We Are the Cops (22 page)

In a case like that you have to be so careful. Because, of course, you really want to hurt the guy – that would be the right thing to do – but it’s going to come under a great deal of scrutiny and if this guy turned up in court all beat up and bloodied, that
would not be good for the case. So he got off relatively easy, other than going to prison for quite a few years.

As for the officer who got shot, fortunately they did more damage poking around, making sure it didn’t nick an artery when he got shot, than the actual bullet itself.

So yeah, that was funny.

A young lady had been kidnapped – no one could find her – and this guy was abusing her sexually. He had her handcuffed to either the sink or the bathtub. So one day he took off and she managed to escape. She was totally naked and she escaped. It was in the middle of winter and she ran to the house next-door, completely naked with handcuffs hanging down and told them that she had been molested and all the rest of it. They called the police.

Now this guy is coming back home and he sees all the police around his house. He thinks, ‘Shit! They got me.’

So he drives up here to the police station – into the Northwest District building in Detroit – on a Sunday afternoon, walks in with a shotgun, walks right through the front door and starts shooting, right here in the lobby. There are still remnants of the gun blasts in the walls. That’s why we have a person checking you at the door now. That’s why. We never had that before; it’s a police building. You walk into the station and you make a report. But after that incident we instituted an officer at the front door with the metal detector.

So, this guy walks in with a shotgun. One officer, who’d been shot before – and his wife was thrilled that he was on a desk
because now she thinks he’ll never be shot again – he got shot in the head. He wasn’t armed, because he was behind a desk and he had his gun in the drawer. There was also a female officer sitting at the front desk but the chair was too tight and bulky, so she had her gun under the drawer. The sergeant was standing there, not really paying attention, because some guy just walks in, and the guy unloaded. The sergeant got hit in the ear with the wad of the shotgun blast. So the gun goes off, one guy gets shot in the head and the wad hits the sergeant hard enough where he started bleeding.

There was another officer sitting at the desk and after the first officer was shot, everybody goes for cover but this officer actually goes to the ground, reaches up and starts shooting. People start coming out of the other rooms and the guy looks down the hallway and BOOM! – he fires another shot. A female sergeant just happens to be standing sideways and the round went through her shirt and tie and grazed her vest. She had no clue what the hell was going on.

Two other sergeants come out and they see what’s going on and BOOM, BOOM, BOOM! So now the guy – the shooter – dives over the front desk because he’s taking fire from down the hallway. In the meantime, we had a Commander also standing at the front desk who just happened to be here on his off day. He didn’t have his gun but he had an ankle holster and he was checking some paperwork. Anyway, this guy walks in and BOOM, BOOM, BOOM! So they hit the ground.

The sergeant, who has been hit, hits the ground. The Commander
falls on top of the sergeant. We’re trained to always go for your gun – we never train to go for your ankle, because you just don’t train that way – so naturally, the training kicked it and the Commander grabbed the gun off the sergeant who he was laying on top of and starts shooting. They’re shooting for a minute and a half. BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM! Point blank range – I mean, right across the desk. BAM, BAM, BAM! He shot the guy a couple of times. The Commander got shot a couple of times also and the guy’s gun finally clicked and he just collapsed.

You need to YouTube that. That happened here. It had never happened before.

I was on duty and I got the call. ‘What’s going on?’

They’re saying, ‘The Commander’s been shot!’

‘Where?’

‘Northwest District.’

‘I know, but where?’

‘Northwest District.’

‘I KNOW! Where?’

‘In the lobby.’

I’m then thinking, ‘The fricking police building?’

I got here real quick. I come in here and there was smoke everywhere. This whole room – the whole lobby – was filled with smoke. All the officers were standing there with their hands on their guns because they’re in shock. They didn’t wait for EMS. They took two cars and hauled ass and took everyone to hospital, which is five minutes away. ‘Stupid’ died, behind the counter, but it was suicide by police. He knew he was going to jail for raping
that woman so he came in here to take police officers with him.

The Commander had run down the hallway saying, ‘I’m shot! I’m shot!’ He ran into the office and collapsed into a chair and they just wheeled him out of here.

The only person who died was the asshole. One officer went critical that night through loss of blood. He got hit in the side and it blew off some of his hand and fingers. Another officer took – through the grace of God, it must have been either buckshot or something smaller like a twenty gauge – he took one point blank to the head, right into the face. I just remember him sitting there saying, ‘Hey, I’m shot. Can anybody help me? Can anybody help me?’

That was bad. It was unreal. Most of those officers never returned to work after that.

I was in the Eastern District and we had one officer killed and four others shot in the same incident. One fatal and four wounded.

What happened was, a run came out on a B and E in progress – Breaking and Entering – a home invasion in progress. Two rookie officers got the run. But two veteran officers were closer, so they said that they were going to make it to the scene too. So the two veteran officers show up and they see movement in the house and the next thing you know, shots are fired. The guy comes out, guns a-blazing, onto the porch. He’s running out – BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM!

It was two-thirty in the morning or three-thirty in the morning, I think. Everyone starts responding – you know, ‘officer in
trouble’ – and the sergeant gets there and there’s cops laying on the front lawn, shot. One was shot in the arm, one was shot in the leg, one was shot in the groin; I can’t remember where the other one was shot.

So he takes the first one to the hospital and EMS come and they’re taking them as well but they can’t find the fifth officer. He was the first one shot and no one knew it. He died instantly on the front porch. He walked up to the front porch to open the door and the guy lit him up. Unfortunately we didn’t know that at the time.

When they called me, ‘Commander, Commander, we got four officers shot!’ I get in the car and started going there and then I get a phone call, ‘Commander, we found a fifth officer. It doesn’t look good.’

He was a big guy, a huge guy. Unfortunately in all the pandemonium no one had seen that he was the first one down.

