s all there was to the crying.

The upset stomach and whatnot lasted for another couple of days. Then some other stuff came along. The biggest thing was that I started to become more concerned about my safety. I had gotten into a bad habit over the years of sometimes not taking my gun with me when I went out. I’d always bring it with me if I went downtown or some place like that, but I’d leave it at the house if I was just gonna run to the store to get some milk or return a videotape, short trips like that. A few days after I killed this guy, I noticed that I no longer felt comfortable if I went someplace without my gun. I don’t know what it was, but something prompted me to start carrying my gun wherever I went. I guess I just want to be sure that I’m ready. Something can go wrong anyplace, and I don’t want to be caught with my pants down, so now I don’t leave my house without my gun.

I wasn’t the only one who got more concerned for my safety. My oldest daughter was eight when the second shooting went down, so she was old enough to understand what it was all about. She started getting scared. I’d been on the SWAT team since before she was born, and my work never bothered her before, but she started going through a phase where she got scared when I was home and the pager went off to call me to work. I talked to her about it, and she told me that she was afraid that I was going to die, that some bad guy was going to shoot me. So I had to deal with that for a while.

I think the toughest thing that happened after the shooting was seeing a picture of the guy I shot on TV about a day or so after I killed him. He was a real bad guy, wanted for all sorts of stuff, including escaping from prison, cooking crystal meth, and attempted murder on both citizens and police officers. We got called out when the U.S. marshals caught up to him at his condo and he refused to surrender. We tried everything to get the guy to give up: negotiations, gas, even did an explosive breach on his front door to get a better view of the inside of the place. I was posted up near some of the other guys watching through the front doorway when all of a sudden the guy came running toward the doorway pointing a handgun at me.

Things started slowing down for me, and my eyes focused on the gun. I could see it real clearly, the squareness of the barrel and the gloss of it, stuff like that, but for some reason I didn’t see the guy’s face. I fired two short bursts on full auto, and when I started shooting, things got real weird. I never heard any of my shots going off, but I did hear a “clack, clack, clack” sound from my gun, maybe the spring action of the bolt in the carrier moving back and forth. I could also feel the gun. It was kind of shaking and vibrating while I was shooting. I was aware that other officers were also firing, and I saw some rounds hitting the door frame, which sent wood chips flying off, but I still didn’t see the guy’s face. The whole time I was firing, it was like I was watching from a few steps behind where I was, just standing there watching me shoot, the bullets hit, and so on. In fact, it took a few seconds after I stopped firing for me to realize exactly what had just happened. By then, the guy had fallen down, and it was basically all over.

He fell face first, so when we went into the condo a few minutes later to clear it, all I could see was the back of his head. That was fine with me because I didn’t want to see his face. In fact, I didn’t want to know anything about this guy, didn’t want to see what he looked like, didn’t want to know his name. I didn’t want to know what kind of husband he was, what kind of a dad, any of that. I just wanted to know the things that I had seen, that this guy was an asshole who was out to hurt people and didn’t give a shit about the police or anybody else. So I was glad that I didn’t see his face out at the scene. In fact, I was hoping that I’d never see the guy’s picture, and I was hoping I’d never hear his name. For some reason, I wanted to keep a sense of distance from the guy, but it didn’t work out that way.

I had been feeling kind of sad since the shooting. I didn’t feel sorry for the guy, because he wasn’t a decent person. I just felt that it was a shame that his life had to end the way it did. I also had a sense of sadness that I wasn’t able to make it through my career without killing someone. Shooting situations weren’t something I sought out, and after fifteen years on the job with none, I figured I’d never have any, ’cause they tend to happen to younger guys. I also felt sorry for everybody else that was involved with the guy, like his wife and the people that owned the condo, because it was so messed up. Overall, I just had a sense that it was too bad that it happened.

It was either the day after the shooting or the day after that when I was just sitting on the sofa casually watching the TV. All of a sudden, they flashed a picture of the guy up on the screen and said his name. It wasn’t the type of picture you’d expect for some guy who just got killed by the police, like a prison picture or maybe a driver’s license photo. It was a family picture. There was this happy-looking guy with a smile on his face up on my TV screen. It really upset me a lot because the picture that they put up there portrayed him as if he was a kind of a regular happy-go-lucky guy. He didn’t look like a biker or anything like that. He just looked like a regular guy, and I thought, “Shit, I didn’t want to see that picture.” Then I started crying. A few seconds later, my wife came in the room. When she saw me crying, it kind of upset her. I’m not some macho-type guy, I’m pretty easy going, but I’m almost always in control of my emotions. So crying felt strange because it was a loss of control on my part. I wasn’t embarrassed or anything like that. In fact, it felt kind of good to let it out, but it sure bothered my wife. I don’t think she ever would have expected to see me crying, and she just didn’t know how to handle it.

The guy fell right after I fired my fourth round. He went down face first with his hands up underneath him. I remember thinking that he wasn’t hit, that he was trying to get me to move close to him so he could bring the knife out and stab me, so I stayed about three or four yards away. One of the other two officers on the scene came running up on my shoulder and asked me what happened. I told him that the guy pulled a knife. Then I told him that I thought he had it underneath him and not to get too close. Then we started moving up on the guy, real slow. I kind of went around to his feet, where I could see a large pool of blood starting to form up by his head. I looked to see where it was coming from, and I could see he had a large mass of blood in his hair, in the back of his head. He looked lifeless, so I was pretty sure he was dead.

Then things started happening. The third officer who was there from the start began to secure the scene. A corporal arrived soon after that, and he took my gun immediately from me. He said, “You know your rights, right?” I said “Yeah.” He asked me what happened, and I told him. He said, “OK, why don’t you go stand over there,” pointing to the car of this other officer who had just arrived. From that point on, everything that happened out at the scene I experienced as if I was watching it from above. I was looking down from across the street, seeing me standing at the police car next to this other officer. I saw some other officers put the crime scene tape up. Then the paramedics got there, they checked the guy, and said he was dead.

A little while later, I remembered that I needed to get something out of my patrol car. It was still parked in the street, just outside the crime scene tape. When I walked to my car, there was a couple standing by it. The girl was crying. The guy was holding her. I remember thinking that that was his family, that they were going to see that I didn’t have a gun in my holster and know that I was the guy that did it. After I got the stuff from my car, I went back to the officer I’d been standing with. Then, very shortly after that, they had him take me to the station. It was probably three in the morning by then.

After they got done with me out at the scene, I was real antsy. I felt like I had to talk to somebody who’d know what I was going through. I wanted to talk to a buddy of mine named Mitch Barnes. He and I went through the academy together and he’s my best friend. I wanted to talk to him because he’d been in a shooting at the first agency he worked, and I figured he’d know what I was feeling. So after I called my wife and told her what happened, I called Mitch and woke him up. I just had to talk to somebody who knew what I was going through. I don’t know why I felt that way. I just had this overwhelming desire and urge to talk to somebody who knew what I was feeling. I think that I figured that was the only way I could calm down. I was really keyed up, walking around, not able to sit still. I figured I needed to do something to occupy myself, and I thought that when I talked to Mitch that I could calm down, that he was the only person that was going to know what I was thinking.

So I called him up, told him what happened, and he came right down to the station. We hadn’t had a whole lot of officer-involved shootings in my agency, so it was mass chaos at the PD. Nobody knew how to handle it. Commanders came in, but they didn’t know what to do, so I spent several hours just hanging around. After this went on for a while, Mitch said to them, “Hey, Ted’s been at this thing for a while. He was supposed to get off at three o’clock this morning and it’s now nine o’clock. He hasn’t had anything to eat. Let me take him out to breakfast. We’ll come back and you can finish up with him, but he needs some food.” They said, “OK,” and we started to get ready to head for breakfast.

