We Are the Cops (11 page)

Turns out that they were going to do a robbery; they were going to rob a drug dealer. But we ended up getting the guys after
they jumped out of the car and ran.

My car is Swiss cheese, buildings are shot up, but there’re no injuries nowhere. It just took me back to that old guy who said, ‘Hey, He’s looking out for you today.’ For him to say that and for me to be that close to gunfire and I didn’t get hit, I was like, wow. And it just shows you: we’re police, we’re totally marked as police and both these guys are shooting at us anyway.

I’ve been involved in one shooting, as far as actually shooting
at
somebody. That night there was a person walking around with a revolver. It was tucked into his front waistband and he had tried to sell it to two thirteen or fourteen-year-old kids.

They want nothing to do with it and they walk over to the payphone at Seven Eleven and give us a call and say, ‘Hey, there’s a guy walking around with a gun that he’s trying to sell to people.’

I was probably a good two miles away with another officer at the time. We got dispatched on it. I think it was a Friday night. Real busy night – it was the middle of summer. We happened to be the first ones there. We show up to the Seven Eleven and we talk to one of the kids.

The kid says, ‘That’s him right there.’

And he was by Luv-it Custard, which is on the other side of the street. So, we pull our guns out and we go across there and confront him. Basically, what we are going to try to do is to prone him out on the ground, pat him down and see if he has a gun. Well, it didn’t work out that way. Instead he just turns and faces us.

He says, ‘I’ve got a gun.’

My partner at that time was issuing him verbal commands. The guy lifts up his shirt and shows us the gun.

And it’s like, ‘Okay, we know you’ve got a gun, now let’s not turn this into a big deal. We’re just going to lay you down on the ground.’

So we’re trying to prone him down on the ground and I remember looking at my backdrop, which was a gas station with a bunch of people standing around. We have our guns drawn on a guy who’s also got a gun, we’re in the middle of Las Vegas on a busy Friday night and there’re people everywhere. It was not good.

We’re trying to tell him to drop the gun and instead of people using common sense and thinking, ‘maybe this is something I should back away from’, it starts drawing a crowd! And the crowd doesn’t realise that they’re putting themselves in a dangerous position.

So I had to move around him so that my backdrop was now a wall and I’m warning my partner as I’m coming around, ‘Hey, watch behind him. Watch behind him.’

After about thirty seconds of trying to negotiate with him, he reaches down and grabs the gun. But he doesn’t do it in a furtive way – he kind of does it in a way that makes me think that maybe he’s going to drop it on the ground. So he pulls it out with his finger and thumb and he’s holding it up and so we’re thinking he’s going to drop it.

But then it’s becoming clear that he’s not going to drop it.
He takes it and puts it into a firing type grip down by his side and I’m about to tell my partner that we can’t have this go on. I mean, clearly this guy is posing an imminent threat to us and the public. We don’t need him to start shooting at us first.

I was about to tell my partner, ‘I’m going to drop him.’ But just as I’m opening my mouth, the guy starts pulling the gun up. So we shot him. Dropped him. Thank God our backdrop was the wall. I think two or three rounds of the seven or eight that were fired, went errant and they hit the wall. They were all accounted for though. And that was pretty much it. It was over just like that. It’s one of those things.

I remember the call that we were on before that one was just some silly civil call where two people couldn’t get along, neighbours arguing. And you go from that to all of a sudden, four minutes later, you’re in a shooting.

He didn’t die fortunately – or unfortunately, however you want to look at it. He got hit three times. He got hit centre mass, hit in the gut and one through the pelvic girdle. Fortunately, we were eight blocks away from the hospital and they say if you make it to trauma alive, you’re odds are pretty good that you are going to make it. He made it.

But the worst thing is that now you’re off work forever. You’re put on administrative leave. And for those of us that like to work, it’s like, what do I do? I’m home all by myself, watching all this stuff on TV and of course, you’re on the news and things like that. They tell you not to watch the news but how do you not watch the news? Everything that came after was actually more
stressful than the shooting itself.

