Street Cop. David Spell

      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.