Posted on 10/04/2009 3:55:15 PM PDT by Marechal
PHOENIX (CN) - A homeowner says a Phoenix police officer shot him six times in the back during a 911 home-invasion call, and the 911 tape recorded the officer's partner saying, "That's all right. Don't worry about it. I got your back. ... We clear?" The family says the officers were not aware that the 911 call was still recording as they spoke about covering up the shooting. In their complaint in Maricopa County Court, Anthony and Lesley Arambula say an armed intruder "crashed through the front window" of their home on Sept. 17, 2008 and ran into one of their son's bedrooms. Anthony, worried about his son who was still in his bedroom, says he "held the intruder calmly at gunpoint" and called 911. Phoenix Police officers already in the neighborhood heard the crash of the Arambulas' window. When they approached the house, Lesley says, she told Sgt. Sean Coutts that her husband was inside holding the intruder at gunpoint. Lesley says Coutts failed to pass on that information to the two other officers. Inside the house, the Arambulas say, Officer Brian Lilly shot Anthony six times in the back while he was still on the phone with the 911 operator - twice when he was on the ground. The officers ran into the bedroom after Anthony told them, "You just killed ... you just killed the homeowner. The bad guy is in there." The complaint states that Officer Lilly "admitted that it was only after Tony was laying, bullet-ridden, on the ground that he assessed the situation. The 911 tape continued to record what happened even after Officer Lilly unloaded his weapon into Tony, including Officer Lilly's post-shooting, one-word 'assessment': 'Fuck.' "Tony believed he was going to die; the 911 tape records his plaintive goodbye to his family: '... I love you ... I love you.' Then Tony made what he believed was a dying request to the officers; he did not want his young family to see him shot and bloodied. Officers callously ignored his request and painfully dragged Tony by his injured leg, through the home and out to his backyard patio, where they left him bloodied and shot right in front of Lesley, Matthew and Zachary." The Arambulas say the officers later dragged Anthony onto gravel, then put him on top of the hot hood of a squad car, and "drove the squad car down the street with Tony lying on top, writing in pain." According to the complaint, Lilly can be heard on the 911 tape telling Coutts, "We fucked up."
The Arambulas seek punitive damages for gross negligence, civil rights violations, failure to supervise, excessive force, deliberate indifference to medical needs, false arrest, and emotional distress. They are represented by Michael Manning with son Morrison Hecker.
If you're shot by a cop...
Just further proof that you need to shoot first at somebody who doesn't belong in your house. This way you can be ready for their compatriots who might be coming.
there ‘is’ also apparently two ways to say ‘there are two sides to every story’.
Thank goodness the homeowner will live.
Cop: “Drop your weapon!! Drop your weapon!!”
How hard is that?
But I still can’t say that up until the point of abuse of the victim and the beginnings of a cover-up it’s anything but a tragic mistake in a highly tense and chaotic situation.
This exact situation is covered in some detail in Massad Ayoob’s “Judicious Use of Deadly Force” class, about ways to help insure that first-responders don’t mistake you for the bad guy.
I don't know, I wasn't there and my life wasn't the one on the line. That tends to change perception of events. It's obviously a tragic mistake, and from the sounds of things, if the article is at all accurate, which we should always doubt, it's possible better communication of vital information by everyone could have prevented the whole thing.
But life, and many times death, is full of human error.
This exact situation is covered in some detail in Massad Ayoob’s “Judicious Use of Deadly Force” class, about ways to help insure that first-responders don’t mistake you for the bad guy.
Is there a short version on exactly what he recommends? Because with all the tension and heightened adrenaline, it seems you've got about 2 seconds to explain yourself in this situation.
I don’t have my notes handy, so my recollection won’t be comprehensive, but among the recommendations were one of the things that they tried to do - tell the dispatcher that there’s an armed good guy on scene.
The dispatcher’s failure to inform the cops is a grievous mistake.
Also he recommends to convey a description of you to the dispatchers.
Another is to, if possible, stand in such a way that you’ll see the responding officers before they see you, and you can call out to them. Back against the wall, facing the entrance, and the like.
I’ll see if I can track down my notes.
Yeah - but if the story is correct, these guys were not responding to the 911 call. They heard the invasion on their own (???) And were responding on their own, not to the call?
Sure... absolutely if you make a 911 call about a home invasion, and you are armed, you should disclose that. My brother actually has a rather amusing story to tell about that, but in this case, if the telling is correct, it’s as if there was no call, the cop in the room only had what his eyes could see to guide him.
The bit about the rather bizarre handling of the injured homeowner doesn’t make any sense. So much that I wonder if that part of the story is actually true, or maybe there was something different going on. Put him on the hood and drove down the road? I’m just not buying it...
I agree that the key mistake here was not passing along the essential tidbit of information to the cop making entry— that the homeowner already had the perp and was holding him at gunpoint. That cop really needed to know that. Could he have handled to situation differently anyway? Maybe, but those decisions are made in nanoseconds and we don’t really know enough to say.
I think it's pretty much always a little lonely being the guy tasked with going in all the dangerous places. The smartasses are hardly ever there, sharing their perfect all-knowing judgment at the moments when it really would have helped.
The only thing that might make sense is if the situation was still deemed dangerous (there's an armed intruder who is not accounted for in this particular story and shouldn't be forgotten!) and they needed to get him clear of the situation because paramedics won't go in a hot scene like that.
Even with what appears to be lots of mistakes made, I really hate to see mistakes like this end up in lawsuits for what is inevitably, millions in taxpayer money. How millions of dollars fixes what happened to these people still needs to be explained to me before I'd award damages.
According to the other article linked somewhere on this thread, the man is still suffering from his injuries. I understand your concern about taxpayer dollars. (See my screenname.) But, the victim is entitled to some kind of restitution. Maybe police officers should carry insurance to cover potential victims in cases like this one....? Just a thought. Or do they already?
This case sounds terrible. The homeowner did everything he was supposed to do, and then LE messed up completely. Glad to hear he survived at least.
The other person who was not there, and who has a record of biased reporting and just plain mistakes of fact, is the writer of the article where you got all your facts.
Just sayin... You might want to have that knee jerk looked at. It appears to be more of a chronic tick against all cops, than merely a reaction to this story, and it pretty much makes me discount anything further you have to say.
I’m also glad he survived. Actual damages, actual costs... I can easily be convinced of. I don’t have a problem with that, where negligence and fault can be found. I have a problem with “punitive” damages: Money awarded merely to punish, and “pain and suffering” costs which really make accidents and tragedies turn into ‘get rich schemes’ that quickly drain my sympathy for their actual damages.
You mean the millions of them who go their entire careers without ending up in the news? Or just the few you hear about?
Truth is, there are enough who do screw up to easily skew perspective for the shallow and reactionary. I don't lick any boots, and I'm not saying they never screw up. I know they screw up, every human endeavor has it's share of human error. Just some jobs make the consequences of that error much more severe than others. Human error is NOT the same thing as malice.
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