We went to court on him and he got found guilty of resisting a police officer with a firearm and some other things. He ended up going to prison, though I don’t know how long he was sentenced for and I don’t know if he’s still there.

The shooting I was involved in was on a major highway between two states. It’s a drug corridor. It’s the major turnpike between two cities.

Listening to the radio one night, there was an armed carjacking and all of a sudden one of the cops in a neighbouring community says, ‘I got the car! I’m behind the car!’

So now the high-speed chase starts. They come into my town and I get into the chase and we go out onto this highway. We’re about four miles outside town and we now have five or six agencies involved – state police, several towns police – no one has direct radio communications with one another. The guy comes off the highway and loses it on the exit ramp and rolls the car over.

So with that, the ‘blue army’ comes screeching to a halt and we’re all running around with our guns drawn. A state trooper runs around to the far side of the car and he slipped. He had his finger on the trigger of his gun and as he falls down he blows a round off. But all we see is him going down and the sound of gunshot. So everyone is like, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!

A hundred and some rounds later the guy jumps out the windshield with his hands up. He shit his pants. How he wasn’t killed, I’ll never know. I was amazed.

My first shooting was against a dog and that’s definitely the best story. We got a call that there’s a fight going on in a parking lot of a bar called The Roadrunner. I’m on the outskirts of town, I respond to it and I get out. There’s another officer coming up behind me. We look around but there’s no fight. It’s dark. We’re on the outskirts of town so there’s no lighting in the parking lot other than what’s coming off the bar. We look around the parking lot and another officer comes by in a patrol vehicle, driving through the parking lot shining a spotlight around. All of a sudden, he lights up this dog – this great big Doberman – on top of a car, trying to eat somebody inside. It’s sitting there, biting and scratching on the windshield. The dog looks up and it sees me. I’m probably about sixty feet away from it and it gets to me in about two seconds. By the time it looked up and saw me I was able to drawer my gun and fire three rounds from the hip just before it reached me. Two of them hit it in the chest and the other one missed. The dog turned and ran off and we found it later, down the street under a car, dead. After I shot it, I’m standing around in shock.

The officer behind me is like, ‘What just happened?’

He was kind of in shock as well – he was a new officer. Then the other officer, who had spotlighted the dog, got out of his car and starts looking around.

He gets on the radio and says, ‘Control, we need homicide out here. We’ve got a dead body in the car. He’s just been shot.’

So I’m thinking, ‘Oh no! I just killed somebody!’

I’m thinking that one of my rounds ricocheted off the pavement and killed this innocent person in this truck. I didn’t even dare go look. I’m in shock. I just killed somebody. It was not that big a deal shooting the dog but then I just killed an innocent person. So I’m just kind of standing around, you know, thinking, what am I going to do now? I’ve gotta wait for homicide.

About ten minutes later somebody else gets on the radio and says, ‘Disregard it. It’s just a 4-0-8.’

A ‘4-0-8’ is a drunk. So he wasn’t shot – he was just passed out in his vehicle. But this officer, without checking or anything, just got on the radio and took about twenty years off of my life!

It turned out that it was his dog – his prize breed attack dog. This was his baby. He never went anywhere without it. But he had passed out in his van with the dog in there with him. The dog escaped up though the sky-roof of the van and was then trying to eat people in the parking lot.

Anyway, that was the first time I’d fired my gun in the line of duty.

The one on-duty shooting I had to do in defence of myself was of a pit bull. There was an old man and everyday he’d go on a two-mile walk around his neighbourhood, carrying a walking stick. He walked down one street – I don’t know if it was his street, but it was one of the streets he usually walks on – and as he was coming down, there were these two pit bull’s that were loose and they charged him and attacked him. Neighbours saw it happen and they came out and were giving him aid, then they called the police.

I get there and the man’s hand is all ripped up where the dogs laid into him and they also bit him just under his crotch on the inside of his leg. So he was ripped up pretty good and he’s got this bloody rag holding on his hand, bleeding out of his leg and he was a heavy set old man, probably in his seventies. His walking stick was all chewed up where he was trying to beat them off of him and they were chewing on his walking stick.

