Into the Kill Zone Read online

  The stories are presented in three groups, based on how and why the officers got into police work. This approach provides thematic threads that tie the stories together and allows the reader to see how people with similar motivations and backgrounds can have different ideas, attitudes, and expectations about deadly force. The stories begin with those of a set of officers who had a strong personal connection with law enforcement before they came on the job.

  Friends and Family

  The most common personal link to policing among officers was a parent or sibling who worked in law enforcement. The other sort of personal connection was through a close friend on the job. Officers who had a personal link to police work before they got into it typically possessed more knowledge about what the job entails than did their less-connected peers. As the stories in this section illustrate, however, officers who share similar backgrounds still can travel different paths to the job and possess substantially different perspectives on deadly force.

  • • •

  I was pretty young when I started to think seriously about becoming a cop, seventeen or eighteen. The idea came from my brother, who was already in law enforcement. He encouraged me to pursue it, and I did. I didn’t think much about being involved in shootings before I applied for the job. In fact, what first brought the possibility that I might shoot someone to my attention was a question that came up in an oral interview to come on the job. One of the people doing the interviewing asked me, “Do you think you could take somebody’s life if you had to?” It kind of set me back a little bit because the questions prior to that had to do with mundane things like why I wanted to become a police officer and my religious beliefs and whatnot. So when the question about killing someone came up, it kind of threw me back a little bit. I had to really think about it. I told the oral board that if I was placed in a position where I had to shoot to save my life or somebody else’s that I didn’t think I’d have a problem with taking a life, and it was left at that. So that was my first introduction to the idea that I might have to shoot someone.

  • • •

  I really started to consider becoming a cop when I was in high school. My dad was in law enforcement, but when I was young, he never would talk about things that were going on or things that had happened. When I was older and went to the station with him, the guys were always having fun and the stuff that was going on looked exciting. So police work looked exciting, and that was probably the main reason I got interested in it. When I told my mom I wanted to become a cop, she was concerned and proud at the same time. My dad tried to talk me out of it, but it was kind of a halfhearted attempt. His attitude was like, “It’s a great job. I don’t really want you to do it. But you’ll love it.” I went to a junior college for a couple of years, played some football there, then transferred to Randall State University and after a year there came on the sheriff’s department when I was twenty-one.

  The notion that I might have to shoot somebody was always in the back of my mind, from the time I first decided to become a cop. I knew that that was part of the job. I had gone on some ride-alongs with friends that were on the department, and I knew from that that I wanted to work the faster places. Those places had a lot of shootings, so I knew that that was part of the game, that getting in a shooting was a real possibility.

  • • •

  Probably about a year before I came onto the force was the first time I thought about becoming a police officer. I was working for this import company that was facing a possible bankruptcy. My brother—who’d gotten on the force two years before—said my military background would probably help me get onto the police force if I were interested. I gave it some consideration and got accepted when I eventually applied.

  I’d gone to college right out of high school and accumulated about ninety credit hours before I joined the army for a two-year hitch. I was a combat medic. Went overseas for a few months as part of a multinational peacekeeping force south of Beirut, Lebanon, called Operation Bright Star. It was fairly intense duty, but I was never involved in any combat. It was usually several miles away.

  When I got out of the army, I came home, worked odd jobs, helped my dad in the family grocery business for a while, then found something that looked more promising at the import company that ended up facing bankruptcy. I decided to go on a ride-along with my brother when he mentioned that I should consider taking a police job. Nothing happened until the end of the shift, when he stopped by on a good shooting that involved a bad drug deal. The guy had half his face blown off. I had thought the ugliness of police work would not appeal to me, but it looked like I could handle the blood and gore, so I said, “This is for me.” I liked the atmosphere, being around a police station, in a police car, the adrenaline involved. Plus I saw that the police department was structured very similar to that of a military environment, and that’s something that I really enjoyed previously. In fact, I’d have stayed in the military for longer than two years, but I wanted to be near my family. I’m of Chinese descent and family is important to us. Besides that, I’m used to Mom’s cooking, and you don’t find much good Chinese food out in the sticks or in another country.

  I gave some serious thought to the issue of using deadly force before I came on the department because I was involved in a shooting when I was eighteen years old. It was a hijacking at our family store. I saw the suspect come in, put a gun to my dad’s head, lay him down, and shoot him execution-style. I witnessed the whole thing. I was standing by where my dad hid one of his pistols, and I pulled it out and shot the suspect after he fired a shot at me and missed. He got away, but I know I hit him because they recovered a bullet that had a lot of blood on it in the front door. I figured that round went through his arm because he dropped the money. I chased him out of the store, and when he was about half a block away, I shot him in the back. He actually did a flip before he fell; then the getaway car came and dragged him away.

  I thought my dad was dead, but it turned out that the bullet the hijacker fired went through his ribs. The gun was a cheap .22, where the cylinder was misaligned with the barrel. A piece of junk. I swore up and down that the gun was raised over my dad’s head, but he moved or something just when the guy pulled the trigger, and the bullet passed through two ribs, missed all the organs, and exited.