Now, like I said, they had taken my gun away early on in the investigation, but I was still in uniform. I mentioned the fact that I didn’t have a gun to this one particular captain, but he said I would just have to do without one for right now. Mitch pulled me aside and told me he had something I could use. So we went over to his desk, he fished around in it and brought out a model 60. I put it in my holster. It fit, it didn’t flop out, so off we went to breakfast with this little gun in my holster.

We talked about the shooting a little bit there, just general stuff. He told me not to turn in the report that I was going to have to write when we went back to the PD until he read it. He said that I might write some weird stuff in there and that I needed to be logical, that I needed to write with clear-cut thoughts in mind. I said, “OK.” We went back to IA and I sat down and wrote my report. Mitch reviewed it, I made a couple of changes, and we turned in the final product.

I finally went home about two o’clock in the afternoon, maybe later. Incredibly, I couldn’t go to sleep. I’d been up all night, stayed up all day, but I couldn’t go to sleep. I was glued to the news. Five o’clock, six o’clock, ten o’clock news, glued to it. Everybody told me before I left the station, “Don’t watch the news, don’t read the papers.” I didn’t want to read the papers because I hated our newspaper. We called it the “News and Slander.” But I was glued to the television. Flipping back and forth between the different networks. I slept that night. I don’t remember how well, but after I woke up the next day, Mitch called and asked me how I was doing. I told him I was OK but that I had this weird tightness in my chest. Mitch said that they were going to send some guys over to sit in my driveway and watch my place because someone had phoned in some threats to the department. He said the threats were nothing serious, that nobody knew where I lived, but they wanted me to be able to sleep. Nothing ever came of the threats, but I had guys sitting in my driveway and in my garage twenty-four hours a day for about three days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fact that I killed a guy doesn’t bother me. The fact that I had to look at him bothers me, and the fact that a life is gone because of something I had to do bothers me. I don’t regret killing him, which I guess is kind of a contradiction of terms, but I do regret having to take a life. It’s just the fact that I was raised in a Christian home. I was a good kid. I have pretty strong religious beliefs, and I believe in the death penalty, too. I think you deserve the punishment that fits the crime, and I believe if he intended to take our lives then he deserved to be shot. But you know, it just tears me up that I took a life.

My boyfriend was working the same shift, so after I gave my statement, I went home with him to my house. I remember him holding me and me crying. I was so mad at the guy I shot for putting me in that situation. So mad and I cried. He held me. I remember it being a hard cry. I remember it being a rip-out-your-guts-type cry, like when you were a kid and you just cry over something that has just devastated you. I mean devastated. It was like that. It was like a go-back-to-childhood-type thing. It was really nice to have my boyfriend there because he was able to comfort me. I don’t remember ever being comforted like that other than when I was a child and going to my mom’s arms when I was crying because I got hurt. That was the type of comfort he gave, and that’s the type of cry it was.

I never wanted to shoot anybody, but I was also upset that he didn’t die, because I thought that I didn’t do my job. I shot the guy and he didn’t die. I didn’t do my job; my shots weren’t good enough. Three out of six hit him, not all of ’em. On the other hand, the other part of me, the human part, the person who wants to do good for everybody and wants everything to be OK for everybody, is glad that he survived. I sometimes wonder if he had died if it would be harder on me emotionally. So I think that maybe the fact that he lived is a little bit of a saving grace, that it might have been harder on me if he died. Now, on the other hand, the guy is a mental, and if he goes off of his meds again and shoots and kills another person, I’ll be devastated. Absolutely devastated.

I was in four shootings in my first two years on the job. The last two involved the same fourteen-year-old kid. In the first one, he pointed a .357 at me during a foot chase, but my shots missed him. Then, a few months later, he tried to run me and my partner down on this traffic stop. We shot the hell out of the car but didn’t hit anybody.

I got to wishing I’d killed the kid that second time. I thought, “This is ridiculous, he did it to me once, then he turned around and did it to me again.” What are the chances of something like that happening? I didn’t want to get involved in anything like that again. It was terrible. I wouldn’t want anybody to have to go through it. Just the idea of going in and doing the shooting and handling the paperwork and all the stuff that happened after the last one—I didn’t want to deal with all that crap again. It’s not like it is on Cops, where you get to see the chase and that’s it. On TV, you don’t get to see the reports, and you don’t have to see the commander grilling the guy; you don’t have to see the court testimony; you don’t have to see the defense lawyer making his client out to be the best person in the world while you’re just a big lump of shit that just likes to fire at people.

Coming back-to-back-to-back-to-back like that, I thought, “Man, what am I doing?” I wasn’t quite sure that I wanted a job where people were always pointing guns at me and trying to kill me all the time. Plus, after the fourth shooting, it just got to the point where I was tired of being asked all the questions; I was tired of the Monday-morning quarterbacking; I was tired of the way that I was treated, the accusations that I was trigger-happy. I was out there trying to do my job; I had guns pointed at me; I had been run over by a car; I wasn’t just looking to shoot.

I got tired of being in that position, and after a while I just finally thought, “Hey, there’s got to be something better.” I really started to think about being on the night watch, started to think about being up in the north end, started thinking about being a big-city policeman in general. I wanted to see if I could try to go with a federal agency, but I knew I needed at least three years on in the city before I could do that. That really started making me wonder if I’d made a bad decision on the career choice.

I knew that I needed at least almost two more years on the job before I could even attempt to go federal, and I knew that it would be beneficial if I had some type of investigative experience in order to do that, so I looked into getting into detectives. While I was waiting for a transfer, it was brought to my attention that since I had been in multiple shootings within a short amount of time, I was going to be watched a little bit more closely than the next guy. So I knew that I had to mind my p’s and q’s while I was on patrol.

I started to try to avoid situations where I might have to shoot. The last two shooting incidents started at Lacy Park and Washington when people flagged me down to tell me about something suspicious, so if I was at a busy intersection and somebody tried to flag me down, I’d tend to just wave and keep driving. I was very, very cautious on the calls that I went on. So I pretty much got lazy, but I was very, very safe when I did go out there. I always wore my vest. I usually would have a second gun. I was prepared to do what I had to do if faced with another situation like the others, but I would do things a lot more safely. I also decided that if another situation came up, I’d let the guy next to me do the shooting. I would be very hesitant to do the shooting again.

After I spent some time in detectives, I came over here to K-9. It turns out that I found a niche doing something that I really like over here with the dog, and luckily I’m still a policeman. I love being a policeman, but I don’t enjoy a lot of the B.S. interactions that are involved with it. I haven’t had a shooting in about ten years now, but my attitude about things so far as trying to avoid confrontations really hasn’t changed.

I had my psych eval on Monday, and after that I had to go into work for a few hours here and there over the next few days, but the rest of that first week I spent most of my time with my friends and my family. I felt really good that whole time. I had this sense of elation, a happiness to be alive. Being around my father and my son and my wife and my friends, I was just elated to be alive because looking back at how close it was, I could have died. So I was just happier than shit.

Then, the Friday after my shooting, I was sitting with the rest of the guys, waiting to go do a warrant, when I got this page from communications, saying, “Your father’s work called, and they’re trying to get ahold of you. He didn’t show up for work.” I thought that something was wrong because my dad’s a perfectionist who never missed a day of work in his life. That Sunday before, he had been over at my house talking to my wife about how depressed he was about my mom having died the year before from cancer. My wife had told me that he was really depressed about that, and it was hitting him really hard, so when I got the page, I started thinking, “Shit, I hope he didn’t kill himself.” I really didn’t think he would do that, but I thought it was possible because I knew he was really depressed about my mom’s death. He had always said that when he dies, he hopes it’s quick. Then, after seeing my mom suffer through eight months, dying slowing, he’d said, “When I go, I want it to be lights-out, and I’m gone. Quick and painless.”