Now, the bad guy was shot one time and the ironic part is – and thank God no one else got shot – the bad guy got shot and they tackled him and they cuffed him to a fence. They tell another guy to sit on him, to watch this guy. Unbeknownst to us, the guy still had the gun – he just couldn’t get to it. But he had the gun close enough that he could have shot another officer.

That was the worst incident as far as total officers shot. We’ve had several incidents through the years where two officers have been killed at one scene but that’s the first time we had five officers shot at one time and that messed up a lot of people. It was a bad thing. It was very traumatic for the department. He was a
big guy, this officer. He was like a mountain man. He was huge. Always smiling. That was unfortunate.

But I thought at the time that it brought the department together, like they always do, a little bit.

This officer was four or five years out of the academy. This was his first police job. I worked with him for three or four years on midnight shift.

It was a Sunday night and he made a traffic stop of a car with a broken taillight. He pulled it over and it was a fifteen-year-old kid without a driver’s licence. He decided to cut the kid a break and he directed him to park his car at a gas station and lock it up and he was going to give him a ride home. The kid gave him the address of an apartment complex nearby. So the officer drove him there and I think the kid thought that he was just going to let him out but the officer walked him to the door because he wanted to speak to the parents. Well it turns out that it was the kid’s girlfriend’s house. So then he asked him to get a parent on the phone. So the kid got some woman on the phone and the officer realised after talking to her for a little bit that it was the kid’s sister – it wasn’t his mum.

So the cop had enough and he probably informed the kid that he was under arrest. But then the kid took off up the stairs. They were cement steps, about twenty steps up to a landing and then it goes down twenty steps to the other side of the apartments. Based on what I saw at the scene and the reports, it sounded like they either scuffled on the landing or coming down the stairs
on the other side and they tumbled all the way down the twenty steps. And it appears that the officer hit his head and got knocked unconscious. The witnesses who were in the hallway said that the kid then reached down, pulled the officer’s gun out of his holster and just shot him in the head. Executed him. Shot him right in the side of the head whilst he was just laying there. Killed him instantly. And then the kid took off, running.

After he fled he got picked up by somebody. His dad took him to a hotel a few miles away where they holed up overnight. We knew who it was, because reviewing the officer’s in-car video, there was the plate. He also ran the kid’s name to the dispatcher, so they knew who he was. The Detroit Fugitive Apprehension Team actually came up and helped our department. They worked with the kid’s family pastor to convince him to turn himself in. I was actually there the next morning when they brought him in. He was convicted. He got life in prison.

He was fifteen at the time and the Michigan Supreme Court recently passed a law where they’ve ruled that it’s unlawful to sentence juveniles to life sentences regardless of the crime and they’ve made it retroactive. So there’s a chance that he will not have to serve out this life sentence. So all of the police unions in the state are working hard to get that overturned.

This kid was a turd. He was a local gangbanger – a thug. He posted pictures on Facebook prior to this – guns and drugs and money. He’d been pulled over one month earlier by another police department in the same car and was actually arrested. But before the cop took him to the station, he decided to cut him a
break and let him go. And so this is how he repays the police a month later, by shooting one of them in the head – a cop who was trying to do him the same favour.

He was the first officer on our department to be killed since 1976. It was terrible. I got the call from the station, probably ten minutes after it happened. I live a two-minute drive from the hospital where they took him to. So I drove straight to the hospital and I ran into the Emergency Room and they were still working on him, still trying to revive him. They actually had me hold the bandages on the sides of his head whilst they we working on him.

There were two officers who just happened to be two apartment buildings over from where this happened, on an unrelated incident, in that same complex. They heard the shot and they were able to get there pretty quickly. They were both in the Emergency Room, just in shock. One of them was actually walking around the hallway in circles. The other one that was in the Emergency Room was leaning against the wall, just staring. It was pretty traumatic and obviously throughout the course of the night, other officers started showing up.

I had to work the next morning. This happened at around midnight and I was at the hospital until five-thirty, went home, slept for about half an hour, showered and I had to be back at work at seven. They ended up bringing the kid in around noon. So I had to book him – you know, here’s this guy that just killed one of my officers and I’ve got to take his fingerprints. I’ve got to ask him all these questions. I’ve got to take him into the holding cell and then we had to take him over to the court. That stuff’s tough.

But then I was fortunate enough that I was actually working back on midnight shift when his trial happened, so I was able to go up to his trial every day. I was there – front row – and other officers filtered in on their days off and stuff. But I was able to be there pretty much for the entire trial, which, you know, helps you see that justice is being done at least.

It’s not that we – the officers on the department – are psychopaths or anything but most of us can shake stuff off pretty quickly. I mean, we still honour him – his picture is still on top of the refrigerator at the station. We had a wake for him at a local pub. I’m familiar with what a wake is supposed to be so I took his composite photo and had it blown up to eight by ten and bought a frame and a stand and took it so that we could put it on a pool table with other mementoes of him. Well, that picture is still at the station. It floats around, pops up in different places and right now it’s on top of the refrigerator. It’s always around. And we do a charity golf outing every year that raises money for officers killed, and it’s in his name.

The thing about his death though – as tragic as it was – it was completely preventable. There were about seven or eight mistakes that he made, that had he not made even just one of those, had he made six mistakes and not the seventh, this never would have happened. The first one was, he didn’t handcuff the kid when he put him in the back of the car, so the kid was able to use his cell phone and call his girlfriend and say, ‘This cop’s bringing me home, pretend that you’re my sister.’ That was the first ruse – she was supposed to pretend to be his sister and their parents
weren’t home. Had he not been able to do that, they would have just shown up at the girlfriends house and she wouldn’t have known to pretend to be the sister and maybe the ruse would have been caught earlier and something would have gone different.