Posted on 12/04/2014 12:21:06 PM PST by Mrs. Don-o
One April night thirteen years ago, a police sharpshooter killed Jake.
Jake (I have disguised his name) was my step brother-in-law, husband to one of my wife’s step-sisters. He was a big man who tried to act bigger, but he was a pussycat with his wife and infant daughter. His wife had to monitor his medications for a mood disorder and he was normally compliant. I would never have described him as dangerous; he just talked big. He was a guy struggling to come to terms with his past, trying to do the right thing moving forward. Mostly, I think he was succeeding. He had his wife to help.
His perfect life would have been as a mountain man. He was an enthusiast of black powder, muzzle loading, single-shot hunting rifles. I think he owned only one of them and I never once heard of him actually shooting anything except targets. When he and I took my kids and our nephews fishing, well, those are some of the better memories I have of him, those and our conversations about religion.
He was part Native American, proudly so. He had left conventional Christianity (he never really had much to do with it in the first place) for a religion of nature, as he thought his grandfather had practiced it. To me it seemed like animism, Disney-like talking grandmother trees. He wanted to believe he was deeply connected to creation. Fair enough. I never teased him about it. If it brought him some solace I would not have denied him that.
On the night of his death, he had gone to a religious meeting. While there, he had fumbled a ritual and was told he was forbidden from wearing a sacred headdress until he learned things better. He returned home testy, angry, belligerent, and he didn’t want any medication. His wife left the house and called police. She thought they’d come, help calm him down, and he’d take the medication, simmer off, and everyone would go home. Eight hours later as the police had convinced him to do, he put his daughter in the carrier and placed her on the front porch. Turning to return inside the house, he was shot in the back. He had a knife, but no one said he was brandishing it about.
Yet he had been doing his big talk to the police, about his barrels of black powder and how if people just didn’t leave him the hell alone he’d blow up the house, the neighborhood, and everyone else just for good measure.
His wife was sequestered, confined to a police cruiser. No police officer interviewed her. No one asked what kind of guns he had in the house or how many barrels of powder. She had no chance to explain his medications. Maybe for the first time in Jake’s life, somebody truly believed all his big talk. So the police shot him while he was in tight proximity to a baby in a baby carrier. Police say their sharp shooter was aiming for Jake’s leg, over a distance of perhaps twenty yards.
His wife did not know anything about what was happening over the eight hours. No one spoke with her, not until a police chaplain showed up to tell her Jake was dead. The county attorney ruled it was a justified police killing. His widow filed a wrongful death suit, for which I was deposed as a potential character witness. The case ended before it even started; the judge granted a pro forma motion to dismiss with prejudice.
Last year the local newspaper did a feature on “suicide by cop,” covering police shootings. A sidebar included a brief re-cap of Jake’s death and several others, as told by police records. No one, again, asked his wife anything.
Given more time, I think Jake would have come out looking shame-faced, abashed, and feeling deservedly foolish. The police would have known that, had they but asked his wife for details, sought more information, and only told Jake, “Take the pills, you idiot.”
The number of deaths reported among law enforcement officers in 2013 is the lowest it has been in fifty-three years. The number of officers killed by gunfire last year was the lowest since 1887. In 2013, the number of police shootings of felony suspects, 461, was the highest figure in two decades, representing a consecutive increase over the last three years. Every year, we are on a course for more like Jake.
Russell E. Saltzman is a former dean of the North American Lutheran Church. His latest book Speaking of the Dead, is available from ALPB Books. He can be contacted at russell.e.saltzman@gmail.com.
"The number of deaths reported among law enforcement officers in 2013 is the lowest it has been in fifty-three years.
The number of officers killed by gunfire last year was the lowest since 1887.
Every year, we are on a course for more like Jake."
What's going on here?
Uh, no, not your brother-in-law but your wife's brother-in-law. Stopped reading right there.
Police say their sharp shooter was aiming for Jake’s leg, over a distance of perhaps twenty yards.
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Police sharpshooters, once they get called to a scene and are given a “go”, are not shooting for legs.
They took his “big talk” seriously.
I’m thinging you must not read much at this site? Saves time, for sure.
Sweet gentle guys who terrorize their wives and hold their own baby hostage, with weapons, are getting shot. This is a tragedy because we need more gentle giants who have absolutely no self-control and no regard for the people around them.
They are practicing at the range more maybe?
just on the face of it — according to the story :
Trigger happy cops that require federal gov’t intervention to protect the “citizens.”
There seems to be a bit of a problem with using the police as domestic counselors. Perhaps the numbers correlate somewhat with the percentage of the population that is taking psychotropic drugs.
Is that the take-away frm this article? He never mentions feceral intervention. Could you give me a quote?
I thought the main pont, which he returns to repeatedly, is that the cops should have asked the wife what was going on there. But they never did.
This article says Jake was a bit crazy — nice but seriously unstable. He was also very well-armed and Jake himself stated that he was planning to use the weapons. The job of the police is to protect and serve the public. They did that.
What you say was the point of the story. However, if that is the case, is also shows that the local PD is worthless and even dangerous.
That being the case, the libs will call for the Cleveland PD to be federalized.
that is something that cannot be allowed.
July4: The job of the police is to protect and serve the public. They did that.
I think July 4 has the key point. The police are not supposed to be private, on-call psychiatric help. If a person has called the police, she has turned over judgment as to appropriate actions to take. On the whole, I think this is how it has to be. The family members of a dangerous person - and the police have to assume he's dangerous, since they were called, in addition to the weapons and threats - can't be in control of the situation.
How many times do we read of deaths, sometimes multiple deaths, because a parent or spouse refused to press charges against a dangerous family member? They aren't objective.
It's a sad event, no doubt. Perhaps the author's step-in-law should have called him, instead of the police. On the other hand, that could have resulted in Jake's killing his wife and child.
I don’t know that he’s a lib. His political point, if he want4ed to make one, MIGHT be that the police are too federalized and too militarized already. If they were more “local” in every sense, maybe they would have been more open to getting some on-the-ground intel from the wife.
Look, he put the baby on the front porch as directed. I'd have no prob with shooting him in the legs. The marksmanship, at least, was not directed toward "protecting the community" if the man had, at that point, done something appropriate to protect his child,and had his back to the cop.
I’ve read several incidents where a domestic violence situation turns up with one of the two involved dead...suicide by cop or cops getting itchy trigger fingers.
Either way...here’s my takeaway:
You have a family fight....don’t call the cops! You lose all control of the situation the second you do.
Two years ago this lady that lived near me called the cops on here belligerent teenager. He was blown away with a .308 to the chest when he lifted his phone (Yes the well trained sniper thought it was a gun).....
Lord have mercy.
As I observed above, maybe that was when there were fewer people taking mind-altering drugs all the time.
I hesitate to form a more specific opinion on the events based on the information we have. The article doesn't suggest that either the author or his stepinlaw were witnesses.
A hypothetical.
Let’s assume his mom had called the cops in to deal with Adam Lanza.
He gets shot and killed, much as Jake did.
The cops are excoriated for killing a harmless bit-talking teenager off his meds.
But Lanza never shows up at Sandy Hook School. Dozens of children and adults survice, never knowing the bullet that missed them.
Would also like to note that German cops kill Germans at a rate 40x that at which American cops kill Americans.
While America certainly isn’t Germany, the disproportion is not fully explained by the difference in crime rate.
We don’t have to believe the cops necessarily acted wrongly in this case or in Ferguson to recognize that perhaps there is a way they can do their job without killing so many Americans.
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