Because I was worried about him, I called down to the division where he lived and said, “Hey, go to the house. I give you permission to force entry. I know my dad wouldn’t have a problem with that.” He was the kind of guy that would always throw barbecues during Super Bowl and Thanksgiving, have a bunch of cops over there, so everybody pretty much knew him. So they forced entry into the house, and his car was there in the garage. His wallet was there. I said, “Go into the closet; there’s a shotgun; I know he owns one shotgun. Make sure that shotgun’s still there.”

“Well, his jewelry’s all here, rings are laying around and his watch and stuff.”

I said, “Son of a bitch! He always takes that shit off when he runs,” because my dad was a big runner. He ran all the time, ran circles around everybody. Then I said, “Shit! Shit!” and started thinking, “God, where could he be? Where could he be?”

He had a girlfriend at the time, but when we tracked her down, she didn’t know where he was. So I called communications, and I said, “Hey I need you to do this for me. Did we have any John Does yesterday anywhere in Northern Division?” The operator started looking, and I was thinking, “God, please say no, please say no, please say no.” Then she said, “Yeah we did. We had one on Coldwater”—which is the next street over from my dad’s house—and I thought, “Oh, fuck! Here we go.”

I said, “Give me a description,” and she said, “Older white male. Graying, thinning hair. Early fifties.” I was thinking, “Fuck, that’s gotta be him.” So I asked, “What was he wearing?” She said, “Jogging shorts, a shirt, and shoes.” So I said, “Where did the body go?” And she said, “Well, he was transported for a heart attack, and they didn’t revive him, so he’s at the coroner’s office now.” I said, “All right, give me the number for the coroner’s office.”

I still didn’t know it was him for sure, but I was already starting to get in a big panic, and then I went into that dreamscape again, like I did at the shooting, where I thought, “This isn’t fucking happening. I’m gonna wake up any second now.” So I started getting that fuzzy, dreamy feeling again, and then I called the coroner’s office. I said, “Look, my dad didn’t show up for work. He’s missing. I checked with Northern Division, and they said they had a John Doe. Do you have the guy there?” The guy gave the description, and he gave it so distinctly I just knew it was my dad.

I was in the canine trailers at the time. I remember walking out, and when my lieutenant approached me, I just started bawling. I said, “I’m gonna have to leave. I can’t do the mission, I’m gonna have to leave. My dad’s missing, and I think he’s at the coroner’s office, and I’ve got to go to try to identify the body.” Lieutenant Norris said, “Hey, fuck the mission. I ain’t going either. I’ll drive you over there.” So he drove me over there. The coroner showed me the pictures, and sure enough, it was my dad.

We had a lot of close friends on the street where my dad lived, so I went over to his house and started letting everybody know what happened. As I was doing that, I started thinking, “Fuck! I killed somebody and this is my payback.” That’s what I thought. “I killed that guy last week and this is my payback. I took a life; now somebody’s taking somebody I care about.” I remember thinking that over and over and over again, even when I got home. I told my wife what I was thinking, and she said, “No, that’s not the case.” And I said, “Yeah, I know. But I just can’t get the thought out of my mind.” Then I started reverting back to the shooting again and getting pissed at this guy I killed again, saying in my mind to the guy, “You fucking put me in this situation, and now my dad’s gone because of it.”

The next day, I got a call from the counselor who handles the officer-involved shootings. She’s a psychologist, a really sweet lady, and I told her what I was thinking and that it was really bothering me. She asked me, “Are you religious?” I said, “Yeah, I’m very religious. I’m a Christian. I’m not a Bible-thumper, but I have my beliefs.” She said, “Well, if you have your belief in God, you know we don’t have a vengeful God. God wouldn’t do that. It just happened.”

Then a couple of days after that, my wife and I were talking to this pastor about coming to this church near where we live. I told him about the shooting, my dad’s death, about all that had been going on in our lives recently. He quoted something out of the Bible about how God makes allocations for police officers, and then he said, “You need to understand that there are those people out there that have to protect the flock, and that’s what you do.” Then he said, “Do you understand the difference between killing and murder? The Bible says ‘Thou shall not kill,’ but that’s misinterpreted. What the Bible really means is ‘Thou shall not murder.’ Murder’s premeditated. What you do as a police officer to survive and protect everybody else is not murder. Yes, you killed somebody, but it wasn’t murder. There’s a big difference in God’s eyes.”

As soon as he said that, holy shit, man, it was like it was gone. That was probably five days after my dad passed away, and as soon as that pastor deciphered the difference between killing and murder and pointed out that there are allocations in the Bible for people like soldiers and police officers and that there are people that have to do ugly things so the rest of us can lead normal lives, every stress from that shooting was gone. It was just an incredible rush of relief, especially with the religious words, because I believe in God; I believe in certain things and I believe you shouldn’t kill. Then, when I heard the difference between killing and murdering and the interpretation of the Bible, that really was a big relief to me.

Then I started replaying everything about when my mom passed away and the way my dad led his life. He missed my mom so much, and he and I had no unfinished business. There was nothing we wanted to say but didn’t, and I was at peace with that. He was a big drinker and he was a big partyer, always the life of the party. He loved to run, he wanted to go quick, and that’s how he died. He went out for a run, he was in his cooldown, and he just totally blacked out.

After I broke it down, I said to myself, “You know what? He was fed up with what was going on at work. He was missing my mom so much. It was actually a good thing that it happened. He went exactly how he wanted to go.” I was totally at peace with it after that, and I have been ever since. I think it’s unfortunate that my dad’s dead because my son is missing out on a great grandfather, but I’m at peace with it. I’m at peace with the shooting too. I didn’t have any problems with the shooting at all those first few days, until that thing with my dad happened, and I started thinking, “Shit, I did this terrible thing and now my dad paid for it.” That’s what I was thinking at the time, but now I know that’s not the case. It’s just not the case.

Being involved in shootings was the main reason I left SWAT after almost ten years. It’s kind of hard to explain, but every time I’ve been involved in a shooting—whether I fired the shots or one of the other guys did—I feel, for lack of a better term, like a machine. I don’t mean to sound melodramatic, but it’s just do the job, shoot the guy, get it over with.

When I’m involved in a situation where a decision about shooting has to be made, it’s just perceive the threat and react. What’s in his hand, what’s not? Does he have a gun? It’s just like a machine. I just go in there and do what I’m trained to do. I just do it, and if the guy’s got a gun and he’s threatening me or someone else, I’m going to shoot him. When I’m in those situations, I don’t even think twice about it. If there is that threat, I’m going to cap ’em. And that’s what bothers me: I can do it so easily. I just seem to myself to be too cold when it happens. That’s it. I don’t know how else to explain it. It just seems too cold, too calculating, too easy.

I was in two situations where I shot people. Then we had two others recently where I was the SWAT commander when other officers killed people. In the first of those other two, this barricaded suspect shot one of my guys, and one of my other officers killed him in the exchange of gunfire. It really pissed me off that the suspect had shot one of my guys, so that one didn’t bother me too much, but a few months after that, I gave the order to one of our snipers to shoot this guy who was holding his kid hostage at knifepoint. He had a knife to his son’s throat, threatening to kill him, so I told the sniper to take him out. I don’t know why, but that one really bothered me.

I was just getting pretty tired of killing people and being around people getting killed and being responsible for shooting people and killing people. When I went home after we shot the guy holding the kid, I went to my wife and told her, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” I mean, I loved my job, but I hated what it made me do sometimes.

Then I started having dreams about my eleven-year-old boy dying, recurring nightmares with different scenarios. I’d have dreams about him falling off of things, getting hit by cars, just different stuff. They’d wake me up at two or three o’clock in the morning, and I couldn’t go back to sleep.

