Date: 2008-01-10
To: A Serious Incident
Miles today: 0.0

While working as a police officer in Houston, Texas I often worked the ¢swing shift.¢ This was the 8-hour period between 7pm and 3am. It was an active time of the day culminating in the time frame around 2am when all the bars would close and the drunks trying to drive home. So the nature of the calls I¢d receive ranged from burglaries to hijackings (armed robberies) to DWIs.Most of the time I would ride by myself. One-man units were not supposed to be sent by themselves on calls like a ¢shooting in progress¢ or a domestic disturbance. Those types of calls really warranted a two-man unit from a safety standpoint. But sometimes there just were not enough two-man units to handle all the calls. So, on one hot summer evening, around 8pm, the dispatcher announced there was a family disturbance in a close by apartment complex. No one else was available so I took the call.The location was a second-story balcony in front of an apartment door. All I knew was that an unknown male had beaten up an unknown female. That was all I knew. Rang the doorbell and a middle-aged, Hispanic woman showed herself. She was upset, was still crying. I asked her what was wrong.Now in Houston, the Hispanic population is pretty large. Many Hispanics do not speak English. Unfortunately, many cops did not speak Spanish. I was one of them. So this lady began spilling out her story in Spanish and I had no clue what she said. Suddenly, she was pulled to the side of the doorway and this tall, big man appears facing me. He begins to speak Spanish ¢ and once again I didn¢t understand.Sometimes things in your life seem to happen in some type of weird slow-motion pace. Have you ever experienced that? Maybe it has something to do with a stressful event? I don¢t know. But in this case, all of a sudden, everything seemed to go into slow-motion. When I was in the police academy they taught us to always watch a suspect¢s hands. It would usually be his hands you would have to worry about.So here was this big guy yelling at me in Spanish and I can remember thinking ¢you need to be watching his hands.¢ That¢s when his right hand came up and he was holding some kind of small pistol. I thought to myself that I wanted to tell him not to shoot me but that he didn¢t understand English, so it wouldn¢t matter. I was right ¢ it didn¢t matter ¢ he fired. I don¢t recall feeling anything, maybe just a slight push back of my body toward the guardrail. Then the guy went back into his apartment and shut the door. I never saw him again after that.At this point a number of thoughts are going through my head ¢ it almost seems comical in retrospect. First, had I been hit? Yes, I could see blood coming out from my right side. Second, should I somehow try to break the apartment door down and go after this guy? No, he was more likely to shoot me again. Third, what if he came back out? I decided that was a distinct possibility. So I got on my police walkie-talkie to get some help.Whenever an officer was in serious need of help, he/she was supposed to get on the radio and say in a calm, clear voice: ¢(your unit #), Assist the officer.¢ At least that is the way it was supposed to work. In reality, I yelled into the radio something like ¢I¢m shot and I need help right now.¢ For a moment I could not even remember the address where I was at (in those days Houston had no 911-alert system) but then recalled and passed it on.So I knew that (hopefully) soon there would be a number of cop cars arriving (that was kind of a tradition to see how many cops would show up when another officer was shot or killed) along with the paramedics. I wondered if I should try to go down the stairs and get away from that apartment door. That probably would have been real smart but I was starting to feel a bit weak. I just slowly sat down on the concrete balcony and waited.While waiting, I didn¢t have a clue what, if anything, I should do about my wound. It was not bleeding much (from what I could tell) but I wasn¢t much of an expert in such things. There had been a LOT of things they taught us in the Academy. One was that cops have a pretty good chance of going into shock after being shot. Why? Because, regardless of the job, it¢s hard to believe that YOU will actually get shot one day. When it does happen, there is a tendency to go into shock. Strangely enough, most crooks who do get shot don¢t go into shock. By the nature of their work they are expecting the possibility of something bad happening to them. At least that¢s what I was told.So I¢m sitting on the concrete and trying to will myself (yeah, right) to calm down. I begin to think that getting excited is going to cause my heart to pump faster and I¢ll lose more blood. Hey, it made sense at the time.Long story made short ¢ cops and paramedics show up. Paramedics didn¢t want to go up to me because of the danger behind that apartment door. So some cops dragged me down the stairs. Paramedics spot checked me and said everything looked pretty good (what did that mean?). But I knew they were right because they didn¢t take me to a hospital by a ¢life-flight¢ helicopter. They just used a lowly ambulance. I never passed out and I didn¢t feel pain until the next day later when the painkillers began to wear off. My doctor showed me the bullet that had hit me ¢ a .25 caliber automatic. It turns out that if you ever have to get shot, this is the best bullet to get shot with. It is slower and weaker than even a .22. The bullet hit me in my lower side, just above the hip bone (my pack¢s hip belt rides on that very spot today). It hit nothing of any importance. I was lucky. The doctor gave me the bullet and I still have it today.If the bullet had hit several inches closer to my front (or back), the bullet proof vest I was wearing would have stopped it. At that time all Houston cops (those on patrol duty) had been issued bullet proof vests. However, they were optional to wear. During the summer months the vests made for a very hot and uncomfortable experience. Even I did not wear mine all the time. Shortly after my shooting another officer was shot and killed. If he had been wearing a vest he probably would have survived. At that point our police chief said ¢No More¢ and made wearing the vests mandatory.The man that shot me? Well I wasn¢t there to see it, but they brought out a hostage negotiator who spoke Spanish. Within 15 minutes he came out, surrendered, and everything was over. About six months later he went to court and the charge against him was plead out to "Aggravated Assault on a Police Officer". He received a twenty year sentence and was probated out of prison six years later. I don¢t have a clue where he lives now.As you might expect, my wife freaked out a bit after what happened. She would have preferred that I left the job right then and there. After about two months of healing I could have gone back to working in patrol. But I didn¢t. Partially because of my wife I transferred into a newly formed unit that investigated computer crimes. It wasn¢t so much that I knew a lot about computers ¢ just that no one else knew any more than I did. I spent several years with the unit, but over time I really wanted to go back into patrol. I came very, very close to going back. But the price would have been the probable loss of my marriage. Instead, in early 1997, I resigned from the police department and parlayed my computer skills into a well-paying computer job in the ¢civilian world.¢ All for the best.