by Chuck Remsberg, Police1 Senior Contributor
When their unit caught the call about a 300-lb. man walking stark naked down a major thoroughfare in Kenosha, Wis., with three naked children at 2:13 a.m. in cold weather, FTO Dave Monson turned to the rookie riding beside him and remarked dryly, “That’s not normal behavior.”
Minutes later, with nine direct hits from Monson’s .45 S&W pistol, one twisted life was taken and three young lives were saved.
For Monson, 45, a certified firearms instructor and K-9 trainer, it was his first shooting in 10 years as a sworn officer. For his rookie, Luke Hofmann, with just 53 days on the street, it was a baptism by fire from which he is still recovering. A spokesman for their department says they should be considered heroes.
Today, we offer an insider’s view of how this bizarre event unfolded, made possible by the cooperation of Chief Daniel Wade of the Kenosha Police Department and an exclusive interview with FTO Monson.
Hofmann had been riding with Monson only a couple of nights as part of his paced rotation through several FTOs when they got their fateful dispatch early last Tuesday morning (March 29). The night before, an out-of-control teenager had ripped a piece of wood off a porch and tried to slam them with it, and earlier this night they’d briefly chased a biker who was recklessly popping wheelies. But they’d missed out on what was shaping up to be the big excitement of their 2200-0600 shift in the waterfront city of 92,000. What Monson calls a “thug gang” of seven young suspects had been caught burglarizing an elementary school, tying up much of Kenosha’s on-duty street force with transports and processing. Monson and Hofmann were occupied with more mundane matters.
They had just cleared the police station where they’d cleaned a rifle used in practice earlier in the day when they got the call about the big naked man and the little kids.
A young female motorist had spotted the strange group walking in the street and felt concerned for the children. They were later determined to be a 14-month-old girl carried by the man, and her two brothers, ages 3 and 5, walking along beside him. The man was their father. “It was two in the morning, and it was cold out. Something was wrong,” the woman later said. She feared the group had been robbed.
She stopped and the man approached her driver window. He asked for a ride. She declined, but offered to call 911. He urged her to do so, but as she dialed her cell he spewed a storm of curses and banged his fists on her car. “She tore out of there scared to death,” Monson told Police1. But she completed the call.
In less than four minutes, Monson and Hofmann located the group about five blocks from where the complainant had encountered them. The area was residential, dimly lit by street lamps. “The man was still carrying the little girl and marching with the boys back and forth across the street,” Monson recalls.
The thing that registered to Monson as he stepped out of the patrol car was the sheer size of him. “He was huge, five foot nine or ten, 300 pounds. He was built like Superman, and I’m not exaggerating. Massive. Strong.”
Monson called to him. “Sir, what’s wrong? Stop! Can we help you? Stop!”
The man barked out what Monson took to be orders to the kids, but his speech was incomprehensible gibberish. “The little boys were all stressed out,” Monson says. “They were looking at us like they needed our help, then looking at him like they had to do what he tells them.” The group started walking away. “I’m thinking, What am I going to do?”
As big as the father was, Monson knew the officers shouldn’t get anywhere near him, so “we kept our distance”.
Monson continued to attempt dialog but “he ignored everything I said” and kept moving. The FTO told Hofmann to reposition their unit, hoping to create a blockade, but the man and his kids just moved onto the sidewalk and continued walking. Monson called for backup.
As Monson and Hofmann followed the subjects, Monson’s commands got louder. “Stop! That’s enough! Police! STOP!” Similar commands were repeated dozens of times.
Then after walking about three blocks, past yards still adorned with Easter decorations, the man abruptly halted. “When he turned around, he had what I thought was a knife,” Monson says. “I had my flashlight on him and the beam picked up the metal. Then I could see it was a pair of scissors.” The pointed blades were about five inches long. The man apparently had concealed the weapon between his chest and the little girl in his arms.
Monson told Hofmann to draw his TASER and, following proper procedure, the veteran officer pulled his semiautomatic and drew down on the suspect. If Hofmann needed to fire the TASER, Monson wanted to be ready with deadly force in the event the darts missed or the electrical impulse was ineffective.