About a year after we killed the guy who was holding his son hostage, I decided I needed to get out of SWAT. It was really hard because I helped start the team here and I loved the job. I loved the guys. I loved SWAT. But on top of the nightmares, I had basically gotten to the point where I had started hating the world. I needed to get back to where I liked people again. So I went back to patrol. Pretty soon after I left SWAT, my attitude about people started to improve, and the nightmares about my son started going away. I don’t get them anymore, but I still miss SWAT. It’s hard, because I know I could go back if I just said the word. In fact, not too long ago, I was at a meeting with the major, and he told me he wanted me to go back over to SWAT. We talked about it, but I turned him down. I really want to come back in, but I know I can’t right now—not and maintain my sanity.

Over the years, I’ve put on a lot of officer survival training where I talk about the situation where I got shot. The PD even made a training tape where we reenacted the shooting. So I can look at what happened with a sense of detachment, but I have also had times where I’ve been extremely upset about it.

The night I got shot, I was trying to kill the guy who was trying to kill me. I was doing everything possible to get an edge on him, and I’ve had some moments where the anger I felt that night comes back. Probably the biggest one came about ten years after the shooting when I was working as a sergeant in the Western Division. I was working a narcotics detail over there, teamed up with a guy named Vick Ancent, when we went to do an investigation over at the old St. Matthews Hotel. We were up on the roof, about ten stories up, looking around. There were needles up there, all kinds of other paraphernalia strewn around, and we were looking down into center-court windows of some of the rooms because we’d seen people shoot up right next to their windows before.

So I was standing on one side of the roof, and Vick was on the other, when he called me over. I walked around, and just three floors below us I could see somebody sitting at a table rolling what looked like a marijuana cigarette. Vick said, “Let’s do an investigation,” so we went downstairs, knocked on the door, and somebody opened it.

We went in and told everybody to turn around, get up against the wall, and put their hands up. I covered them while Vick searched them. They were all unarmed, so he had them sit down and started getting their IDs. I recognized the first guy he talked to, but I didn’t know why. I was thinking, “Where do I know this guy from?” All of a sudden, it was like a mallet hit me over the head: “This is the guy who shot me. This is Oscar Smith, the suspect who shot me. He’s supposed to be in prison. What’s he doing here?” I couldn’t believe it, because after he was convicted, the judge took me into his chambers and told me that this guy was going to spend the rest of his life in prison, that he was never going to see the light of day.

I was dumbfounded. Then I got very excited. I was in a rage that the suspect was in the same room with me. My face was probably redder than a beet. I was furious. This was somebody who tried to murder me.

I called Vick over and said, “Listen, I believe that’s the guy that shot me. I’m going to throw him out of the window!”

He could tell that I wasn’t kidding around, so he said, “Don’t worry. He’s going to jail. He’s under the influence. I’ve already looked at the tracks on his arms. He’s under the influence. Just keep it cool.”

So there I was, wanting to throw this guy out the window. Then I started thinking about what Vick said, and about my family, my job, what I’d lose if I did throw him out a seventh-story window. I decided that it wasn’t worth it, so I just played along with Vick and didn’t let on that I knew this guy. He didn’t act like he knew who I was, so I don’t think it registered with him at all.

We hooked the suspects up, got them in the car, and drove to the station. On the way, Vick was prepping the guy with questions: “Do you know this officer?” Stuff like that. The guy kept saying that he didn’t recognize me. Then, all of a sudden, he said, “I know.”

When we got to the station, Vick took him into the interrogation room while I waited outside. The suspect had a wallet that was taken in a street robbery just around the corner from the hotel where we’d arrested him. The victim couldn’t ID him, but we booked him on the robbery of the wallet anyway. The suspect ended up doing some time for a misdemeanor out of that because he had used one of the victim’s credit cards at a nearby gas station.

He did three or four months, and when he got out, I ran into him again. I’d responded to a call about a kidnapping at a motel to see what the officers had over there. There were several officers, and they had several suspects over to one side of the motel. One of the suspects was just walking around, so he caught my attention. When I looked at him, I realized it was Oscar Smith, and I drew down on him. All the other officers then drew down on the other suspects, not knowing what was up. After we got them all hooked up and searched, I explained to them who the guy was and that he was potentially very dangerous.

It turned out that the situation at the motel was a bag of worms, more of a narcotics thing than a kidnapping. The guys had a young female and a bunch of drugs, but it looked like the girl was a willing participant. So all the guy that shot me got booked on was another narcotics charge.

After he got out from that one, the guy came down to the station and told the officers on duty that he thought that I was after him and that he wanted to talk to me. I didn’t want to talk to this guy, so I didn’t. The captain up at Detective Assistance Division heard about this guy coming to the station and decided that it might be worth it to put a surveillance team on him, to see what he was up to. So they watched him for a while. The captain got back to me and told me that the suspect was nothing more than a penny-ante dope user, dope dealer, who wasn’t worth anything.

That was good to know, but I was having some problems with the situation because he was supposed to still be in prison, and here I was running into him out on the streets. I was still real angry, so I went to talk with one of the department psychologists about what was going on. He was able to put my mind at ease.

He went over some of the same stuff I’d thought about when I was thinking about throwing the guy out the window. He asked me if this guy was worth everything that I’d worked for, my family, my job, and everything else. When I thought about that, it was easy to see that I needed to back off. On the one hand, I had this dope dealer who was probably going to be found dead in an alley with a needle hanging out of his arm someday, and on the other, I had my family and my career. That’s what was important to me. Watching my kids play baseball on Saturday afternoon, going to the soccer games, stuff like that. When I looked at it that way, it was easy to put it in perspective and move on with my life.

Not a Problem

As hard as shootings are for some officers, they are a breeze for others. Some officers simply experience no notable negative reactions in the wake of shooting someone. They may have been a bit apprehensive about some aspect of their situation, such as how the investigation was going to proceed or how their family might react, but that’s all. Some of the officers told me they had expected to have difficulties because they had received training that proclaimed that officers always experience substantial problems in the wake of shootings, and then they explained to me why they believed they didn’t have any. Others left their lack of negative reactions unremarked upon, so I asked these officers why they supposed they were unaffected.

A common theme runs across what all the officers who did just fine told me: they were doing their job, shooting bad people who were doing bad things and who therefore deserved to be shot, so they had nothing to be concerned about. This section presents the stories of some of the officers who experienced no problems following their shootings, including their variation of the “it’s my job and he deserved it” theme as an explanation for why they did so well.

I don’t look at the shooting as an unpleasant experience. Now that may sound callous. When you kill somebody, how can that not be unpleasant? Well, if this had been an innocent person or somebody that I had accidentally killed, then I’d probably feel bad about it. But this guy was committing robberies, and he was trying to kill me, so I don’t have the slightest bit of regret about shooting him.

I didn’t really have any problems after the shooting. The shooting team came out to my house and interviewed me the next day. They had rolled out the night before and got all their physical evidence from the scene, took all their photos, interviewed all the witnesses, and whatnot. They saved me for last, I guess, just to make sure my story jibed with what everyone else said. I told them exactly what happened, ran them through it as they asked me questions, cleared up one or two points for them, and then they were done. I knew in my mind that what I’d done was right, and the detectives confirmed it just before they left: one of them told me that as shootings go, mine was as clean as a spring chicken.

I mean, it was pretty much cut-and-dried. He knifed me. I shot him. And that was that. I understood the gravity, and I understood the seriousness of what had happened, but it just didn’t weigh on me any. After the detectives left, I thought everything through real carefully a couple of times. I kind of took myself down different paths. OK, what could I have done differently? What should I have done? There were probably a million other ways I could have handled it, but the bottom line was that I tried to keep some guy from hurting his wife, which I did. I sacrificed part of my arm in the process, but I can live with that. It sure could have been a whole lot worse, so I essentially resolved all that stuff within the first day or two, came to grips with it, and decided that it was OK.

