“I thought, ‘I’m going to have to kill this man, and I don’t want to do that.’”
By Dennis Boone, The Kansas City Star
What do you think of this officer’s actions? Comment in the Police1 Forum
Even while staring past the barrel of a teenager’s gun as he threatened to kill her on Wednesday, Officer Sandy Omtvedt didn’t have her own well-being in mind. She was thinking about the boy standing less than six feet away, drawing a bead on her with that loaded .25-caliber Raven.
“I thought, ‘I’m going to have to kill this man, and I don’t want to do that,’ ” said Omtvedt, an eight-year veteran of the Kansas City, Kan., Police Department.
That she didn’t follow through is testament to a mix of her professional restraint, police training and experience. And somewhere in the Wyandotte County jail today, a 15-year-old youth can be thankful for that training, even though he’s in a great deal of trouble.
Sherrick A. Sims of Kansas City, Kan., was charged Thursday with two felonies - aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer and possession of a firearm - as well as with a misdemeanor weapons charge.
A detention hearing was scheduled for 1:15 p.m. today in Wyandotte County District Court’s juvenile division.
At a news conference Thursday afternoon, Omtvedt talked about the incident, which occurred shortly before 1:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Wyandot Center for Behavioral Healthcare, near 78th Street and Washington Avenue.
Omtvedt, 46, was the first officer responding to a call about one of the center’s clients, who, the caller said, might be armed. She met some harried employees who directed her to the third floor, where a teenage client there for group treatment was in a room with at least two employees.
Omtvedt said Thursday that as she approached the room, she told the boy to put his hands on his head. Instead, he hurtled out of the room and knocked her into a bookcase in the hallway. He then drew the handgun from a pants pocket. As she pulled her weapon, he slapped a magazine into his and took aim.
“You don’t want it to end this way,” he told her.
“Drop your weapon,” came her stern reply.
For reasons known only to the boy, he didn’t pull the trigger. Omtvedt’s reasons for holding back were right in front of her: At least two women were in the area.
“I did not take the shot, because they were in the line of fire,” she said.
The boy backed into an open elevator, hesitated, then burst back out of it, into a stairwell and down to the first floor. He fled the building and, tracking him from a third-floor window, Omtvedt directed additional officers to him on her radio. They arrested him within minutes.
Pete Zevenbergen, director of the Wyandot center, said the incident reflected the difficulty that mental health centers face balancing client needs with employee safety concerns. The safety issue was never more crucial, he said, than over the past week, given the recent slaying of a Johnson County mental-health worker during a home visit.
“We have no metal detectors and probably won’t have any,” Zevenbergen said. “We have a lot of people who come into our building carrying all of their possessions in this world on their back. We have had people who have brought in weapons.
“The question is: How do we deal with that?”
As for his staff, they were still on edge Thursday, he said, adding, “They’re not used to violence.”
The teenage client, who was attending one of the group sessions under court order, had given no indications of being violent, Zevenbergen said.
Omtvedt said it was the first time she had had to draw her weapon while on the Kansas City, Kan., force. Her 27-year career in law enforcement also includes stints as a military policewoman in the Air Force and on the security staff at the University of Kansas Medical Center.
While normal procedure suggested waiting for additional officers to arrive, Omtvedt said the fear written on the faces of center employees told her there was no time to wait. “That was a judgment call on my part,” she said.
The Police Department’s chief spokesman, Capt. Michael Kobe, summed it up this way: “She saved lives and didn’t jeopardize other lives unnecessarily. She did a great job.”