“The guy was playing us,” Monson explains. “He’d hold the scissors to the baby’s stomach, then raise them over his head. He was looking for a confrontation, using his kids. I thought he might be setting us up for a suicide-by-cop.”
Neither officer was comfortable taking a shot for fear of hitting one of the youngsters. Despite their frustration and the intensity of the standoff, Monson explains that he did not funnel in just on the threat.
“Other officers ask me about tunnel vision, but I didn’t get it,” he told Police1. “I had to keep track of Luke and the three kids. There was a lot to check on, and I think that kept me from tunneling in. I’m glad, because I might easily have hurt one of the kids if I’d had tunnel vision.”
He kept up a barrage of commands: “Drop it! Drop it!”
Finally the offender threw the scissors down. “I thought we were making progress,” Monson says. “I ordered him down, but he lay down with the girl under him. I thought, Things are going downhill again. I told him to put his arms out. He said no.”
Instead, he grabbed his daughter in a bear hug, then sat up with her squeezed between his legs. The 3-year-old boy was standing near his father’s right side and the 5-year-old was “brushing against his left side,” Monson recalls. The man pulled his older son tight against his chest. He had effectively created a shield of his children.
“Let them go! Let them go!” Monson was yelling.
Without warning, the man “grabs the 5-year-old by the chin and the back of the neck and wrenches his head around,” Monson says. “He went limp, and I almost went limp. I thought he’d killed the kid right in front of me.”
The man dropped his son. The boy moved slightly after he hit the ground and the father reached for him, stretching and positioning himself in such a way that he created the opening Monson had been waiting for.
From a distance of about 10 feet, Monson fired two rounds. Both struck the suspect in the torso. “He started to reach toward the boy again, and I walked up between the kids. I was about two feet away. It was just me and him then. I shot him until he stopped moving. In my mind he was going to kill that little boy one way of another.”
Nine shots, no misses. “He was so big and strong that no bullet left him.”
The boys “ran up and clung to my legs. They didn’t say a word. They just stuck to me like Super Glue to paper. One was holding me so hard I had to force him away a little so I could get to my magazine to reload.”
The suspect, an ex-con identified as 31-year-old Bobby Sherrod, was DRT—dead right there. Miraculously, none of his children suffered serious physical injuries. What may lie ahead for them psychologically, of course, is far less certain.
As police reconstructed the hours that preceded the shooting, this is what took place:
The children, whose mother lives not far away in Illinois, had been visiting Sherrod for a couple of days at a residence he shared with his 24-year-old girlfriend about a mile from the shooting scene. Sherrod, who had recently been released from a Wisconsin correctional facility, had been “acting weird” for some time. He was due to appear in court in Illinois on a domestic battery charge on the day after he was shot dead.
On the night of the incident, he smoked pot, drank a bottle of shampoo, ripped the bathroom sink out of the wall and beat his girlfriend after arguing with her.
He also poked the baby’s stomach with a knife, tried to force the 3-year-old to swallow some pills, punched the 5-year-old in the face, poured water over all the kids and threatened to kill them.
The girlfriend fled. Sherrod then “began tearing up his home.” He took off all his clothing and stripped the children as well. Finally he set off with the kids, naked and still wet, on their forced march into the chilly spring night.
“If that lady had not made that 911 call, I’m sure we would have found all of them dead somewhere,” Monson says. “The 5-year-old said in a videotaped statement that he believed his father was going to kill him and his brother and sister.”
According to Monson, the little boy also told police, “I’m glad you killed my dad.”
“That’s sad,” Monson told Police1. “That’s very sad.”
Understandably, both he and Hofmann were said to be “very emotional” when they returned to the station after the shooting. Pending a full review of the incident they are currently on temporary administrative leave, as mandated by state law.
At this writing, Hofmann was deemed not yet ready to speak for publication. Monson and other officers hope he’ll be back on the street soon, at peace with what happened and committed to resuming his law enforcement career.
