By Chuck Remsberg
Senior Police1 Correspondent
Author of the new book Blood Lessons
Google “police officers killed serving warrants” and your computer will deliver screen after screen full of references in an eye blink. In the annals of law enforcement, nearly 500 cops have fallen dead from felonious attack during warrant service.
Cpl. Cal Bowers considers himself lucky not to be among them. He was “only” wounded so severely that he’s been off work for nearly five months. He has lost 8 inches of his intestines, dropped 50 pounds of body weight, and for weeks was so easily fatigued he couldn’t walk to his kitchen without having to sit down to catch his breath.
He’d like to tell you what he’s learned from his near-miss. He’s had plenty of time to mull it over as he fights to recuperate.
A SWAT team leader with the Prince George’s County (Md.) Sheriff’s Office, 34-year-old Bowers, with six years on the job, was asleep at about 0130 one Saturday last February when calls to his pager and phone sent him scrambling to the first call-out of his career where weapons were fired.
A deputy from his department who was working with the U.S. Marshals Service on a multi-agency violent crime task force told him an officer in nearby Washington, D.C., had been shot in the face with a .45 the day before by a young male who came out of a residence the task force had under observation.
The assailant fled into hiding, but officers managed to find his girlfriend and gain her cooperation. Through “triggerfish” locator technology, they’d eventually been able to track his whereabouts after she called him on her cell phone. He was believed to be in Room 346 of a cheap motel near a racetrack on the outskirts of Laurel, Md.
A warrant had been issued for his arrest. Besides the assault on the D.C. officer, he was wanted in connection with several homicides. He was believed to be armed with the .45 and a Mac-10. Did Bowers think he and his team could respond and make the capture?
“We’re a small, part-time team that’s in the process of rebuilding after losing members through retirement,” Bowers told Police1. “Frankly, we don’t train too often, but we’ve done 50 or 60 search warrants, a couple of barricaded subjects and so on with no problems. I said we could handle it.”
He rounded up eight members and they convened at a site away from the motel for a briefing by marshals who’d established surveillance on the place. “They said there was a high amount of traffic in and out of the motel,” Bowers recalls. That suggested drugs and prostitution—and an unknown amount of unsavory wildlife on the premises. “We decided to get into the room as fast as possible.”
An alternative would have been to “maybe surround the room and do a call-out,” Bowers says. But that would mean “evacuating every other room—and lots of confusion.” Occupants of the targeted quarters might peek out, see the police “and start shooting.” Or, given the kind of business apparently going on at the place, people going in or out of other rooms could sound an alarm or cause other dangerous problems.
“We decided our best option was rake-and-break,” Bowers says. He and his team would pile out of a van, move stealthily up the exterior staircase and across the walkway to #346, smash the room’s plate glass window, drop a flashbang inside while simultaneously crashing down the door with a ram, and take the would-be cop killer by surprise before he could react.
With about 30 marshals and other LEOs providing ground cover, Bowers’ team moved out and up at about 0400. Moments later, the window shattered from a blow with a pry bar, a deputy yanked down the curtains and Bowers delivered the flashbang.
Their plan worked beautifully—except for the door. “The regular lock and the deadbolt gave way readily,” Bowers explains. “But the hinged security hasp hung up.” Because of all the foot traffic in and out of the motel’s rooms, Bowers’ team had figured the hasp would likely be unengaged. But in Room 346 it was fixed in place—and stubbornly resistant to ramming.
“You have to hit it with enough force to tear it out,” says Bowers, himself a former team breacher. “That’s hard to do with a ram because the hasp is so high up.” He estimates it took 13-14 strikes—“at least a minute”—before the metal door finally gave way.
Meanwhile, through the smoke at the window opening, Bowers could see figures moving inside while the breacher hammered away. Two men and a woman looked as if they’d been startled while sitting on a bed; they dropped to the floor immediately in response to commands.
A third male, a thirty-ish African-American who resembled the wanted fugitive whose photo the team had been shown by the marshals, was emerging from the bathroom. He dove across the bed nearest the intractable door, “pulled up a long case,” and darted back into the bathroom.
Seconds later, he popped out with a weapon in hand. Bowers didn’t recognize the type of gun immediately—it turned out to be an M4 carbine “with the butt stock broken or cut off to be more concealable”—but he instantly recognized the implications of the long, curved magazine.
