Editor’s Note: Police1 and Calibre Press are proud to announce that the bestselling law enforcement training video, Surviving Edged Weapons, which is referenced in this article as a key component to this legal case, is being re-released. See the end of the article for ordering details.
When four officers arrived to deal with a 38-year-old electrician who’d “flipped out,” he was wearing six baseball caps and had stuffed a teddy bear under his tool belt.
His sister, concerned because he was off medications and raving that he’d die if his feet touched the ground in daylight, wanted him transported for compulsory psychiatric care. But what began as a “mental health assist” quickly turned into a matter of officer survival when the subject charged at the cops with a screwdriver, clutched above his head like a dagger.
Their response was 23 rounds fired to stop him. Fourteen hit him, six in his back. He was DOA at the ER. His feet had touched the ground and sure enough, he’d died.
That was October 29, 2001. But it wasn’t until early 2009—more than seven long years later—that the LEOs involved were finally cleared of liability, with the help of a classic training video on the dangers of edged weapons which is still saving officers and educating jurors more than 20 years after it was first released.
By circumstance, a new release in DVD format of the 85-minute Calibre Press program, Surviving Edged Weapons, was in production when the federal jury returned its exonerating verdict.
The initial 911 call for assistance in this career-threatening case reached the PD in La Porte, Texas, a town of some 34,000 on the outskirts of Houston, at about dinnertime that Monday evening. The complainant/sister met officers near the house where the troubled subject, Robert Bruce Meadours, was living and offered a thumbnail description of the situation.
Meadours, a heavy drinker and a pot smoker, had suffered mental problems for years, but when stable he was able to work competently as an electrician. Five weeks had passed since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, however, and during this time his mental state had “steadily deteriorated.” During the last few days in particular, he’d been in a tailspin of depression, delusion, and paranoia, ignoring drugs that could keep him balanced and reacting erratically to voices in his head. He’d agreed the day before to seek help, but had then reneged.
According to a written court decision later on, the sister “made it clear she was seeking mental health assistance and not reporting a crime;” she just wanted her brother safely “taken for treatment.” But she acknowledged that “she did not know what he was going to do. She warned that Meadours was a large and strong man (6 ft. 2 in., 203 lbs.), that he possessed a number of tools that could be used as weapons, and that [he] feared the possibility of being involuntarily hospitalized.” He’d spent time in a secure mental hospital in Louisiana back in the 1980s and “did not like being held and involuntarily medicated.”
With an EMS unit waiting nearby, the responding police set out to find Meadours and talk him into custody, splitting up to cover the front and back of the house. The cops were Ofcr. Jeff Kominek, a Marine veteran with two years on La Porte PD, armed with a Kimber .45 pistol; Ofcr. Steve Martin, an FTO with experience on three other police agencies, carrying a Sig Sauer .40 caliber; his rookie, Ofcr. Jeff Dalton, a former corrections officer, with a Glock 9mm; and Sgt. Steve Ermel, a La Porte SWAT member with more than eight years on, toting a Benelli .12-ga loaded with beanbag rounds, in addition to his duty sidearm. The department did not have TASERs.
Kominek made first contact. Deploying to the rear of the place, “he became aware of several large dogs loose in the backyard and the subject, with the baseball caps and the stuffed animal as bizarre accessories, sitting on a porch swing on a patio,” says Dave Grossi, a former Street Survival Seminar instructor and an advisory board member of the Force Science Research Center, who testified as an expert witness in this case.
Meadours was holding a 10¾-inch screwdriver in his right hand, point down in an “ice-pick grip.” No items were around him to suggest he was using the tool to fix anything. Kominek drew his Kimber and radioed the others to respond on the double.
First, the officers tried “verbal defusing techniques” in an effort to persuade Meadours to put the screwdriver down and allow them to help him. “He consistently replied, ‘That’s not going to happen’ or ‘Not a chance’ or other words to that effect,” Grossi says. During these exchanges, he got up from the swing and began to pace around the yard.
As the officers continued attempting persuasive dialog, Meadours “became increasingly aggressive,” kicking at the ground and exhibiting other behavior that convinced them he was “a threat to himself and others” and that the contact could not be simply abandoned, according to the court decision.
“For some unknown reason, he seemed to target Ofcr. Kominek,” Grossi says. “He directed most of his statements to Kominek, calling him ‘a liar’ and referring to him as ‘Stan.’” Later it was learned that ‘Stan’ was Meadours’ uncle, whom he believed “was really Satan.”
With verbal direction unavailing, the officers developed a tactical plan. Ermel would disarm him using beanbag rounds and the others would then “swarm” him, subdue him with “soft empty-hand control” measures, and bring him out to the EMS personnel, handcuffed.
At a point where Meadours seemed to be preparing to charge toward Kominek, Ermel let fly a beanbag. It struck Meadours in the upper thigh but did not bring him down. Instead, he ran to the rear of the yard and leaped over a 4-ft. chain-link fence into a dog run where, still gripping the screwdriver, he scrambled atop a doghouse.
Kominek, Dalton, and Martin, all with guns drawn, hurried into the dog run also, positioning themselves for a swarm. From outside the fence, Ermel fired a second beanbag, hitting Meadours’ arm. “Damn, dude!” the suspect exclaimed, but he still did not drop the weapon.
A third beanbag caused Meadours to either fall or jump off the doghouse. Landing on his feet, the screwdriver raised in stabbing mode, he sprinted toward Kominek, who was about 20 feet away. Trapped inside the fenced-in area, the officer had no opportunity to disengage. He began squeezing rounds from his .45, firing nine in all. Simultaneously, Dalton and Martin were shooting, too. Each shot seven times.