The neighbours – when I got there, the whole neighbourhood was outside – they’re sayin’, ‘Those dogs are a nuisance. They’ve been terrorising this neighbourhood for weeks. Those people have only lived here a few weeks and they let their dogs out all the time and they’re terrorising the neighbourhood.’

One lady goes, ‘Look at my house! Look at my front door!’ And her front door was scratched all to pieces. And she was like, ‘That’s where those dogs chased me in my house and scratched up my front door!’

A woman who lived next door to this house where the dogs lived – and this is an older woman, she might have been in her sixties or seventies – she said, ‘When I hear them barking outside, I don’t come out that gate. I stay in my house all day long because I won’t come out because of those dogs.’

So I was like, ‘What house do these dogs live at?’

And they pointed and said, ‘That house right there, where the car’s parked. That’s where they live.’

So I’m looking and I don’t hear anything, don’t see anything. So I say, ‘That house right there?’

And they say, ‘That house right there, yeah.’

I walked back to my car and I get my shotgun and I take my slugs out and put buckshot in. My shotgun hangs on a tac-sling, so it hangs in front of my body. I walk in the street, in front of the house, then I’m looking around the corner of the house and it’s got a privacy fence on one side – a six foot wooden fence that went between the house next door and the edge of the house that the dogs lived at – and then the other side of the house had a car under a carport and a chain-linked fence around the backside, so the backyard was completely fenced in and closed.

So I’m lookin’ and I don’t see anything and I don’t hear anything. So I walked back down to the people and I was like, ‘Are you sure it’s that house?’

And they’re like, ‘Yeah, it’s that house and look – right there’s the dogs!’

So I turn and look and sure enough, right there in the front yard that I just looked at, sit two dogs – a tan pit bull and a black pit bull.

So I say, ‘Alright.’ And as I turned to walk back up, the dogs disappear. I stay in the street again, then walk up and I don’t see ‘em. I’m thinking, okay, somehow they’re slipping in and out of the back yard. So I walked back down to the far side of the house where the privacy fence was and I walked up that edge of the yard. Then I walked right up against the edge of the house, got up on the porch and I was going to knock on the door because the car was there and I’m thinking that the owners gotta be home; so I’m thinking that they can come out and get their dogs.

So I pull out my baton and when I knocked on the door with
the baton, it came down – the baton extended out – so I reached down and I collapsed it onto the ground to close it again. I went to put it back into my holster and as soon as I did that I heard the dogs. RAWR! RAWR! RAWR! RAWR! They come haulin’ around the corner, up the sidewalk, straight towards me and I’m on this little bitty four-by-four front porch; no rails on it, rose bush on each side, so I can’t move. It’s only about a foot off the ground. As the dogs are running right towards me, I guess instinct, training – I don’t know – I screamed, hollered, ‘GET BACK!’ But dogs aren’t going to obey me; they’re pit bulls and pit bulls are known for being territorial.

The female was the one at the front and she ran all the way up on the porch – this little bitty porch – and the only thing that stopped her from biting me is the fact I’d swung my shotgun up and it was right in her face and she couldn’t get around it. Well, the second I swung it, I pulled the trigger. And nothin’ happened. The pucker factor went up considerably because nothin’ happened. Well, I realised that I had not taken the safety off – which was a learning experience! So I hit the safety and pulled the trigger and BOOM! And it went right into her right eye socket and never came out. Nine pellet buckshot. She locked up completely, fell over on the porch and the male dog just turned around and ran back behind the house, hid in his doghouse and barked for the next hour. But she just locked up, fell on the porch and just bled out, on the porch.

And it was almost surreal because, you know, when you’re on the range and you’re shooting, gunshots are loud. You wear your
headset but it’s still loud. But when I pulled the trigger and it went off there was no ringing in my ears. A shotgun blast is loud – if you ever go out target shooting with your friends and you don’t wear earplugs, your ears are ringing after you’ve fired a shot. But it was almost as though the adrenalin shut part of my body down. It wasn’t loud; I could hear the people down the street going, ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’ And of course, as soon as the blast went off and that dog fell, I immediately started trackin’ the other one but he turned and ran, like I said. So I let him run.