Читать книгу Street Cop - David Spell - Страница 13

8

Shots Fired

It was another cold winter’s night in 1988. Nothing was going on anywhere in the county. It was another good night to drink coffee and stay in my warm car. About two in the morning, however, the radio crackled to life. “Be enroute to shots fired. The caller heard multiple shots near her residence,” the dispatcher advised.

The address was in a set of duplexes just outside the city of Lilburn. Officer Rick, one of my academy mates, cleared with me. While this sounded like a good call, most of the time “shots fired” calls turned out to be nothing. Usually, you would drive around the area never hearing anything. Seldom were you ever given a specific location, just a general area. If you happened to locate it, it often just turned out to be kids setting off fireworks.

On this call, though, we were given a specific address. It did not say whether it was on the “A” side or the “B” side of the duplex, but it was better than a general area. Rick and I parked across the street from the location and got out. The building was dark and it appeared that everyone was asleep. We decided to walk around behind the duplex and see if there was anybody back there. It is always embarrassing when officers leave a call without checking things thoroughly enough and it comes out later that they missed a body lying in the backyard. Believe it or not, that does happen.

When we got to the back of the building, we did not see or hear everything. There were no lights on back there and it was very dark. We illuminated the yard with our flashlights and did not see anyone lurking in the shadows. We were getting ready to walk back around to the front when we heard voices. A window was open near where we were standing and we could hear some people speaking Spanish inside the duplex. There was the sound of a pistol action being worked and then we heard footsteps approaching the window. Rick and I pressed ourselves flat against the wall. An arm was suddenly thrust out of the open window and was holding a pistol. It fired seven shots towards the woods behind the building. Just before the shots went off, I caught a glimpse of a single bed next to the window. We instinctively dropped to the ground and crawled around the corner of the building. We then got up and ran back to our police cars.

Both of us were a little excited. It is not every day that you get shot at. Okay, we weren’t really shot at. I don’t think the Hispanic guy with the gun even knew we were out there. But we were only about ten feet away from the window when the guy let loose with the pistol and it was a bit unnerving. I got on the radio and called for backup. When we got some more officers there, we were going to go and arrest this clown for shooting out of his window. For starters, it is illegal to discharge a firearm in a residential area. There were other possible charges that we would explore after we got the perp in custody.

Within just a few minutes, we had several more officers out with us. Lieutenant Chris was running the shift that night without any Sergeants. When he got there, Rick and I briefed him on what we had. “I’m not sure which side of the duplex the shooter is in,” I told him. Rick and I both thought it was the “A” side and we told Lieutenant Chris so.

The Lieutenant quickly took charge. He sent a couple of officers to watch the rear. The Lieutenant, Rick, me, and another officer went to the front door of apartment “A” and knocked. A middle-aged Hispanic man came to the door in his underwear. He appeared to have just woken up.

Lieutenant Chris yelled at the guy, “Were you shooting? Where is the pistol? El pistol?”

The man appeared apologetic and said, “No English.”

Unfazed, the Lieutenant just got louder with his English, “Where is the pistol? If you don’t tell us where the gun is, we are going to have you deported!” The poor guy only looked more confused.

I tried a different strategy. I motioned inside and asked if we could come in. He very kindly let us in, but in retrospect, there wasn’t much chance of him refusing. I was holding my shotgun and the other officers had their revolvers out. When we stepped inside, I saw a door against the far wall. That was the only room where the shots could have come from. I told the Lieutenant, “That’s the room.”

He knocked on the door. The man tried to tell us something but none of us spoke Spanish. We did not get any response to the knocking, so we tried the knob. It was locked. The Lieutenant, without hesitation, kicked the door open. When I saw the baby bed next to the window, I realized that I had screwed up. That wasn’t the bed that I had seen through the window when we were outside. Fortunately, the baby slept through the whole fracas. I told the Lieutenant and the others that we needed to be on the other side of the duplex in the “B” apartment.

We started for the other apartment. I wasn’t sure how the Lieutenant was going to handle the fact that we were in the wrong apartment or that we had kicked in the wrong door, but he did not seem particularly concerned. He told the Hispanic guy, “Alright, we are leaving but don’t make us come back over here!”

When we knocked on the other door at side “B”, a teenaged Hispanic girl opened it. She did not seem surprised to see us and let us into the apartment. She spoke some English and when we asked who was shooting, she motioned with her head towards a closed door off of the living room. Maybe she had heard what had happened next door because she walked over and opened the bedroom door for us and stepped back.

This was the right bedroom. I recognized the bed under the window. Only now, there was a guy laying in it pretending to be asleep. He had the covers pulled up to his chin and we could not see his hands. He could be pointing the pistol at us and we would not even know it until he started shooting. All four of us started yelling at him to let us see his hands. He continued to pretend that he was asleep.

There were a couple of other bedrooms in the duplex and we had managed to wake up the other ten people that lived there. Several men, women, and children came out of these rooms rubbing their eyes. The teenage girl briefed them in Spanish on what was going on. They started yelling at the guy in the bed, too. I don’t know what they were saying, but it was clear they were not happy with this clown.

I guess he thought that if he ignored us, we would just go away. He kept acting like he was asleep. Lieutenant Chris then holstered his gun and ran across the room and dove on top of the “sleeper.” This is not a move that they teach in the police academy. Lieutenant Chris had always been a little unorthodox, though. The problem with this tactic was that if the man did have the gun under the covers with him, he could very easily shoot the Lieutenant. The end result of that, of course, would be that the other three of us would kill the guy. I really thought that the Lieutenant was about to get shot, so I stepped sideways to get a better angle at the guy’s head. As I did, I racked a round into the chamber of my shotgun and the other two officers positioned themselves to shoot as well.