In the dream that repeatedly haunted Ofcr. Jennifer Moore’s nights, the action was always the same: She and her partner are driving down one of the mean streets of their high-crime beat in Phoenix when they spot a white car that looks “wrong.” They pull it over, but before they can exit, occupants of the vehicle start shooting at them….
Each time, Moore bolted awake before the shooting stopped, so she never knew how the attack ended. The dream recurred across several nights before it abruptly passed away with others long forgotten.
Then, “four or five months later,” as she recalls, came eerie echo of what she had imagined in her sleep—the Saturday night in her real life that left her with a permanent reminder of the sudden dangers of the street and earned her membership in a select law enforcement fraternity, the IACP/DuPont Kevlar Survivors’ Club.
She was formally inducted during the chiefs’ recent annual conference in San Diego. Later, in an exclusive interview with Police1, she disclosed details of her brush with death that have not previously been revealed, including her prescient dreams.
That fateful Saturday, last June 28, Jen Moore was just three weeks from completing her year’s probation with Phoenix P.D. She’d come to policing as an Army intelligence veteran, and, at 5-foot-5, she’d hit the streets with 5%er enthusiasm. Her partner, Ofcr. Benjamin Ippel, had just finished his probationary stint. He was 27 years old, Moore 28.
Ippel wasn’t supposed to be working that night. He was taking two weeks off because of family obligations. But “something” he can’t define “told” him to come in that Saturday for his regular 2000 to 0600 shift with Moore who, at the time, was the only female on their squad.
They intended to stay at the station to work on a special research project, drafting an action plan for dealing with a troublesome apartment complex on their beat that was rife with drugs, prostitution, and trespass violations. But “we decided to go play a little bit” before knuckling down to that tedium, Moore says. They climbed into their patrol car and swung into a familiar hunting ground, “an area known for hard-core violence—a lot of shootings, stabbings, gang activity.” Moore was driving.
Just as they had in her dreams, they were trolling along dimly lit Taylor St. in a mostly residential area when they saw a white car coming toward them at about 2140 hours. It was a 1995 Mercury sedan, two figures inside.
“We know the neighborhood, who lives there, who frequents there,” Moore says. “We’d never seen this car before. Ben has a knack for finding stolen autos, so we decided to run it.” But when the car passed by them and the officers looked back to grab the rear license number, they couldn’t read it, because the plate light was out.
They whipped a U-turn, pulled the car over, and lit it up with spotlight and high beams. The passenger, they noticed, kept looking back at them. Moore shined her flashlight in his eyes.
“I was first up, on the driver’s side,” she says. “Ben stayed back, still radioing in information. I think the two guys in the car thought I was alone.”
Right away she noticed two beer cans in the center console’s holders; the one near the passenger was open, and he said it was his. The driver said they’d just come from a liquor store around the corner.
“It was night and day attitude-wise between the driver and the passenger,” Moore says. “The driver was very polite, completely respectful. He said he was from Mexico and had come here to work, the story we always hear. He had no driver’s license, no registration, no proof of insurance.
“The passenger kept interrupting, trying to talk over him. I told him to keep quiet, but he kept going, very belligerent, very aggressive. He claimed they lived ‘not far away’ and referred to this as ‘a fucking bad neighborhood,’ but I couldn’t get what I thought was a truthful answer about why they were there. Twice he disobeyed my commands and tried to get out of the car. I told him to stay where he was and keep his hands on his knees where I could see them.
“I kept thinking, Something’s not right here. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up the whole time.”
After scanning the interior for visible weapons, she decided to write the driver several tickets, to cite the passenger for the open container, and to have the car towed.
When Ippel approached her on the driver’s side where she had the driver out of the vehicle, the mouthy passenger opened his door and stepped out.
That’s when the stop went south “faster than it takes me to tell what happened,” Moore says.
Moore handed the driver off to Ippel and those two moved to the rear of the Mercury. She started around the front of the car toward the passenger, who at that point was standing near the front right fender. “I saw his hand go into the front right pocket of his baggy pants,” she says.
She drew down on him with her Glock-22. “Get your hand out!”
He took “quick steps” over the curb and onto a yard, “like he was going to take off running.” She yelled, “Don’t run! Stop! Get your hand out to the side!”
He turned instead as if to make a beeline for Ippel. Moore closed on him fast, shouting for him to stop. Suddenly, he did. With her gun on him, he put his right hand on top of his head, his left at his side.
“I could see that both his hands were empty,” she remembers. She ordered him to turn away from her, holstered, and advanced to cuff him. But when she grabbed his left hand, his apparent compliance took a violent turn. They struggled as he tried to wrench free.