Hit by 14 rounds, Meadours went down, caps, teddy bear, screwdriver, and all. He was about two steps shy of reaching Kominek when he fell.
In the wake of the shooting, the officers were not disciplined for any infraction by their department nor—after a grand jury hearing—were they accused of any criminal offense. But predictably, Meadours’ parents and sister filed an $8 million suit in federal court against the city and the cops, claiming the suspect’s constitutional rights had been violated “by subjecting him to excessive force.” They also brought state-law civil claims for gross negligence, assault and battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Combined under federal auspices, these cases began creeping through the justice system, while the officers continued to work the streets under a haunting cloud of uncertainty.
After an extensive discovery process, all the defendants moved for summary judgment on grounds of qualified immunity, arguing that there was no “genuine issue of material fact” indicating they had used unreasonable force. It was August 2005, nearly four years after the shooting, before the federal district court in Houston ordered the city of La Porte removed as a defendant—but denied the officers’ plea.
They appealed and another two years passed before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit denied their appeal and remanded the case for trial at the district level. There the judge declined to dismiss the possibility of punitive damages being assessed in the case. If those were levied, neither the city nor its insurers would pick up the tab; the officers themselves would be on the hook personally.
It wasn’t until January of this year that the officers, represented by attorneys William Helfand and Norman Giles, finally went before a jury.
At trial or during the preliminaries, three expert witnesses hired by the plaintiffs had vehemently attacked the officers’ actions. All discounted the dangers of edged weapons and the need to use deadly force against a screwdriver. All claimed that 23 shots was a “blatantly excessive” response under the circumstances. One opined that even one beanbag round would have been excessive, let alone three. Another called the shooting an “execution” and judged that at least two of the shots to Meadours’ back were caused by an officer standing over him and pulling the trigger after he was down. Supporting this conclusion, he said, was the fact that rounds were found on the ground under the suspect’s body.
Dr. Robert Bux, a clinical and forensic pathologist from Colorado, and Grossi, accepted as a police-procedures authority in some 500 previous cases, were called as expert witnesses by the officers’ attorneys and vigorously challenged these assertions.
Between them, their testimony established that it is not unusual for rounds loose in a suspect’s clothing to fall out and land under him when he collapsed to the ground. With the dynamics of the suspect running and the officers moving and shooting, it was inevitable from their respective positions that some rounds would strike Meadours back-to-front. “No police training requires an officer to delay his use of force to run around to the front of a threatening suspect,” Grossi stated. The 23 shots were not an example of consciously extended or “contagious” fire but of rounds detonated by three officers independently recognizing and simultaneously responding to a sudden, urgent threat to Komenik’s life. Lesser levels of force had been attempted unsuccessfully or were impractical, and it was Meadours’ actions alone that escalated the incident.
A highlight of Grossi’s testimony was his patient education of the jury on the realities of edged-weapon assaults. Although introduction of Surviving Edged Weapons was “fought tooth and nail” by the plaintiffs’ attorney, the judge permitted Grossi to show about 5 minutes of footage from the video. He selected excerpts that vividly showed how quickly a suspect wielding a cutting or stabbing instrument can close distance when charging an officer, the lethal damage he or she can do once contact is made, and the appropriateness of using deadly force to end an attack. Edged weapons are not just knives, he stressed, but include broken bottles, shivs—and screwdrivers.
“Every eye in the jury box was glued to the video,” Grossi recalls.
After a dramatic finale in which the plaintiffs’ attorney during his closing argument donned six baseball caps and tucked a teddy bear under his belt to conjure the memory of Robert Meadours, the trial ended and the jury began deliberations.
Public comments that had been posted on the website of the Houston newspaper during the trial were far from universally reassuring about civilian sentiment in the case. One comment: “I have a mentally handicapped sister. Would they like to come shoot her now to save time?” Another: “[W]hy couldn’t they shoot him in the leg or shoulder?” From a reader who claimed to have 20 years in law enforcement: “I cannot, for the life of me, see why four officers needed to shoot the man rather than disarm him.” Another: “Not what I’d call dangerous behavior. He had a little screwdriver.” And: “The only way we’ll ever stop law officers from killing unarmed citizens is to give them the death penalty.”
Deliberations extended into a second day before the jury finally reached its verdict. Standing in full uniform (except that, by court rules, their holsters were empty), the officers heard the decision: The family’s claim for $8 million was rejected; the officers’ actions were found to be justified. After an agonizingly long wait, they were finally absolved of liability.
“The verdict’s great,” lawyer Helfand told a reporter. He called Meadours’ death “tragic,” but said the officers had responded to a life threat in a “professional and careful” way.
“These are the kind of officers we call heroes,” he said. “They’ve been through hell. I think it’s time to stop pillorying them.”
A NOTE ABOUT SURVIVING EDGED WEAPONS
Surviving Edged Weapons made law enforcement history when it was produced by Calibre Press in 1988. It was the first police training program created in an affordable videocassette format, enabling officers to buy it individually and learn tactical defenses on their own time by viewing it on their personal VCRs. Before that, police films were available only in 16mm, sold only to departments, and cost upwards of $400.
Surviving Edged Weapons in DVD is expected to be available for $29.99 by the end of February at www.TheCalibreShop.com. You can also order by calling (800) 323-0037 or e-mailing: lisa.gitchell@praetoriangroup.com.
