Deputy Had Been Shot Several Times With Assault Rifle
Play the in-car video/audio (Windows Media).
By Jim Balloch, The Knoxville News-Sentinel (Knoxville, Tenn.)
Loudon County, Tenn. Deputy Jason Scott Play the in-car video/audio |
“Well, we’re going to get him. That’s what we’re here for.”
Those words, uttered by a law enforcement officer, are heard on a police cruiser videotape that shows part of the dramatic, extremely dangerous effort to reach fallen Loudon County Deputy Jason Scott on March 12.
The tape was made from inside a Knox County, Tenn. Sheriff’s Office cruiser. It includes footage as the vehicle, packed with unseen, grimly determined officers, moves along a narrow road and then up the driveway to reach the mortally wounded Scott.
Scott, 24, was lying in front of the house where his heavily armed killer, Michael Harvey, 16, was still barricaded.
Scott was shot several times with a .30-caliber, 30-shot SKS assault-style rifle as he stepped from his cruiser shortly before 8:30 a.m. in front of the home of Frank Harvey, state prosecutor for Loudon County. Scott had been dispatched to answer a call about an altercation between Michael Harvey and his mother Ann Harvey, who had fled the house on Palmer Drive near the Knox-Loudon County line. Other Loudon County officers arriving to back Scott up were driven back by a barrage of gunfire.
As SWAT teams were arriving and being assembled, several state troopers and Knox County deputies initiated an action to go ahead and reach Scott as quickly as possible.
“All we’re worried about is the officer,” someone is heard saying on the tape.
The rescue cruiser, all of the officers in it, and other officers in the woods around the house were exposed to possible gunfire during the effort to reach Scott and bring him to a waiting ambulance.
Adding to the confusion and stress was the uncertainty if the young gunman was still in the house or hiding in the woods. That uncertainty increased the area that officers had to cover during the effort.
Besides the SKS, the youth had access to several other guns and could easily have opened fire on the rescuers, but did not do so. Later in the day, however, he did exchange gunfire with officers before shooting himself in the head with a 9 mm handgun.
Details of the rescue effort and the identities of many officers involved were reported in the March 22 News Sentinel; officers draped the windows of the KSCO cruiser with bulletproof vests. The cruiser was driven by KCSO Deputy Gabe Mullinax. In the cruiser were KCSO Sgt. Roger Sexton, Deputy Todd Sleet and Tennessee Highway Patrol Sgt. Mike Melhorn. Other officers who were close to the house on foot and were exposed to possible gunfire in the effort to save Scott were identified in that story.
The videotape was released Thursday as part of the Loudon County Sheriff’s Office file on the incident. Identities and voices of the officers on the videotape have not been determined.
The video portion of the tape shows a narrow, straight ahead view from the front of the cruiser and therefore cannot show all of the maneuvering and risk taken by all of the officers involved.
But the audio portion, which also picks up some radio traffic, gives some indication of the chaos and confusion of the situation and captures the stress of the officers and their struggle to get Scott off the driveway and into the back of their cruiser.
“Y’all might want to turn that recorder off because I’m going to cuss like a ... I tend to do that when I’m scared,” one officer frankly states early in the tape.
Scott’s exact location could not be easily determined by officers on the scene.
”... they can’t tell me ... there’s two houses, he’s between them but they don’t know what or where ...”
“If we’re going on up there ... let’s just move it!”
The cruiser has to negotiate a narrow roadway jammed with vehicles and teeming with police officers. As it reaches the end of the driveway an officer says, “He’s over here, he’s over here.” The vehicle turns and Scott, lying face down, is visible.
An officer, probably from the cruiser, darts in front of the camera to help move Scott. Others from the car and who came up from the woods are not in the camera’s view.
“I got you covered,” an officer says on the tape.
Scott weighed about 250 pounds, and his rescuers struggled to get him up and into the back seat of the cruiser. That is not seen on the tape, but the officers’ difficulty in handling him is clear from their voices and words.
“Come on, get him in, get him in!”
“Lift him up, buddy!”
“Push! Push! Push him in!”
Scott was reached at 9:10 a.m. His badge number was 910.
On the way back out, the cruiser’s path is still blocked by numerous police vehicles, including the command vehicles of Knox County Sheriff Tim Hutchison and Loudon County Sheriff Tim Guider. At one point the cruiser has to leave the roadway entirely to complete its journey to a waiting ambulance, which took Scott to a medical helicopter that airlifted him to the University of Tennessee Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
The tape ends with a shouting and shoving match between an officer and a news photographer, who was apparently trying to take a photograph of Scott being loaded into the ambulance.
The standoff did not end until the next day. A SWAT team entered the home and found Michael Harvey dead on the floor of his parents’ bedroom, wrapped in a lightweight beige blanket, still holding the 9 mm handgun he used to shoot himself in the head.
The SKS rifle was leaned upright against a wall. The magazine still had 16 live rounds in it — more than enough to have killed every officer who tried to rescue Scott.