Neither of the guys I shot died, and that’s fine with me. If either or both of them would’ve died, that would’ve been fine also. When I talk to people about police shootings, I tell them it’s not important to kill the person you shoot. You don’t try to kill when you shoot; you try to stop. So if you stop what he’s doing and you stop it right now, it’s a successful shooting. You’ve done what you were supposed to do. You’ve accomplished your mission. If he dies, well, that’s a consequence of his actions in trying to hurt someone. If he doesn’t die, well, God just smiled on him that day. So to me, the injuries I inflicted are not material.

The guy lived, even though I hit him six times. If he would’ve died, the only difference to me would’ve been that I would have gotten two weeks off instead of one day, because my department keeps officers out of the field for two weeks after a fatal. My intent was to stop the threat, and that’s what I did, so what happened to him is totally immaterial to me. Fortunately for him, he lived. Unfortunately, someday we may have to go back and get him again because he’s now out of prison. I think that’s the bad end of it. If the guy isn’t gonna hesitate to shoot a bunch of heavily armed policemen coming up to his house, he’s sure not gonna hesitate to shoot a guy who pulls him over on traffic. For that reason, I would’ve probably felt better if he had died, because I’d hate to read the paper someday and find out that he was successful in killing either some civilian or another policeman.

I think he’s definitely a threat. I don’t think he is gonna change. While he was in the hospital, his friends were threatening to kill some police officers, and while he was out on bond awaiting his trial, he was supposedly back in business dealing. If a guy has that kind of mental attitude, then he’s not gonna hesitate to shoot. I think he’s a definite threat and that society needs to worry about the guy. But as far as my decision, once the threat has ended, the shooting stops. Once I stopped the threat, whether he lives or dies is irrelevant to me. So I wouldn’t change a thing I did. Not a thing. But society would be better off if he was dead.

We always do a critical debrief on all our incidents, so there was a lot of discussion among the team the next day. “Hey, what did you see? What did you do? How many rounds did you fire?” The guys who weren’t involved asked, “Hey, what was it like? Did you use the sights? Did you do this? Did you do that?” I think the debrief was a little bit more detailed on this because of all the things that happened. We want to decide whether we used the appropriate tactics. We want to know if we could have done it better. We ended up getting three people wounded, and of course the first thing we said was, “What could we have done to solve that problem? Could we have done it differently?”

I’ve been on the team for over fifteen years, so during the debrief some of the younger guys asked me, “Have you ever been on one like this before?” I said, “Man, what this reminds me of is Vietnam.” This was the closest thing I’d ever been in to making contact since I was over there. The only thing different was we’d been in a building, and over there we were in a jungle. But it was a regular old Wild West shoot-out. There were bullets zinging everywhere, and that’s the thing that got me reflecting back on what I did thirty-odd years ago. The shoot-out was the only thing that I’ve been involved in in police work that compared to Vietnam. We’ve had some other big shoot-outs here in the unit, but fortunately I haven’t been involved in any of them.

Once the debrief was over, I thought about what I did. I figured there was nothing I could have done to contribute anything else besides what I did by shooting the guy. So I told myself, “You did a pretty good job,” and left it at that. I’m not one to gnaw on things. I don’t internalize things, so I don’t have any problems with what I did.

I’ve shot six people, and three of them died. All of them had guns, and most of them fired some rounds at me or other officers. So I’ve been in some shoot-outs. But it never bothered me. In fact, after my fourth shooting I fell asleep on the psychologist’s couch as I was waiting for my mandatory session with her. The shooting happened just before midnight, and after I got released from the investigation around nine the next morning, I went to see her because it’s the policy of the PD for officers to see the psychologist as soon as possible after every shooting. I was so tired because I didn’t sleep all night that I fell asleep on a couch in the waiting room outside her office. She came out, woke me up, and said, “I guess you don’t have any problems sleeping.” I said, “No.” She let me go home, and I came back to work that night.

Now I’ve heard about officers getting in shootings, and they say, “Oh, my God, that was devastating.” But that doesn’t make sense to me because I look at shootings as something officers come on this job to do. In fact, it’s the most exhilarating part of this job. It’s why policemen rush to get to hot calls when they come out—not to shoot anybody, but to confront the bad guys. It’s our job to go to the danger. Over the years, I confronted many armed suspects that I’ve taken into custody without using deadly force. But when someone shoots at me, I shoot back. If an armed suspect confronts you and you prevail in the shoot-out, you and your partner go home that night. What’s devastating about that? I just don’t understand why officers would have a problem with that. So to me, because the possibility of shooting people is part of the job, I’ve never had a problem after any of my shootings.

Validation

As previously noted, many men and women headed for law enforcement jobs wonder if they will be able to shoot someone if the need arises. This concern persists in the minds of some officers once they come on the job and emerges among some of those who had harbored no such doubts during their pre-police days. Similarly, because police officers must often count on one another for protection, many officers harbor the same question about fellow officers—particularly rookies—who have yet to prove themselves capable of shooting someone. An officer’s first shooting, consequently, can have the immensely positive effects of striking the reservations they had harbored about their ability to pull the trigger and demonstrating to their peers that they can be counted on when danger comes a-callin’.

Some officers have the question about their own ability to take a life answered through situations in which they could have shot—the officer who actually had to stop pulling his trigger during his encounter with the newspaper-armed emotionally disturbed individual, for example. For many others, however, only a shooting can erase the doubts. In a similar vein, sometimes only a shooting can allay any doubts an officer’s peers may have about his or her ability to shoot when the need arises. The three stories in this brief section address the validation issue in greater depth, showing more thoroughly how shootings can both settle the minds of the officers who pulled the trigger and demonstrate to their peers that they possess the ability to do the ultimate police task when called upon to do so. The final story also illuminates the particular burden that female officers often bear when it comes to peers’ opinions.

I was a brand-new rookie when it happened. Some of the veteran guys at the station went and bought a little bottle of Jack Daniels while my partner and I were being interviewed. As we were leaving, they were like, “Here, kid. Have a drink, you did good.” Because I was still in training—with the “Yes sir. No sir.” stuff—I took some. One of the guys took me aside and told me that people were going to look at me different because you never know how someone is going to react in a shooting situation until it happens. He said that people around the station that haven’t been in a shooting will look at me differently now because even if they would like to treat me like a trainee, they won’t because if they haven’t done it, they’ll always have the question in their mind, “Will I be able to do it?” He was right. The veterans started treating me differently. They gave me a little more respect because they knew that when the shit hits the fan out here that I’ll be able to handle myself.

What happened also changed the way I looked at myself a little bit. I had a sense of pride, a sense of relief almost, that, “Hey, I did it. I was able to survive. When they threw the worst at me, I survived.” Like a lot of cops, I’d wondered how I’d perform if push came to shove. After the shooting, the doubts I’d had were gone.

My first shooting changed some minds about me and settled my mind about some things. I was one of the few guys on SWAT that didn’t have a military background, and after it happened one of my supervisors, who was a Vietnam vet, told me that he always had doubts about whether I would pull the trigger on somebody. The shooting put his mind to rest. It also reinforced a lot of thinking that I had about shootings. There is a lot of training about police shootings that says, “You’ll feel stress. You won’t be able to see your front sights. You’ll wet your pants. You’ll do this and that afterward.” Before my shooting, I didn’t think any of that would happen to me. I’d say, “No, I won’t,” but I wasn’t sure, so I didn’t challenge any of it. That’s different now. Now I know I won’t because none of that stuff happened to me.