  From that experience, I knew I could shoot someone, but I also thought about some other stuff regarding shootings. Besides my brother, I had some friends who came on the department before me, and they always told me about the liabilities involved. They said that every time you pull the trigger, you’ve got the chief’s name on every bullet that comes out of your gun. I also thought about how I would act in a bad situation as a police officer because I’m not really the John Wayne type, the aggressive type. I’m a pretty laid-back person. More importantly, I didn’t want to choke in a situation where I could get somebody else innocent killed, whether it’d be a civilian or my partner. I didn’t have a problem with the notion of hurting someone. I was just concerned about whether I could react the way that I’m supposed to.

  • • •

  When I was a young kid growing up in the Midwest, my father had a very close friend named Ray Underwood, who was a police officer. He was a childhood hero of mine, so I started thinking about following him and becoming a cop when I was pretty young. He had been in the marines, and when we’d go over to visit, he’d show my brother and me his gun. He even gave us a bayonet he had from the Second World War. When I was nine or ten, he got in a horrendous shooting while handling a disturbance call at a local hospital one night. He took several rounds, but he put the suspects down. He stayed on the job for a long time after that, so I was always impressed with old Ray Underwood.

  Even though I’d had a family friend who was shot when I was pretty young, I don’t think that the seriousness of shootings registered when I was a kid. Where it really registered to me was when I was in the Marine Corps overseas in the Vietnam incident. I was in a force reconnaissance unit, a small
group that would go out snooping and pooping around in the bush to bring back intelligence so the regular units could kick off a mission. Being in force recon was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life because I got intensive training and discipline. I went through all sorts of schools: guerrilla warfare, SCUBA, jump school, maneuvers over and over again about movement in the bush with a small group of people. I did all sorts of stuff like that for a year before heading overseas.

  All that training helped keep me alive in Vietnam. That, plus when you’re in force recon, you’re not just one of the grunts. Those guys got hit terribly over there, but when you’re in force recon, you’re out there calling the shots. We had immediate air on station, immediate on-calls always set up to have artillery coming to our aid, and if we really got into the heat, we could get an emergency extraction. We’d just move to an LZ, a landing zone, and they would get you out of there. So it was a damn good thing as far as survival to be in a recon unit. We had a lot of contacts in the year I spent in Vietnam, but nobody from my unit ever got killed. We did OK, but we also ran missions where we set up as a reactionary force, and sometimes on those we had to go out and pick up the bodies of dead Americans. From that, I learned about what deadly force is all about and what guns can do.

  I came back stateside in March of 1970. I put in my application with the police department in May, got released from the corps in late July, and started the academy two weeks later. So six months out of the bush and I was in the police academy.

  • • •

  Being that I grew up in a police family, I was pretty young when I first thought about becoming a cop, probably ten or eleven. My grandpa started the tradition back in the early ’40s, right around ’42. My dad got in it during the ’60s. Then my sister and I came on the job in the late ’80s. I’d gone away to college, came back from my first year at college, got a job with the Communications Division, and realized that police work was pretty much what I wanted to do. So I went back to school, got three more semesters under my belt, graduated, and came back. Two weeks after I came back from graduation, I started the academy.

  When I was growing up, I never really thought about fights or shootings or anything like that. We didn’t have Cops, and we didn’t have Real Stories of the Highway Patrol on TV. That’s something that has been so much more recent. I was a typical kid. I grew up playing cops and robbers and good guy–bad guy, and we had the cap guns and if some guy snuck around the corner of a building, we’d pop one at him. “Bang! You’re dead” kind of thing. So we dealt with it, but we never had to deal with the seriousness of it. It’s like these programs nowadays where they show chases and all this action-type stuff, but you don’t see any of the aftermath of it. You don’t see any report writing, the interviews that take place. You don’t see really any of the investigation stuff. You see all the fun stuff, and that’s what we dealt with as kids, we dealt with the fun stuff. We didn’t have to deal with all the paperwork and stuff afterwards. So even though we did deal with it to an extent, we never really got in-depth with it.

  Neither my dad nor my granddad were ever involved in a shooting, and they never talked about shooting people. When Dad would come home from work, I can remember he’d take his belt off and he’d set it on his dresser, and he left his gun in his holster. He very rarely would lock it up unless we left on vacation, and we all knew you don’t touch the gun. If I wanted to touch it, I had to ask him first, and there’d better be a good reason why I wanted to touch it. So I asked him a few times, and he’d unload it and he’d sit down with me and say, “The bullets go in this way and this is how the barrel turns,” stuff like that, because in those days they had the .38s. So my sister and I were curious about it and he never hid it from us, but we also knew that it was not a toy. I knew what it was capable of, but I guess I just never really thought about what it would do. So because Grandpa and Dad were never involved in anything, they never really talked about shootings, and looking at my father’s gun was the extent of our dealings about that sort of thing.

