By Chuck Remsberg, Senior Police1 Contributor
Part 1 of a 2-part Police1 series
Matthew Hoskins is eager to reboot his promising career in law enforcement, but it’s tough to land a cop job when you’ve been on trial for attempted murder.
Little over two years ago, Hoskins was a lieutenant in a sheriff’s office and a part-time police chief in rural Wisconsin. Today he fixes dishwashers.
“Officers are so naïve when they think nothing can happen to them,” says Attorney John Matousek, who defended Hoskins when his case went before a jury last summer. “Given the right scenario, any cop could end up in Matt’s shoes.”
In an exclusive interview recently with Police1, Hoskins recounted how what sounded like a woman in distress in the middle of the night became the nightmarish pivot point of his life that brought him face to face with the threat of 85 years in prison.
About midnight between the last Saturday and Sunday of September 2003, Matt Hoskins, divorced and 33 years old, was getting his 3-year-old son ready for bed at his girlfriend’s house 5 miles outside a small county seat in western Wisconsin. With the girlfriend and her two young kids, they’d enjoyed an evening of family-style fun-games, a rented movie, snacks. Hoskins had been a sheriff’s jail lieutenant in a neighboring county for about six months, a “perfect job” for what he hoped would be a steady climb up the administrative ladder. His girlfriend held the same job and rank in the county where she resided.
Hoskins was blowing up an air mattress when he heard screaming outside, echoing up the hill where the house sat from a road about 50 feet away. Peeking through a window, he saw a pickup truck take off, leaving two cars stopped on the road. “Shadowy people” were moving around them. A female “began screaming bloody murder.” Then a sharp report that Hoskins perceived as a gunshot resounded from the same vicinity.
“Everything was quiet for a few seconds,” he recalls. “Then the female starts screaming hysterically. A guy yells, ‘Shut up! Shut the fuck up!’ Another guy yells, ‘Let’s get outa here!’
At best, Hoskins thought a domestic was in progress; at worst “it sounded like gang warfare.”
Hoskins didn’t carry a gun when he was off-duty, but he grabbed his girlfriend’s Glock Model 23, his cell phone and the closest thing at hand that resembled a flashlight, a swivel-handled lantern. “I did not run down the hill to intervene,” he insists. “My sole intent was to get a license plate number. But I did think for sure that someone was going to be laying dead in the ditch.”
By the time he got to the road, the two cars were speeding away-squealing tires, fishtailing, spraying gravel. The second car went down the road a few hundred feet then spun out stopping sideways across the roadway. The vehicle doors popped opened and he could hear a women screaming again.
He speed dialed his girlfriend (who also in charge of the dispatch center) and told her, “Get the cops out here now!” and as the car began to take off Hoskins jogged down the road just in time to get the see the plate number as the car sped off.
He was standing in the dark “rehearsing in my head” a tag number he’d glimpsed when he heard a female voice on his left and turned to see, in the feeble glow of the lantern, a figure dressed in black military jacket and black pants “coming up out of the ditch, yelling at me.” He drew the Glock from his pocket and shouted at her, “Police! Stop!” he says. But she kept coming.
At that moment, he heard “something coming full bore down the shoulder of the road” from the direction toward which the cars had taken off. The weak lantern revealed “a huge man, 5 inches taller than me and a good 70 pounds heavier, dressed in a full camouflage jump suit.”
Earlier in his career, Hoskins had chased a bank robber who was “wearing almost exactly the same outfit, and my mind flashed back to that.”
Without saying a word the man rushed up on Hoskins and punched him hard in the face, Hoskins says. He found himself dazed and looking down at the roadway, as the man continuing to pummel him. Hoskins managed to push him off and regain his footing, jumping back about five feet. But the subject ran back into Hoskins grabbing his wrist and shoulder in a vise grip. Hoskins says his assailant didn’t let go until Hoskins fired three “warning shots” into the air to scare him into submission before they both ended up on the ground. Hoskins says today that he could not justify by his personal code shooting the man during the attack.
“I said, ‘I’m a police officer! Don’t move!’ I pointed the gun at him. He said, ‘I’m a police officer too.’ I said, ‘You’re full of shit!’ Snake venom was coming out of my mouth.”
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Soon after two deputy sheriffs arrived, the ludicrousness of the situation became apparent. The male and female who had accosted Hoskins were father and teenage daughter. He was the county surveyor who 15 years ago had served as a town reserve officer. She was a popular high school cheerleader and their property just down the road from Hoskins’ girlfriend’s place had been the site of frequent weekend toilet papering by mischievous classmates.
In an effort to discourage the pranksters, the father had rigged up booby traps around their yard, consisting of pieces of pipe and shotgun shells filled with gunpowder that would be detonated when tripwires were disturbed. They then laid in wait.
The ruckus that had attracted Hoskins had arisen from the arrival of a convoy of would-be TPers, a surprise confrontation with the father, daughter, and her teenage friends tripping of one or more booby traps, which Hoskins had interpreted as gunfire. Alone in the dark road, Hoskins, who is short and looks much younger than his age, apparently had been mistaken for a lingering high school kid.
Everyone seemed to accept the incident as an unfortunate misunderstanding. “I felt stupid,” Hoskins said. “I could have taken a life.” The father walked up to me and shook my hand, twice. He says the father apologized and remarked that Hoskins “showed great restraint.” No complaint was filed, no report was written. One of the deputies dismissed the incident as simply “a goat fuck.”
By Monday, though, the episode was the talk of the county seat (pop. 3,500) and rumors were flying. It was claimed that Hoskins “pistol-whipped” the father. He was described as a “cowboy” who was “out of control” on the dark road. He was said to have been drinking heavily before the incident, as evidenced by “bloodshot and watery eyes,” which one of the deputies said he noticed
The father added details that hadn’t been mentioned the night of the dust-up. He claimed that he rushed Hoskins because he thought he was “a sexual predator” who was trying to capture his daughter. And most damaging, as things turned out, he claimed that Hoskins had pointed the Glock at his chest and pulled the trigger. He heard the gun “click,” he presently told investigators, and “I thought I was a dead man” until he realized the pistol had miraculously “dry fired.”
As he has from the beginning, Hoskins still firmly denies that he had consumed any alcohol before the confrontation. “Of course my eyes were bloodshot and watery,” he says. “I’d just been punched in the face repeatedly and gotten the shit knocked out of me!” He also insists he did not pull the trigger except to fire the warning shots, which were not aimed at his assailant.
What happens next is the stuff nightmares are made of...
Stay tuned for Part 2.