Another thing that happened with the first shooting is that it put to rest whatever tiny doubt I had in my mind about how I’d do. I don’t care who you are, no matter how good you think you are or how well you trained—until you’ve done it, there’s always gonna be somewhere in the back of your brain, some doubt about how you will perform in a shooting. It might be tiny, tiny, tiny, but it’ll be there. I’ve talked to my dad, who’s a World War II combat veteran, and other guys who’ve been in shootings, and they all say the same thing. But the first one put all that to rest for me, so when the second one happened, my attitude was, “Been there, done that.” I knew exactly what to do, and I knew how I was gonna do it because I’d already done it once before.

Three of us—me, another female officer, and one of the SWAT officers—had been chasing this guy through the grounds of this shopping mall early one morning, when he spun around with a gun in his hand. The SWAT officer and I were both pretty close to him at that point, maybe fifteen feet, and we both fired. After I fired my last round, the guy went down real hard onto his back, and he started screaming. I couldn’t see where the gun went, but I saw that his hands were empty, so I moved up on his left side. I kept my gun trained on his chest the whole time and stopped up by his head.

The other female officer ran up behind the SWAT officer, and the two of them moved up on the suspect’s right side. The SWAT officer then told the suspect to roll over onto his stomach so the other female officer could handcuff him. I didn’t want to keep my gun pointed at his torso because that’s where the other female was going to be when she moved in to cuff the guy, so I moved my aim point to the guy’s head. As I did that, I spotted the gun on the ground, just above his head. I saw it had an orange trigger, which meant it was a toy gun, and I got pissed off. I was mad. I don’t know if it’s the mother instinct or what, but I just shouted at him, “You stupid idiot. What the hell did you make us shoot you for?” Then I kicked the gun away and said, “It’s a toy,” to the SWAT officer, because I knew he’d fired also. He said, “It’s OK. It’s all right. You did what you’re supposed to do.”

When he said that, I felt really great. I was very, very happy that I did what I was trained to do because that’s always the unknown in police work. You can train for it and train for it, but it’s an unknown if you’ll pull the trigger until you actually do it. I had a big grin on my face; I was almost laughing. It was like I’d passed my own little test and maybe a test in the eyes of other people. Part of that was because I’m female. There are a lot of male officers who don’t think females should be on the department, and I was thinking that I’d proved myself to them, so that was a big part of the elation I was feeling.

Other Consequences

Much of what happens to officers following a shooting does not fit neatly into any of the several categories that I used to organize the material I have presented thus far. This section includes a collection of stories that—in one way or another—shed additional light on officers’ post-shooting experiences.

The team would go to elementary school classes, and the kids would always ask us, “Anybody ever shot anybody?”

Back then, I was the only one who had, so of course all the other guys would look at me. I’d say, “Well, yes, I have.”

And I’d have kids saying, “Well, my mommy and daddy say that you’re a bad person if you kill people.”

They’d say, “Well, aren’t you a bad person?” What do you say to an eight-year-old?

I’d say, “But there are times that you try to defend somebody. When you want to help somebody, and it just turns out that someone doesn’t want to be helped.” So you try to explain it to them in eight-year-old terms, which is kind of hard sometimes.

The guys investigating the shooting treated us pretty good, but it took an incredible amount of time for us to get any food. The shooting occurred before we got breakfast that morning, and we didn’t get fed until way late that afternoon. I don’t know if it was from that initial lack of food for so long or what, but I had an increased appetite for a month after this thing, and it started right then. I also became a little more sexually aggressive for a good long time. I don’t know where that came from, but I was just horny more. I wanted sex more.

I’d almost been killed and I was pretty happy to be around. I wanted to do things that made me feel alive. I wanted to eat good food. I wanted to have good sex. I felt good about being alive. I enjoyed watching the butterflies. I went on vacation with my family. I spent more time with my kids. I found myself enjoying life a lot, really taking a moment to drink it all in. I wanted to try to gain new experiences. I wanted to go places I’d never been. I wanted to do things I’d never done. I wanted to do a lot more things before I died.

The shooting taught me a lot about priorities. I used to work all the time, as much overtime as I could. It was a higher priority than my family obligations. I’m not married, I don’t have kids, so it was easy for me to take all the overtime days and fill in when someone couldn’t make it in. I’d do that at the drop of a hat. I worked because I basically had no life. After the shooting, I thought about all those days that I missed out of watching my nieces and nephews grow, watching their soccer games, having them over to spend the night, taking them to the park, going on hikes. I didn’t do any of that stuff because I wanted to work.

But the shooting made me realize that work’s not that important. It’ll always be there, but how often is my nephew going to say, “Hey, Aunt Mary, can you come over and spend the night tonight?” He was going on twelve when the shooting happened, so pretty soon he wasn’t going to want me there anymore. He’s going to want to do other things, and I would have missed out on those chances if I would have kept on working like I used to. Now when the kids ask if I can come over, I jump at the chance. So the shooting helped me reprioritize, to realize what’s really important.

After my first shooting, I really felt like I was a hypocrite, so I quit going to church. The Bible says, “Thou shalt not kill,” and here all the kids in church look at you, they almost idolize you when you walk in the door because you’re a cop, you know. I knew that when I walked in the door after the first shooting that all these kids would be asking their moms and dads, “Hey, the Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ How come Hal killed this guy?” I was having real hard trouble dealing with that, so I basically quit going to church altogether.

A little while after I quit going to church, this PD chaplain came out to me on an off-duty job to tell me that the prosecutor was about to make his announcement about whether to charge or clear me. After he told me that, he gave me this piece of paper with some scriptures on it and said, “When you get a chance, you might want to read these.” So I did right there. One of the scriptures was from Romans, chapter thirteen: “Fear not the administrator”—and some versions actually say fear not the policeman—“for he is brought to you by God. You have no reason to fear him unless you do evil and if you do evil, then you have reason to fear him. For he does not bear the sword in vain.” The other one was, “Above all else comes the law.”

After I read them, the chaplain told me, “You know, a lot of people think the Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but it doesn’t say that. It says, ‘Thou shalt not commit murder.’” Then he said, “You know, there’s a difference between killing and murder. Sometimes it’s necessary to kill people, and you did not commit murder.” When I heard that, I said, “He’s right.” And that really helped. I started going back to church, and by the time I got in my second shooting, I was involved in this Christian officers’ organization we had.

Overall, I was feeling pretty good. I was elated that the mission was successful, that I wasn’t hurt, that none of my teammates were hurt, and that everything looked like it was a very good shooting. We went in with all of our officers; we came out with our officers. We had a violent situation, none of us got shot, and the suspect was down. The only remorse I had was that I had to shoot the dog. I was sad because the dog was just doing what he was supposed to do: protect his master. It wasn’t the dog’s fault that his owner happened to be a dope dealer with guns. It was a shame we had to shoot a good dog.

I slept good that first night. I remember I put my son to bed. He was five at the time of the shooting. He’s seven now. I sat in there for probably fifteen minutes after he fell asleep and listened to him breathe. That’s like my favorite thing to do, hear him breathe. So I sat in there and listened to him breathe for about fifteen minutes. I had eaten good at the station, and I ate good again when I got home, so I had probably three or four beers after I put my son to bed, and then my wife and I went to bed. We actually made love that night and then I slept perfect. I didn’t have any dreams. I slept really comfortably. I wasn’t restless or anything. Slept eight, nine, ten hours. Woke up the next day, and the first thing I thought about was the shooting. Played it over in my mind a bunch of times. Then, probably an hour after I woke up, the phone started ringing off the hook.

I probably fielded fifty calls the first day, and I didn’t have a problem with it, because it was mostly SWAT people who wanted to know what was going on, friends from work. And the first thing they asked was, “Do you have a problem talking about it?” I said, “No, I don’t, I really don’t.” I said, “As far as I’m concerned, it was a righteous shooting. The guy caused the incident. We gave him every opportunity to give up, and he chose not to take them, so he pretty much forced the events to occur.” So I didn’t have any problem talking about it.

