Cop shoots Navy vet; “I’m sorry, you startled me”
Tman sends a link about a Navy veteran, Jennifer Orey, who was shot in her backyard by police officers looking for a man who had been reported to be sneaking around in a black ski mask in the neighborhood.
Orey was in her pajamas in her yard around 10:30 p.m. because she heard noises and thought it was her ex-husband, the newspaper reports.
Orey and Deputy Luke Berhalter came in contact and the officer’s firearm discharged at point-blank range, her brother James Morgan told local Fox 5 News.
“He fired without warning, saying freeze, or anything. Then just as she saw the black smoke coming out the barrel she turned her body,” Morgan said. “The bullet went through her chest and her left nipple, into her shoulder and out her pinkie.”
The deputy reportedly told her, “I’m sorry, you startled me,” Morgan told the television station.
Sorry, after watching the Dirty Harry movies, I thought you police guys trained for those circumstances. I even believed the parts where you like gave warnings and stuff. I’ll admit that Orey probably did the wrong thing when she went out to investigate noises in the dark by herself, but she certainly shouldn’t have been shot for it.
Category: Veterans Issues
@34 Hell yes! Why isn’t the news focusing on the important part here? every outlet I have seen is misrepresenting this story. THe only thing I see here is two cops turning a shooting into a mascal event because they were untrained/ignorant. They are the criminals in this event. The shooter didn’t harm anybody but his intended target, the cops show up and wound 9 people, count them! while taking down this criminal. That to me is reprehensible. something has to change. I adamantly believe everyone should carry, all the time. It should be the duty of all citizens to carry guns, but it will never happen. Maybe in 20 or 30 years after the country implodes under the entitlements that we can’t sustain. We’ll see.
Two scared cops,kept pulling the trigger till it click. No marksmanship, at 5 feet how can one miss that many times? All NYPD needs more range time. All the basic firearms rules were broken. This is a problem throughtout their department. I would like to know why the training was not ramped up because of all the bad shoots before this shooting. The NYPD has cost the city millions of dollars because this problem.
Uh, guys . . . I don’t think the NYPD was involved in this incident. It happened in the San Diego area.
Hondo–I think there’s a theme here, however. Better to take your chances up against a perp than encounter so-called “trained” LEO’s.
Granted, two instances in thousands of interactions are an abberation, but sometimes cops do such over-the-top shit that you really have to sit and wonder sometimes.
NHSparky: I can cut the NYPD a bit of slack on the Empire State shooter. IMO they were in a no-win situation: don’t shoot, and an armed murderer shoots one of them or an innocent bystander (accounts say the gunman was raising his weapon); shoot, and you may hit an innocent bystander yourself. Where I fault them was (1) piss-poor marksmanship, and (2) massive overkill in terms of gunfire. Why one cop couldn’t have nailed him with only 2-3 rounds is beyond me. And even that could have injured some innocents via “through-and-through”.
I can’t see much reason to cut the police in the SD incident any slack, though. There, the cop admitted he fired inappropriately, at a target he didn’t know, and in violation of procedure and common sense (no identification of self as police, no warning/command to halt, didn’t know target, shot a unarmed property owner on their own property, no attempt to notify property owner prior to warn them before entering their property to search, etc . . . ).
The NYPD case appears to me as a layman to be a legit use of deadly force with poor execution and bad consequences as a result. The San Diego case appears to be an absolute cluster-fornication that nearly killed an innocent.
quick observation – nothing indicates her relationship with her ex was so bad that she wouldn’t have gone outside…. many of the above act like she was taking her life in her hands. Could have been nothing more than “you want the damn weed whacker, you call first, dummy!”No need to be as quick onthe trigger as the cop was, now….
@52: There is a video out there that is a dash cam video of a deputy, during a routine traffic stop, who got into a shoot out with the passenger. They were about 3-4 feet apart, they both unloaded all their ammo at each other (approx. 30 rounds total) and neither one of them scored a hit. I’m sure if their had been bystanders around, they would have caught a few of those rounds.
As for the chucklehead in SD……
A disclaimer: The reason I have such a problem with many LEO shootings is because we have been lectured by former and current LEOs about “civilians” being armed being a bad thing, because we aren’t as disciplined or trained as the po-po are (I think that stems from a little bit of ego and arrogance) to handle such situations. I heard it after the Giffords shooting. I heard it after the Aurora shooting. I heard it after the Temple shooting.
I’ve been waiting for a couple decades for the police to admit they aren’t any different than the rest of us humans and aren’t, for the most part, any more disciplined or trained than the rest of us. But, instead, we are lectured by former and current LEOs as though the badge gives them super human powers.
In this case, I’d say that the homeowner is damn lucky that she didn’t go out with a weapon. If she had, the story wouldn’t have been “I was scared and accidently shot her,” but “she confronted me with a handgun and I fired in self defense” regardless if he had seen the weapon or not, and his partner would have backed him up.