We Are the Cops (21 page)

I was working patrol section in a busy and rough part of Detroit with my partner. It was a rainy day and we ended up answering runs here, there and everywhere. Right before five o’clock we got an alarm to a regular business. We checked it out and then we decided to just go get something to drink. I was the driver and as we pulled up at a heavy narcotics location, we see three guys
walking right in front of an area where we had had complaints of loitering and crack sales, right there. We went up to talk to these guys and as I pulled up, one of the guys automatically took off running. My partner stayed with the other two guys whilst I chased the third guy. As I tackled him, I was on top of him, ready to effect the arrest and handcuff him and I could feel his hand down near his pocket area and what I sensed – that he was attempting to pull a gun – became reality, and he pulled a snub-nosed 38. Well, we wrestled briefly over that weapon and he was able to get one shot off where I was struck in the butt area.

I was immediately aware that I had been shot and it came to a point where I had to decide whether to continue fighting over this gun or do I pull my weapon also. I was on top of him and I could see the gun coming so I started fighting him for it. I held his arm and thought I had shielded it enough to get my gun and that’s when I got shot in the butt - because he was able to come across my back area and it struck me.

I returned fire and fatally killed him right there. I shot him in the chest and heart area. He was shot twice. Two shots and then I deemed that it was enough.

It was a ripping pain when I got shot. Whatever the velocity of the bullet was, it just ripped through, because, you know, when you think of a butt compared to any other part or your body, it’s all tissue. All I remember was that it was hot. Hot and tearing. So, not knowing at the time if it was the butt area or the back area, my mind started to wonder. I knew I had been shot because I could feel the warm blood coming out but also the cold air – it
was February – and just blood running down my leg. So I knew I had been shot. At that time I had been around fifty to seventy-five shootings in three years. But I was thinking, did it hit my back? Did it hit something internally? I just knew it was in that area and after speaking to a doctor later on, he was like, ‘Yeah, there’s a major artery that it could have hit and you could be dead.’ But of course it became a teasing point among officers – once they knew I was all right – that I had been shot in the butt.

I didn’t know the other guy’s condition at the time but he was fatally wounded. My partner was two blocks over with the original stop and he had taken those other two into custody, not knowing where I was at. He just radioed that he had heard shots fired and then he pulled up – it felt like minutes but I’m sure it was seconds – and that’s when I told him that I had been shot and that the suspect had been shot. The code – blue or red, or whatever – goes through the entire city and all the Detroit cars and all the precincts are on alert and then you have probably fifty police cars converging on that area, as well as the state police, and we’re probably talking minutes. And the protocol when you have a police officer shot is that the first car on scene, it’s ‘load and go’. So I remember two officers pulling up and them taking me a quick, direct route to hospital, but I’m laying on my side, knowing I had been shot and there’s the panic in the head because, you know, it’s not like I can look down. I just knew I had been shot but where did it hit? Then I remember getting to the hospital and the cutting and the x-rays and everything going on.

That was eerie. Eerie because someone’s life was taken.
Some officers would say, ‘Well, he deserved it.’ But I never took a point where I thought that the suspect deserved it. It just went back to, ‘I have to survive. I know I’ve been shot.’ So I returned fire and fortunately his wounds were fatal. It would have been different or I might have had a different outlook of it if it had been a kid with a toy guy – or it
had
been a toy gun – but the fact that I know that I’ve been shot and returned fire, it was different. At that point I had to do what I had to do.

My brother is a police officer with the department also and he came to the hospital within minutes. I remembered him coming into the emergency room and my only thought was for my mother. I remember looking up at the clock and let’s say it was 5.20 and I knew that my mother was still working and she was already frantic about us being police officers, so he had to call her before 5.30, because the first thing that was going to hit the news was that a police officer from the tenth precinct had been shot and she would straight away think it was one of us. I didn’t want to send her into a heart attack and luckily he was able to get hold of her.

Later I sat down with her and I sat down with the girl I was dating at the time and my brother, and told them that I was a career policeman and that there was nothing in my mind that ever doubted that I was going to return to work. But my partner never returned to work. That was the final incident for him. He had previously been stabbed from his wrist up to his elbow and pretty much lost all control of everything as it had hit a lot of nerves. I think he should have took more time off after that stabbing.
I don’t think he took enough time off, and then he comes into this! He wasn’t my regular partner and he pretty much went off on stress leave and never, ever came back.

But the next psychological part is that whilst I’m in the hospital, I still have homicide detectives and the prosecutor waiting on the case. The body still goes for an autopsy and the autopsy reads ‘homicide’. Luckily this was a justified homicide. But from February until July – upwards of six months – the case just sat in the prosecutor’s office.

The way a police shooting goes – or if you’re involved in a fatal police shooting – you’re released from the hospital the next day and then with my attorney or the attorney provided by the union, you go down and the investigators want to talk to you. You’re read your Miranda rights. You are a suspect. You are a suspect in this investigation. It’s tough because you’re the police but they’re reading you your rights for the death of somebody. I know what I did was right but just the fact that it can linger for six months before it’s even reviewed, can affect you. I eventually got a letter saying it had been reviewed and was a justified homicide and I’d been cleared. Six months later! That was troubling. I guess they put it on a shelf and said, ‘We’ll get to it when we get to it.’

But you just jump back into work and I remember it was probably one of my first nights back on midnights and I was working with a familiar partner and we get a run to go and arrest a mental guy, and he went to grab for my gun and I immediately went back to my training. So I think that it takes a special breed
to do the job where you can just kick back into your training. Granted, some people can’t just bounce back into it but I was just fortunate that I was able to bounce back in and I’ve had no lasting effects.