The only thing about that first day was that I felt really tired, a little burned out. I don’t know if it was because I slept too long or what, but I just felt a little drained. I didn’t feel like doing a whole heck of a lot, just hanging out with my kid and my wife. That’s what I wanted to do. But I had to go into work for a debrief with the rest of the team. After it was over, Ralph—the other guy who fired—said, “Hey, let’s go drinking downtown.” I called my wife and asked her if that was OK with her. I told her that I felt like I should hang around with her, but she said, “Oh, no. Go hang out with Ralph. I’m sure he needs somebody to hang with.”

We were drinking at the bar when the news came on, showing some footage from the scene that included some shots of Ralph and me. The waitress came up to us and said, “Hey, isn’t that you guys?”

We were in street clothes, but she recognized us. So we said, “Yeah, that’s us.”

And we replied, “Yeah, we were the shooters.” We didn’t know her, but she was really nice.

She said, “OK, I won’t say anything out loud. I was just really curious because I saw your faces on the TV when you were walking through the scene, and you guys didn’t have a whole lot of expression on your face, so I kind of thought you were the shooters.”

I thought that was kind of funny that some civilian that doesn’t really know about police work picked up on that.

I called my wife—she was at work—and told her what happened. She was like, “Oh, my God! Are you all right?”

I said, “I’m fine,” and told her, “I’ll talk to you later about it, just wanted you to know that you’re gonna hear it on the news.” And then I didn’t really feel like talking to anybody else but my teammates. I didn’t want to talk to anybody else. The only people I wanted to be around were the guys I worked with, because they were the ones who were there. I didn’t feel like telling the story ten or twelve times to everybody.

People had comments like, “God, you did a great job,” but I didn’t feel that way. I didn’t feel like what I did was such a great job. I didn’t feel like that at all. I don’t feel like taking a life is doing a great job. Even though it may come with the territory, killing someone is not doing a great job. But you just have to suck it up and do it if you have to, because if you’re gonna do this type of work, there’s a possibility that something like this is gonna happen to you. You just have to take it.

I don’t think you can really understand what it’s like to be in a shooting until you’ve been in one, because it’s not like watching a Hollywood movie. Everybody’s used to watching Hollywood, where cops take one shot and shoot the gun out of the bad guy’s hand, or every shot they take is a perfect center mass hit. Plus, from movies, people don’t know the fear of being shot at, the terror of gunfire coming at you. They don’t know what it feels like to be hit, even by a fragment. Those things are missing from the movies. When I went through it, I felt everything. I utilized all five of my physical senses, but in the movie theater you don’t have the cotton mouth, you don’t smell the gunpowder, you don’t feel the bullets hitting you.

The Pathos of Policing

The Not a Problem and Validation sections illustrate that shootings are not always detrimental for the involved officers and that they can even have positive repercussions. This does not mean, however, that officers who do fine after shooting people are immune from the stresses and strains of the violence they have confronted during their time on the job. Police work is widely regarded as one of the more stressful occupations in the world, at least partly because officers must regularly deal with the worst that humanity has to offer, the dead and broken bodies they produce, and the anguish they leave in their wake.

For some officers, it is a single atrocity that stands out in their minds. For others, it is the accumulation of horror and misery that gets them. The stories in this section relate how three officers whose shootings produced no remarkable problems for them still suffered from other sorts of encounters with human violence. They begin with the ruminations of the busy cop, who cannot forget a young woman whose life—despite his best efforts—he could not save from the murderous designs of her jealous ex-boyfriend.

I’d have to say that my three shootings didn’t affect me too much. Even the fatals. But some other things on the job sure did. One of the biggest was a hostage situation that didn’t work out. It was a domestic violence thing, a lovers’ quarrel. It was one of those, “If I can’t have you, then nobody can,” deals. The guy went to the gal’s place of business, grabbed her, took her into a conference room, and held her hostage for a while—I guess to say whatever he wanted to say—before he killed her and then killed himself.

When we got there, patrol had already determined the room they were in. The patrol cops had talked to him through the wall, so we were well aware of what was going on even before we got there. The negotiators got the guy on the phone, and my team got positioned right outside the room in order to do an emergency assault if we had to go in to rescue the girl. The door to the conference room was one of those that can’t be locked, and we placed some fiber optics into the room, which showed that he hadn’t barricaded the door. With that situation, we were almost guaranteed instant entry if we had to go in.

From the fiber optics, we knew exactly where he was, where she was, where the table and chairs were. He was holding her near the opposite end of the room from the door where we were stationed, lying down with her behind some chairs, partway under this long conference table. We knew everything about the room, so we felt real confident that we could rescue the girl if we were told to do so. There were no guarantees, but we felt confident. We assumed that it would be a simple matter of getting in as fast as we could and shooting him, unless, of course, he just threw his hands up and surrendered when we came in.

The plan I put together was to do a limited entry, where my point man was going to go to the end of the table that was near the door to try to get a shot straight down the table at him. If he didn’t have a clear shot, he was going to continue on across the room until he could get a shot on him. The second man was going to go to a different spot in the room to try to draw the boyfriend’s fire while the first guy moved to get a clear shot. I was going to go along the opposite wall to get a different firing angle. And the last guy was going to be my hands man. He was going to wait for my signal to come in, grab the hostage, and drag her out. So the plan was basically to draw the guy’s fire toward us so that he didn’t kill his girlfriend, shoot him, and get her out of there.

We told the commander we were ready to do it. The guy kept threatening to kill his girlfriend, but the commander told us not to go in unless the guy started shooting. Of course, I argued that if he started shooting, it was going to be too late to save the girl. But I didn’t win that argument, and I did what I was told while the negotiators tried to get the guy to give up.

Sure enough, a little while after we were told to sit tight, we heard a shot go off. The girl let out a scream, and we started to go in. As we were turning the doorknob, we heard a second shot. As we were going through the door, a third shot rang out. Then my point man took a shot that hit the guy just as he stuck his gun in his mouth and blew his head off. The whole thing took about three or four seconds.

The investigation disclosed that the first two shots were the guy murdering his girlfriend and that the third shot was aimed at us; it lodged in the carpet just in front of the door we came through. It didn’t bother me that he’d shot at us, and it sure didn’t bother me that he killed himself, but I felt really bad, really angry, that the girl was dead. I was angry at the hostage taker, angry at the decision that was made not to go in earlier.

She was a pretty young girl, had her whole life ahead of her. If she had a chance of making it out of there, it would have been with us going in to rescue her. I was mad that we weren’t allowed the chance to try and save her, but you know, I’m not the one who had to make that decision. So I didn’t dwell on it, but it made me angry for several days, and to this day I still feel bad for the poor girl.

I thought about the shooting a lot in the first few days afterward. What could I have done better? How could I have done it safer? How can I improve? But then there was this surprise. When I was in the academy, they told us that shootings were very stressful events. That guys who get in shootings feel guilty, cry afterward, can’t sleep, get divorced, and all sorts of other bad stuff. So during the academy, I got semiparanoid about getting into a shooting. I was worried about what a shooting would do to me, about these things that happen when you get in a shooting.

So after my shooting, I was waiting for all this stuff the academy teaches, all the shock and sleepless nights, the tears, and so on. I was waiting for it, but nada. Nothing ever came. Nothing at all. I’d told my wife what happened when I first saw her after the shooting and told her to get ready for the tough stuff. Told my other family and friends. Told the story till I got sick telling it because I wanted everybody to know what happened and how I was feeling, so they’d know what was going on when it hit. So I was braced, “OK, here it comes.” But it never did. I was almost feeling guilty that I didn’t have the guilty thoughts. But it wasn’t there, it just wasn’t there. I’ve never had any negative stuff about the shooting, and it’s been a few years—no remorse or anything negative whatsoever.

