“Shots fired! Officer down!” an officer screamed into his mike and all the @Plano Police Department squad cars on the west side of town flew into action. A few minutes earlier the officer had radioed he was checking out at a house in a new subdivision under construction.
I was the CSI supervisor and responded to the mid-afternoon call. It turned out that all the shots had hit the officer mid-chest in his bulletproof vest, a relatively new piece of apparel at the time and not issued by the department. Officers had to buy their own vests. The officer was not seriously wounded and there was no bullet penetration.
When I arrived, only the homicide investigator remained at the scene. The shooter was long gone. The officer had been taken to the hospital. The house was a typical upper middle class spec home on a cul de sac. Nobody lived in the subdivision yet, but the homes on that block were mostly finished and no workers were in the area.
The investigator explained that the officer had been patrolling the subdivision on the lookout for copper thieves, a common problem in Plano in the late 1980s. He had seen a pickup truck parked at the house with its front door standing open. He had stopped to check it out.
The officer had entered the front door and announced himself. Getting no response, he had started walking through the house. While he was going down a hallway near the rear of the house, a man had stepped out of a bedroom and started shooting, hitting the officer in the chest. The officer had turned and fled back toward the front door while the shooter made his escape. The officer was screaming his call for help into his portable radio by the time he got to the front door.
The investigator was frowning with a puzzled look on his face as he explained the incident to me. “Something’s not right here,” he said. “See what you can find.”
My search of the house turned up several fired shell cases in a line from the bedroom down the hall to the kitchen. They were from .22 caliber short ammunition. Nothing seemed disturbed or out of order. I took a full set of crime scene photos from down the block approaching the house, then approaching the entry, then throughout the house with closeups of the shell cases and their evidence markers.
Back at the police station, I conferred with the investigator. Several things puzzled me. The presence of the shell cases implied either that the weapon was an autoloader, or if it was a revolver, the shooter had reloaded and scattered the fired cases, not dumped them in one place to reload. I doubted the autoloader hypothesis. Who shoots .22 shorts in an autoloader? And the low number of cases did not account for a fully loaded revolver, even a small “Saturday night special.”
There were some other inconsistencies in the officer’s story, as well. The investigator and I both believed the officer had shot himself and staged the scene in an ill-conceived scheme to boost his standing on the force, but we couldn’t prove it. After the investigation was closed as unsolved, he resumed his patrol duties, but with the suspicion of staging his own shooting hanging over him for the rest of his career.