By CODE 4 K9 | SWAT/K9 Integration & Advanced Police K9 Training

This is one hell of a call. I recently taught a supervision class for NTOA in Fort Lauderdale and have a little more information than what is provided in the video. Patrol received a call reference a male subject who stated that he was in a room where his wife was being raped. He told communications that he was armed and if he saw the door move, he would shoot at it. The day before this incident, patrol responded to a disturbance in which the male caller was involved. When patrol made contact with the suspect, there was a female subject with him at the time.

Right out the gate, most cops are going to assume that this is a mental health call, and they’re not wrong to think that. But what if, on the off chance, what the male caller stated was true? That would change how we respond to this call. As a supervisor working this call, you have a lot to get done, and some of these tasks are likely happening simultaneously.

First, you have to decide what your mission philosophy will be. Will you work this call as a hostage call or a check welfare on a mental health subject? Based on my experience, it’s easier to scale down than it is to ramp up your response. Murphy’s Law is that you go in soft, and all of a sudden, this turns into the mother of all calls. You would likely get caught off guard and have to rush your decision-making process. That would be a recipe for disaster. Perhaps the best approach is to treat the call as a potential hostage call, given the likelihood it’s really a mental health call. What would tip the scale for me was the information about the female subject being present the day before.

So here are some of the things I would get started.

1. Establish a team to respond to any stimulus from the hotel room.

2. Speak to the front desk clerk and get information on who is checked into that room (male and female). Get any vehicle information associated with the person who is checked into the room.

3. Get a key card from hotel management. You can’t fix a problem if you can’t get to it. Interior hotel doors are tough to breach, even for experienced breachers.

4. Start evacuations. More than likely, I would make a call to the rooms rather than pounding on the door to the next-door room, which could trigger a reaction from the suspect.

Now it’s a matter of how we’re going to make contact with the suspect. Let’s review the video and see what the officers on scene, some of whom were on SWAT, decided to do. As the video starts, you can see that they have a shield, and they also have a key card that will appear later in the video. They announce their presence, and the suspect opens the door with a gun in hand and begins to raise it to point it at the officers.

This is a clear, deadly force situation; however, it’s when things start to go sideways. Windows of opportunity open and close quickly. If they thought there was a potential victim/hostage in the room, why not shoot and push through? The safety priorities dictate that if we genuinely believe there’s an innocent person inside, we push through. Now, if they thought it was just the suspect in the room, why announce your presence standing in such proximity to the door? You can accomplish the same thing from further down the hallway. Remember, he said he would shoot at the door if he saw it move.

Now that the window of opportunity has closed, you see someone (who is a cop) sneak in and try to open the door with the key card. Who wants to be that dude? My question, though, is why? You know he’s armed and is clearly an active aggressor. The only reason to open the door is if you believe there’s a victim in the room. That brings me to my earlier point. If that’s what your thought process was, you should’ve pushed through the door while engaging the suspect.

Onto my next point: shooting through the door. After the door closes, you can hear a small-caliber handgun and a round being shot by the suspect through the door. Officers then shoot through the door without knowing what’s on the other side. I’m not saying that it’s wrong. What they did is what’s called target-specific directed fire. You’re shooting where you last saw the suspect, but you still own those rounds and what they go into.

It turned out that one of the rounds had gone into the adjacent room, and another round was found in a pillow on the bed. Luckily for them, they had done evacuations. One officer was shot through the door and sustained non-life-threatening wounds. At the conclusion of the call, they discovered that the suspect had died from gunshot wounds, and there was no other person in the room with him.

Overall, these guys did a great job. My biggest takeaway is that if we believe he’s alone in the room, make that initial contact from further down the hallway. If you think there’s a victim in the room, take advantage of that window of opportunity before it closes. Stay safe.