Now maybe I repressed it, I don’t know, but I don’t think so, because some other stuff from the job does get to me. The biggest is that I keep getting this one nightmare from when I used to work patrol about twelve years ago. I got a call about these parents who beat up their child, a little baby. They were at the hospital, and Homicide had called me to detain the parents. I had to talk to the doctor first. I walked into the room and the baby was right there. He was dead. His eyes were wide open, big brown eyes, just like one of those Gerber babies. I could see this big impression of a fist on his stomach. The doctor was taking spinal fluid out of the child. I see all that in my dreams sometimes—the room, the kid, the fist mark. I mostly get them when I take a vacation. About the fourth or fifth night, I start getting these dreams. I don’t get them day to day as long as I’m working, but when I go on an extended vacation, then they come back.

I’ve always worked busy areas, so I’ve been involved in a lot of stuff in my six years on the street. I’ve been shot at several times, mostly sniper-type incidents, where we’d take rounds but couldn’t identify where they were coming from. We didn’t return fire in those cases because you can’t just fire indiscriminately, even when the patrol car takes rounds. I’ve been in four shoot-outs with gang-bangers but only hit one of the guys I traded shots with. Then recently, I killed a sixteen-year-old kid who was holding his girlfriend hostage after he shot some deputies.

All these incidents had an impact on me, but it was other shootings where officers and deputies were killed that affected me the most. The first one happened when I was still in field training. Two officers from Reston, a neighboring city, were murdered when they made a traffic stop at this gas station. A couple of months after that happened, a deputy in my division was murdered at a man-with-a-gun call. About three years after that, I made the scene where a good friend of mine was shot and killed during a foot pursuit. And I just recently had a buddy who was killed in an off-duty deal, where a robber shot him in the head when he discovered my buddy was a deputy. I was at the hospital when he died. All of these deaths had a big impact on me, especially the two officers killed at the traffic stop when I was in training. I’ll never forget what I saw when we responded to the assistance call.

When we got there, three one-man Reston cars had already responded. There was a fourth radio car with both the driver’s-side door and the passenger’s-side door wide open, parked in front of the gas station. The emergency lights were on, and there were two officers lying on their backs, basically parallel to each other, on either side of the radio car. The one on the driver’s side was more toward the front of the car, and the other guy was more toward the back. They were both still alive. Two of the Reston officers were off to the side, not doing anything. They looked to be in shock, complete disbelief on their faces, just standing there. The other Reston officer was kneeling down next to the officer on the driver’s side of the radio car.

We found out later from the investigation what happened. The two officers, Dander and Johnston, made a regular vehicle stop on a blue sedan with just the driver in it. They got the suspect out of the car, and Officer Dander started to conduct a pat-down search. As he was searching, the guy pulled a gun out of his waistband. Apparently, Johnston didn’t know the guy was going for a gun. He believed that it was just gonna be a fight, so he came running up to help Dander.

As Johnston was running up, rounds started going off. The first one hit Dander in the thigh. The second one caught him in his arm, his shooting arm, right at the elbow, incapacitating it. With his gun arm useless, he fell on his back. The suspect then fired several rounds at Johnston, who now had his back to the suspect because he had turned around and was trying to get to the other side of the car for cover. One of the rounds caught Johnston just above the vest and hit him in his neck area. He was bent over when he took the round; that’s why it was a fatal. If he’d been standing up a little more, it would have caught him in the vest. So Johnston went down, and the suspect turned again on Dander. Dander had his feet up in the air, I guess in a defensive position. The guy put a round in the bottom of Dander’s foot and then fired several more, striking him twice in the head. He then went over to Johnston, straddled him, did a coup de grâce on Johnston, jumped back in his car, and took off. So the suspect was gone long before we got there.

When I got out of the car, I got one of the Reston officers to give me some information, and I put that out over the air real quick. Then I went over to Dander—I knew him from court—and looked at him. I yelled at him, “You’re going to be all right, buddy, hang in there.” But in my mind, I was saying, “Just die,” because he was messed up. From the severity of the wounds, I knew that if he survived that he was going to be a vegetable. I mean, I could see that he’d taken one round that entered above his right eye and exited the back of his head. He was a mess.

Then I went over to Johnston. He was down on the ground, kind of shaking. There was what appeared to be brain matter off to the side of his head. It may have been, but it could have been food. Apparently, they had just finished eating. They’d each had a burrito, and they’d both been regurgitating, so there was like rice and stuff to the side of Johnston’s head. That’s why I’m not sure if the other stuff was brains or some other food.

Both officers’ guns were still in their holsters, and I’ll never forget that, seeing both guns in their holsters. Another thing that stuck in my mind is that Dander was wearing his black gloves because it was nighttime in March, and it was still kind of cold. I was standing there in just complete disbelief, just in shock, looking at both of them and knowing they were going to die, thinking that we’ll do whatever we can for them, but knowing that they were going to die. I played that picture constantly back in my mind for a long time. It just was an incredible scene to see two guys down like that. Periodically, after all these years, when I think about it, that picture of them lying there dying still comes back.

The Last Word

The final voice we hear from is that of a veteran officer who shot two people, one fatally, during the first of his two decades in police work. Over the years, he has struggled mightily with both shootings, spending considerable time researching the consequences of killing and discussing with other officers how their shootings affected them. Given his informed perspective on the topic, he has the last word.

I’ve gone through some really tough times after my shootings, and I’ve talked to a lot of other officers who’ve been in shootings about how they handled it. Some have had some tough times like me, and some it hasn’t really bothered much at all. I teach shootings up at the academy, and one of the biggest things I tell those recruits is that everybody handles things different. I tell them about Hank Rickly on our department. He killed a guy who jumped through the window of his car armed with a knife.

The guy had come up to his window, being real genial and just talking to him very nice and polite and calling him “sir,” when all of a sudden, he just pulled out this huge knife, said, “You son of a bitch!” and started trying to stab Hank through the open window. Hank just leaned away, pulled his gun, and shot the guy four times. Hank was fine about everything. He knew about the difficulties I had after my shootings, and he told me that he woke up three days after the incident and said to himself, “Why don’t I feel bad?” So he and I are on opposite ends of the spectrum.

But I think that shooting someone changes just about every cop who does it. If you haven’t been in a shooting, you can’t really understand it, and I don’t really know how to explain it, but after you shoot someone, things will never be the same. It’s almost like there’s a loss of innocence involved. You’ll just never look at life the same way.

Notes

1. General information about the investigations into police shootings, the inquiries that follow, and their outcomes can be found in Deadly Force: What We Know, by William A. Geller and Michael S. Scott (Washington, D.C.: Police Executive Research Forum, 1992). A case study of the investigation process in one jurisdiction can be found in Police Shootings and the Prosecutor in Los Angeles County: An Evaluation of Operation Rollout, by Craig D. Uchida, Lawrence Sherman, and James J. Fyfe (Washington, D.C.: Police Foundation, 1981).

2. A discussion of civil litigation against the police can be found in Critical Issues in Police Civil Liability, by Victor E. Kappeler (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1993).

3. Discussions of police officers’ tendency to be insular and suspicious of both those outside law enforcement and their superiors in the department can be found in Violence and the Police, by William Westley (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970); Working the Street: Police Discretion and the Dilemmas of Reform, by Michael Brown (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1981); and Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in a Democratic Society, 3rd ed., by Jerome Skolnick (Old Tappan, N.J.: Macmillan, 1994).

4. Perhaps the most influential treatise on dreams is The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud, authorized translation of 3rd ed., with introduction by A. A. Brill (Old Tappan, N.J.: Macmillan, 1913). For a more recent discussion of nightmares, see, for example, The Nightmare: The Psychology and Biology of Terrifying Dreams, by Ernest Hartman (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

Chapter Five

When the Smoke Clears

Notes