That's right. They could have kept away, I think.
Posted on Fri, Mar. 11, 2005
Times leader
DAVID ISEMAN
City editor
Let’s get all the facts about a tragic event DAVID ISEMAN Opinion
At the outset, let me admit: I’m not a very trusting person, especially when it comes to authority.
As a reporter in Ohio, I used to cover police. If you spend enough time around cops, you start to realize they’re human.
One detective I knew back then would always call in his arrests. He also liked to gab, tipping me off to other crimes he heard about. He was one of my best sources.
I last saw him in court. But he wasn’t the arresting officer. He was the defendant.
He got busted selling burglar alarms, breaking into the homes where they were installed and then investigating the break-ins as the only detective in the rural township where he worked.
Of course that’s not to say that most cops are like him. Most certainly are not. Unfortunately, some are, which makes it harder on all the rest.
Like the state police captain, Kenneth Hill, who came to our newsroom the other day.
Hill, a guy with lots of responsibilities supervising state troopers across four counties, agreed to sit down and talk about the fatal shooting of 40-year-old William Henkle.
You’ve probably heard the story of Henkle by now. Cops say they had to fire at him on Feb. 21 when he lunged at one of them with a running chain saw. Police called it suicide by cop. But the death has triggered lots of questions from folks willing to second-guess the police.
Weary of all that Monday morning quarterbacking, Capt. Hill agreed to answer anything and everything we wanted to throw at him about the shooting.
Then a wild card surfaces
We did a bit of uneasy sparring at first, as Hill went to some lengths to explain why he decided to come to talk to us. We countered that, despite his visit, we would likely be pushing for a full written state police report of the shooting.
After he loosened up, Hill seemed candid. He seemed honest. He seemed sad for Henkle.
He answered questions until we ran out of them.
I left the meeting feeling confident police had to shoot Henkle. I even felt like we might not need to press for the full written account of the shooting.
Then we got the letter.
A full four pages long, it raises more questions about the shooting. But it’s different than previous second-guessing. It claims to quote a witness.
It says the witness saw all but fleeting moments of the standoff, including the entire time shots were fired. It says the witness never saw Henkle go after police with the saw.
It says police stopped Henkle’s elderly mom from trying to talk him into putting down the chain saw.
The letter writer, Henkle’s longtime acquaintance and former next-door neighbor Vicki Johnson, says the witness doesn’t buy the “suicide by cop” explanation because Henkle had made plans, evidenced by a note found in his pickup -- a 35-item, to-do list with only 15 things scratched off.
Vicki, 46, who now lives in Tunkhannock, believes the witness. She knows her well. It’s her 69-year-old mom.
Vicki also contends that her mom gave a statement to police after the shooting. We’d like to read that. So, we’re going to press on for the complete account of the shooting.
I want to believe Capt. Hill. But I also have a hard time not believing an elderly woman who claims to have seen almost everything that happened.
We need that written report.