Bowers yelled for the suspect to drop the gun. When he didn’t, another team member fired at him, missed by 2 inches and hit a mirror. “I remember seeing the bullet hole,” Bowers says. “I was amazed he missed, because he’s a good shot. The next thing I knew, I was shot.”
Five .223 rounds blasted from the M4. One tore through Bowers’ ballistic vest and into his abdomen and left side. He went down just as the door finally was breached. Seconds later, another team member took out the suspect with a .40-cal. round, center mass. Three more guns and quantities of crack cocaine and marijuana were later found in the room.
“At first, I didn’t think I was wounded,” Bowers says. But soon intense pain and the feel of wet blood convinced him otherwise. The round had ripped through his intestines and lower ribs. “My trauma plate could have stopped it, but the bullet missed it by about an eighth of an inch,” Bowers says. “The vest itself—a Level III—just slowed it down some.”
After enduring surgery to remove damaged intestine and make other internal repairs, Bowers spent weeks of misery at home, unable to report even for light assignment. Severe weight loss, diminished muscle tone and persistent pain plagued him.
“I couldn’t jog or get much other exercise for fear of reopening a 9-inch surgical wound,” Bowers says. “For a long time, I was too fatigued to do much anyway. I couldn’t walk to my kitchen and back without being winded and having to sit down.” He expects it to be a year before he’s back to his full physical strength, although he’s hopeful of returning to light duty this summer.
In hopes of seeing some good come of his ordeal, Bowers has spent some of his time off speaking to recruits about what it’s like to experience your first shooting and what lessons can be learned from what he’s been through.
Here are some of the things he’s thinking about as he imagines suiting up with his SWAT mates in the future. You’ll see he’s not talking about any “advanced” concepts here—just the kinds of basics that cops too often ignore at their peril.
1. Mind-set. “I will never again underestimate a suspect’s level of desperation,” he says. “Of course I knew this guy wouldn’t want to go to prison and he was thought to be armed. But when he was so heavily outnumbered by police, caught by surprise and rocked with the flashbang, I figured he’d surrender without a fight. The last thing I expected was someone to start shooting with the presence we had.
“I’ve always felt safe on duty, but now I appreciate that suspects have a mind of their own, and they don’t always think like a normal person.”
2. Positioning/rushing. “I should have been more conscious of using cover. When the suspect pulled his weapon, I was out in the open, fully exposed, an easy target.
“Also I feel we should have slowed things down. We’re accustomed to operating as a quick-reaction team, but in this case we probably should have taken time to go over our tactics more, possibly do a walk-through to rehearse movements and spacing. All we did basically was a quick drive-by to familiarize ourselves with the exterior of the place.”
3. Worst-case planning. “Obviously we should not have assumed that knocking down the door would be easy. We needed more breaching options. All we had was a ram and a rabbit tool. We should have involved an agency with explosive breach capabilities, which we don’t have.
“In the future I’m going to consider every door I see as having every lock and barrier possible. If we hadn’t gotten hung up on the hasp, we would have been in that room before the suspect could have gotten his gun.”
4. Adaptation. When the door proved to be so resistant, “we should have backed off, set up a perimeter and called the people out,” Bowers believes, rather than sticking with a strategy that wasn’t working as planned. He now thinks a breaching attempt should give way to alternative tactics if it isn’t successful in less than 45 seconds.
5. Marksmanship. “Once the window was broken, a good sniper could have taken a shot into the room with no problem. But we don’t have sniper capability.” Omitting that position from the team has been an administrative “political” decision which is a “sore subject” with team personnel, Bowers says.
At least two other more experienced, fully staffed teams are available from other agencies in the area. “Another reason we should have called them to assist,” Bowers says.
Despite the shortcomings, he takes pride in how his team and other officers on the scene reacted once he was shot. “One guy covered me with a shield and the breacher pulled me to a safe place.” Marshals tended to him until EMS arrived and he was helicoptered to a hospital in Baltimore.
Bowers himself stayed calm, despite his severe pain. He quietly recited his DOB, blood type, Social Security number and a brief recap of what happened to medical personnel. “The last thing I remember was them cutting off my clothes. The next thing was when I woke up in intensive care,” he says.
“With everything that was going on, everybody still stayed focused. Nobody panicked, nobody lost control. That means a lot to me.”
[Thanks to Tom Moy of the University of Delaware Police for tipping us to this story and to former Street Survival® Seminar instructor Dave Grossi for certain technical assistance.]