But it’s an inherent danger and we sign up for it – not that I signed up to be killed, but I know that at any time in this career, when we go out on these runs, it can happen. But it’s needed. Without us – the police – it would be complete chaos. We’d be no better than a third world country. So that’s just a sacrifice that I’ve made. But there’s still that drive in me to come into work. I still have that fire. I still want to help and be out there, even with the shooting.

There’s a lot of small aircraft up here in Alaska. You’ve got the little Cessnas and the Beaver airplanes, so as a state trooper it’s pretty common to deal with and respond to these plane crashes. That’s not an uncommon thing. If you look up the ‘line of duty’ deaths for our state troopers, a lot of the troopers that died in the line of duty are actually from aircraft crashes.

There are a lot of pilots out there that have a job to do as far as trying to deliver freight or whatever it is. And people fly so frequently just to get to places and deliver freight and deliver mail to some of these smaller places that I guess it’s one of those things – like driving a car on a highway down on the Lower 48. We have probably a lot more air traffic up here and unfortunately we have a lot of bad weather too.

I worked a search-and-rescue team out of Sitka one year and
there was a small commercial aircraft that had left Sitka airport and they were on their way to a lodge. A second aircraft was leaving the lodge and coming back to the airport so at some point on this flight path that this company used, the planes would have passed each other and been in close contact. But the pilot who left the lodge, coming back to the airport, got to the part where he has to fly through this pass and he radioed to warn the other pilot that he was coming through this pass and to be careful. That’s when the other aircraft should have been around the same sort of area but he ended up not having any radio communications with the second pilot.

We found out that that plane had several passengers on board and we launched an operation to find the aircraft but we never found it or anyone from it. It was interesting. We contacted the Coastguard and they assisted us with the search. We contacted some Sitka mountain rescue group and had them assist us with the search as well and a lot of man hours were put into that search but we never found any sign of that aircraft. It was a smaller aircraft with five or six passengers.

No one has any idea what happened to that plane. It’s one of those ones where we were never able to figure why that aircraft went down or what the circumstances were. No emergency locator beacon on that aircraft went off so there was no indication of where they might have went down. The Coastguard wasn’t able to find any sign of, or any clue of, any aircraft skimming over trees and damaging any trees, like they would have if they went down in a certain area or anything like that. So it was just one of those
cases where it was unfortunate for the families of the pilot and the passengers on board because they never received any closure of what might have happened to their loved ones. I don’t know how many times that happens – where we don’t find the plane – but I know it does happen.

I’ve started to get more concerned about the safety aspect of flying – especially while I was in Juneau – because much of the travel is by those little aircraft to these smaller communities. A lot of times, we’re flying in bad weather because someone in that community absolutely needs our assistance and we have to go. There’s been times where the weather has been so bad where we can’t fly or the weather was just marginal enough where the pilot felt it was safe enough for us to go up in the air, but those pilots are sometimes pushing the limits of their flying abilities and the limits of the aircraft.

There were a few times where I’d fly up to Haines and have to do work up there and then try to get back. I remember getting on the airplane one time and it was snowing and it was blowing sideways and I said to the pilot, ‘Are we gonna make it out of here?’

And he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve got it. We should be fine.’

But we got up into the air and there was a moment where visibility was zero and he was flying by instruments. That was an interesting flight. The pilot just goes, ‘Well, that was a close one!’

We ended up losing our Trooper helicopter this year with the pilot and one of our troopers on board. They were on a search and rescue. Our trooper helicopter got called out to find a person that was in need of aid so they went out – it was in the Talkeetna
area – and the helicopter went out and picked up our trooper and they went out to find the person who needed help. My understanding is, they found the person and were able to pick him up and they were supposed to radio when they got back but they never radioed.

They then ended up having to launch a search for the trooper helicopter. They sent out our wildlife troopers on some other aircraft, and they located them. They located the trooper helicopter.

There were no survivors on board.

It’s just devastating when a friend gets shot. It could have been you, you know?

This one guy who got shot, the night he got shot, he and his partner had come back early after giving evidence at court and he’s like, ‘Can I just borrow the car real quick? We’re going to run around and see if we can make another arrest and get some overtime.’

I said, ‘Yeah, give it an hour.’ And I got on and did some paperwork back at the house – the police station.

So they take the car and they’re not out ten minutes before they grab some guy with a big bag of drugs – a big bag of crack. So they bring him back and they said, ‘Here, throw him in the cell, we’re going to keep going.’ They’re gonna try to get another arrest because now one cop’s got an arrest, the other cop’s wants to try and get an arrest also.

So, this cop’s sitting in my seat – in my car – and they pull over a cab and they walk up to the back of the cab and they just
kind of look in to see if everything is alright. But the passenger looked a little funny, so the cop just opened the door and said, ‘Hey, is everything alright?’ And as he opened the door the passenger shot him.

He took one shot but it happened quick and there was a struggle. They get the gun, they get the guy and one cop says, ‘Holy shit, I think you just got shot!’

And he goes, ‘Yeah, I think I did!’

So he picks up his shirt and right about at his belt line, he has a little hole. He’s this real thin guy and as he pushes on his stomach with his hand, the slug – the bullet – falls out into his hand! He was wearing two belts – he had a regular black leather belt on and then he had his gun belt over the top of that. He was in jeans and plain clothes and what happened is, the angle that the bullet hit, it hit the two belts, which slowed the bullet down. It went inside of him but didn’t go too far.

So anyway, with this, the radio heats up and they’re screaming that an officer has been shot, ‘Officer shot! Officer shot!’

So we’re like, ‘Holy Jesus!’ And then you became aware of who the guy was that got shot.

They brought the bad guy in and when he got to the front steps, it was like, well, his feet never hit the ground until he was in the back room. He just went flying to the back.