By Patrick May
San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Japanese businessman Aki Furta was awakened by two bursts early Sunday in Room 413 at the Extended Stay Deluxe hotel in San Jose. The first was “a man yelling very loud, making a big voice,’' said Furta. “It lasted for maybe two minutes, yelling and yelling.’'
And then, he said, “I heard what sounded like seven or eight gunshots, very fast, like a machine-gun. It was very scary.’'
What Furta, 51, heard was the city’s seventh officer-involved shooting of 2011. San Jose police said that a man was shot early Sunday on the hotel property on East Brokaw road after officers responded to a report of a “suspicious person with a weapon.”
Spokesman Sgt. Jason Dwyer said police received the call from someone at the hotel at 7:48 a.m., around the time Furta recalls hearing the sounds. He said when the first officers arrived, they found the man either passed out or sleeping. After the possibly intoxicated man was roused by officers, he “displayed threatening behavior,” said Dwyer, “and at least one officer fired at the suspect in self-defense.”
The man was hit at least once and was taken to a local hospital. According to Dwyer, the unidentified man -- said to be in his mid-twenties -- is expected to survive.
Police did not say what kind of weapon was wielded by the man, but said they expected to release more details later Sunday. It was not immediately known whether the man was a guest at the hotel, Dwyer said.
Jittery guests
Shortly after noon today, more than dozen police cars and two large wagons were parked in the front, back and sides of the four-story hotel, which was surrounded by orange police tape.
Furta, along with other guests who’d been escorted from the building while detectives conducted their investigation, stood on the sidewalk on Brokaw with his golf bag, waiting for colleagues to join him for a round on the links."We’re not sure if we’ll come back to stay here,’' said the businessman, still visibly shaken by his troubling wake-up call and subsequent questioning by a police officer who knocked on his door after the shooting. “I’ll be reconsidering.’'
Police were interviewing other jittery guests to see if they had heard or seen anything. One guest told a reporter that the man had been found laying in a stairwell in what appeared to be a Halloween costume. Another man who was at the scene after the shooting, but would not give his name, said he saw the victim being taken out on a gurney and that the injured man was dressed in green surgical scrubs, but which looked more like a costume than the real thing.
“I didn’t hear any shots, but I’m feeling so afraid,’' said another guest, Ravi Ganesh, 27, a software engineer from India. He’s been staying at the hotel while he does works for PayPal.
Dwyer said a “very meticulous and methodical investigation” would be done by the police department’s Internal Affairs unit and that all officers involved in the shooting would be placed on routine administrative leave. The investigation is expected to take several weeks.
The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office and the department’s homicide unit will also do their own investigations to determine whether the shooting was justified, Dwyer said.
What’s going on?
Theories abound as to why San Jose has seen so many police shootings in 2011 -- the worst since 2004, when five out of six suspects shot by police became fatalities.
So far this year, three of the six suspects in the San Jose police shootings have died.
Some residents have questioned whether cuts to the city’s police force -- 66 officers were laid off last year in the first such cuts in the police department’s history -- have made city streets more dangerous. Others wonder whether police or criminals are becoming more aggressive.
“A lot of officers are coming up with theories as to why. We go into the street every night; you don’t know what dangers you are going to face,” Police Chief Chris Moore told the Mercury News last week. “These are not things being generated by the officers. They are generated by calls from the public for help.”
Here were the other cases in which a San Jose officer fired a weapon:
Jan. 15: Qazi Do, called a “mild-mannered” schizophrenic by the family lawyer, was killed by police in a ravine in the east foothills after wielding his knife. Lawyer Julie Pulliam contends that police “escalated” the confrontation. District Attorney Jeff Rosen determined that the shooting was justified.
Sept. 16: Filogonio Orozco, 31, was shot and wounded in the back after he accelerated his stolen car toward police, who were on foot.
Sept. 16: Police shot and wounded Paul Ray Castillo, who eluded capture for three days after he killed Vietnamese radio host Cindy Nguyen.
Oct. 8: Police shot at, but missed, Jason Eric Evans, a former San Jose State football player, who had grabbed an officer’s gun and fled down Leigh Avenue. Although bullets missed him, a police car ran into him, knocking him down and dislodging the gun from his hand.
Oct. 10: Responding to a report of gunshots fired on Hillsdale Avenue, police confronted a shirtless suspect. When the man threatened police with a gun, police shot and killed him. Police haven’t released his name.
Oct. 16: Police killed a suspect after responding to a report of a man acting suspiciously and carrying some kind of weapon. Police revealed few details except that one officer fired his gun and two others fired Tasers.
Copyright 2011 San Jose Mercury News