  I do remember when my dad was working the detective bureau, he went out one night to help a friend of his who owned a bar. They were having a problem with some people coming in and robbing the neighborhood bars, so my dad grabbed his 20-gauge shotgun, put it in the little bag, and went down and sat at the bar. I thought, “Boy, it would be terrible if this guy came in there.” I was hoping that if he did that my dad could get him before he shot my dad, and I remember thinking, “I hope Dad comes home tonight.” Luckily, that night everything went off without a hitch. There were no problems at the bar, and he never, as far as I know, ever went back. And that was the only time I ever worried about anything that he ever did. But like I said, neither he nor my grandpa were ever involved in any type of officer-involved shooting, so I never really thought anything about them.

  Youthful Ambition

  Kids with friends or family in police work are not the only ones who dream of a career in law enforcement. The stories in this section show how deep the desire to become a police officer can run and how individuals who set their minds on police work early in life can take quite different paths to realizing their youthful aspirations. Where deadly force is concerned, the stories once again demonstrate that future officers who share some sort of common bond can have very different approaches to the prospect of killing people.

  • • •

  I decided to become a cop when I was seven. I was always getting into my parents’ car and acting like I was chasing robbers. I even made a pretend Kojak light for that. I’d also make my little brother be a bad guy and chase him around the backyard. As I got older and started spending time around the police department in the city where I grew up, I started to realize that it wasn’t all fun and games, that officers really do shoot people sometimes. That happened when I joined the police explorers when I was in high school. They had a program where we got to ride along with officers on Friday and Saturday nights, so through that I became good friends with the officers down there. One of them, Sam Wayne, got into two shootings within about a year, so I saw that shootings were obviously something that was part of the job.

  I decided I didn’t want to work in the place where I grew up, that I wanted to work in a big city. I looked into a few places and ended up coming here. At the time I hired on, the city had a reputation of having some pretty rough places, so I figured that there was a good possibility that I would have to shoot somebody someday. Having given it quite a bit of thought before I came on, I was satisfied that I’d be able to shoot. If you have to, you have to. It’s part of the job.

  • • •

  From the time I was very little, my ambition in life was to be either a veterinarian or a law enforcement officer. I’ve always loved animals, and police work always fascinated me. I had two Saint Bernards when I was growing up, so that’s where the love for animals came from. The fascination with law enforcement just came from watching officers. I remember when I was a small kid, an officer came to school to talk with us about different things. I can’t say I understood everything he was talking about, but it just grabbed me. He had my complete attention and my total respect. I liked that. I liked that people were willing to pay attention to him just because of his job. That was when I was a real little kid, and as I got older, that sense of awe just stuck with me.

  Another thing that drew me to policing was that it seemed like a real active job. I’ve never been one to sit back and watch. I’ve always just liked to do things, and from what I saw of police work, it was clear that it wasn’t the type of job where you sit behind a desk and punch in a card. It seemed like when I saw some cops, they were always doing something different, always dealing with different people, never the same thing. That fascinated me. When I was younger, I could watch cops doing their jobs all day, even if it was just writing out a little ticket. Plus I saw that they were almost always working together. I rarely saw just one officer doing something. It was usually a group of guys, doing their work tog
ether. I liked that because I played sports all my life, and the idea of working together for a common goal appealed to me. As I got older, my interest in being a vet declined, and my desire to become a police officer kept growing.

  I wanted to be a cop so bad that I went down to apply with the PD as soon as I got out of high school. They told me to come back when I was twenty-one, so I did. I took the test, passed it, and went through the rest of the hiring procedures until I came to the physical. They knocked me out of the process because they found something wrong with my back, where one of my vertebrae was a bit off center. They discovered that the problem was something I was born with, not from an injury. But that didn’t matter. They told me there were no ifs, ands, or buts; I couldn’t come on. They did tell me that there was an appeal process, but I didn’t bother with it because I didn’t know any better. I just took the test a bunch of times over the next several years—at least five or six—and every time I’d pass, and every time I’d get rejected because of my back.

  During that time, I worked a bunch of different jobs to support myself. I worked for Montgomery Wards, Coors Beer Company, and held some other jobs while I took some college courses. I drove a truck for a uniform company here in town for a couple of years, then started my own lawn and tree-trimming business on the side. That got to be pretty good, so I quit those other jobs and just did lawn care full-time. I was about ready to give up on becoming a police officer, but my dad suggested that I try it again. He told me that a buddy of his had told him that the PD had changed some of the hiring requirements. He figured the physical might be one of them. I was doubtful about that, but I took the test again anyway. I went through the whole process again, and when I got called for the physical, I made it through. I didn’t know how it happened, and I didn’t ask, I didn’t question it. Just kept my mouth shut, made it through the last step, and got into the academy in June of ’88. Once I got hired, I let my lawn business go and just concentrated on police work.