Then she heard a shot.
“I don’t know where he had the gun, but he shot me point blank,” she says. Her right hand was across her breast at that moment. The 9mm round tore through her ring finger on its way to her chest.
She fell back against the white car and sank to the pavement. “I tried to get my gun out but my hand wasn’t working right. It felt like it was on fire, and my heart rate was all over the place. I tried to get up, but I could only get to my knees.” From his angle, Ippel couldn’t see her, but he heard the shot—“like a firecracker”—and he heard her yelling: “He fuckin’ shot me! He fuckin’ shot me! Kill him!”
Ippel ran toward Moore, saw the suspect hunched over in flight maybe 35 yards away, and squeezed off six quick rounds. But the assailant had gained too much lead. Without faltering a step, he disappeared into the neighborhood’s vast shadows.
Moore put out an urgent radio transmission: “9-9-8,” Phoenix code for “Officer shooting.” At that moment, their sergeant happened to pull up—he was looking for them to discuss their anti-crime project—and he quickly followed with: “9-9-9”—“Officer down!”
For the suspect, the rest of the night was a drama of its own. About a block away, he forced his way at gunpoint into an apartment occupied by a father and his teenage son. “I just shot a lady cop and need somewhere to hide,” he allegedly told them. After awhile, the son talked the offender into letting him leave, but then, according to one report, was too scared to call police. At about midnight, the gunman fell asleep and the father made his own escape. He alerted officers and a barricade standoff of more than four hours ensued before the suspect finally surrendered. He was a 35-year-old ex-convict from Illinois and is said to have five pages of priors. He offered no explanation for why he had attacked Moore.
As for her fate in the meantime: two officers from a neighborhood enforcement team who’d had been working near the scene when her shooting went down responded immediately to the emergency calls. They scooped her up and rushed her to a hospital less than a mile away. There the consequences of the suspect’s attack unfolded.
The bullet had blasted through the middle knuckle of her ring finger. Reconstructive surgery was attempted but was not successful. Most of the finger had to be amputated. She’d also lost “a lot of function” in her pinkie, affecting her gripping ability.
She was surprised to learn that the slug had continued toward her chest after mangling her finger, because she hadn’t felt any pain there. The bullet bored through a thick packet of F.I. cards stuffed in her breast pocket (“guys always made fun of me because I carried so many”), then lodged in her U.S. Armor Level III ballistic vest.
Moore was wearing her soft body armor in an external carrier that night. After she’d shined her flashlight in the suspect’s eyes during her initial approach to the Mercury, she’d tucked the light in behind her vest for ready access if needed again. The light created enough of a gap between the vest and her chest, she says, that she didn’t suffer any blunt trauma from the impact of the round.
With body armor having played a critical role in her survival, Moore automatically gained entry into the IACP/DuPont Kevlar Survivors’ Club, the organization founded in 1987 to reduce death and disability among police officers by encouraging the use of personal body armor. Since then, it has commemorated the survival of more than 3,000 members.
At the IACP conference ceremony, Moore was presented with a free replacement vest by U.S. Armor. Another officer was admitted to Club membership as well. Last winter, Cst. Andrew Meikle of the London Metro Police was a passenger in an unmarked squad car, following firearms suspects in a silver BMW. A passenger in that vehicle fired five pistol shots back at the police unit, striking Meikle’s body armor just above his waist, sparing him significant injury.
Today, more than six months after her shooting, Jennifer Moore is still undergoing rehabilitative therapy to improve flexibility and control of her little finger. “Right now, I can’t straighten it out and I can’t make a fist,” she says. “Once I can get something of a fist, I’ll be good to go. The doctor says maybe a month or two more. I hope it’s sooner. I’m going crazy.”
Despite her injuries, she says she shoots better now. “I concentrate more and my grip isn’t as tight. Before, I had a death grip and my shots tended to go left. Now my placement is much better.”
The thing she most regrets about the shooting? “I’m just mad that I wasn’t able to draw my gun and handle business. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t relive that night, don’t see [the suspect’s] face. That I couldn’t get my gun out eats at me.”
As for her foreboding dreams, she says she has talked to at least two other shooting survivors who reported similar experiences. Before anything happened, they dreamed that they were in a shooting showdown, with specifics that proved later to come true.
“I’m fortunate to have really good training officers who emphasize officer safety,” Moore says. “It would never cross my mind to go out in uniform without a vest. If I see someone who does, I tell them to get one on.
“We are targets. No matter where you work, if you have a badge, you’re a target. Be ready.”
