4

Even The Police Don't Have All The Evidence Until The Grand Jury Is Through

Here's a quick, hopefully vague-enough-to-be-anonymous rundown of the case: Police responded to reports of a suicidal young man. While 911 was talking him down, he pointed an object at an officer. The rest went predictably.

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But only the jury really knows what happened. Since the officers couldn't be privy to the evidence, no details about the case were released until the verdict had been reached. "It was nearly a year between the time when the shooting took place and the time it went to a grand jury, and that entire time, the parents were left in the dark," Steve says. "No one answered their questions ... all they knew was their son called 911, then cops showed up and shot him."

During that time, the only information the public had access to came from the media, which -- according to Steve -- didn't have a goddamn clue. "The press gets it wrong every time. Every time there was a case we were involved in, when it showed upon the news, they got it wrong. I asked the attorney 'How often do they get it wrong?' and he said every single time."

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He remembers reading an interview with the victim's family where it was reported that "police account differs from witness testimony,' and it actually doesn't." He also remembers that "they had a complete misquote right after it happened ... They said 'officers confronted the man and the man went back inside.' That's a misquote, which isn't at all what happened and I don't believe what was said."

3

Serving On A Grand Jury Will Break Your Heart

One of the hardest parts for Steve was interviewing the parents of the victim. "I can't even write about this without crying," he says. "To lose a child like that and to have circumstances around their death kept secret from you for that long is impossible for me to justify."

If anything, Steve had begun to identify with the victim to a haunting degree. "'Suicide by cop' is a term we're all familiar with," he says. "I used to flippantly write off the victims in these stories as somehow being cowardly. Before hearing this case, I felt like when someone did what [the victim] did, not only were the police justified, but the victim deserved what they got ... [But] I've lived with anxiety and depression most of my life. If I didn't have the support network I have in my life, it could just as easily have been me."

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2

Police Protocol Is Nothing Like The Movies

"The subject of 'Why did they shoot so much?' came up," Steve told us. "I'm sure Cracked has written about it before, but there's a disconnect between what people think happens when you get shot and what actually happens. I apologize for the bluntness here, but there's no sensitive way to talk about this. In general, it takes people a long time to die after being shot, and if they're not dead, they can generally shoot back. This is why police are trained to keep shooting until the threat is removed."

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You'd think "lying in a pool of blood" is a good place to put that bar, but "the definition of 'threat is removed' varies," Steve said. "As an example, if someone has a gun pointed at someone, they're a threat until they let go of the gun ... [I've] heard stories I'm sure all cops hear during their training. Stories where someone takes a shot through the heart and keeps fighting back for over a minute. Stories where someone is shot in the chest, drops their weapon, and proceeds to chew out the cop that shot them until paramedics arrive."

"Also, police miss a lot," he says. "I'm a decent marksman (classified as such by IDPA rules). If I'm a little nervous, it's easy to completely miss a man-sized target. Which is seven yards away. And can't shoot back. While I'm going slow enough to count shots. While the ballistics specialist was presenting evidence, I remarked that I was surprised how one officer who had fired rapidly hadn't shot the ground in front of him, to which he replied along the lines of, 'Oh, he did, I just didn't mention it yet. The plants in the yard got it pretty bad.'"

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1

There Aren't Always "Sides" That Can "Win"

"While we found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing on the part of the officers, so many things could have averted this tragedy," Steve says. "Whenever there's a tragedy, you go back over it a thousand times wondering 'what if.' There are clear 'what if' scenarios that end in [the victim] being alive today."

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In the end, it came down to a simple but tragic miscommunication: "The operator was talking [the victim] down, and if the officers had just waited, everything would have been fine," Steve says. "Unfortunately, the operator had no way of getting that information to them. All they knew was what they could see in front of them, and what they saw was a distraught man with a gun preparing to kill himself ... The thing that gets me about this is he'd absolutely still be alive if police just didn't show up, or if they hadn't engaged him. But of all the information they had at the time, not showing up would have been reckless."

It's not really something anyone can learn from, either: "When the case was over, I asked two friends of mine who are cops if they would want to be able to listen in to the 911 call in a situation like that," Steve says. "I was surprised when both emphatically said no. When responding to a situation like that, they need to focus on what's in front of them with no distractions. I can see their point, but it still bothers me that in this day and age, patching in to the call isn't even an option."

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In the end, according to Steve, "beyond the tangible facts of a case, guilt or innocence comes down to intentions." But this story doesn't end with the officers skipping away with a song in their hearts, freeze-framing on a jump-five. "My pastor is fond of the expression, 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions,'" Steve says. "From what I could see, those officers had the best intentions, and living with the emotional consequences has been hell."

Also check out 5 Things You Don't (Want to) Know About Your Justice System and 5 Realities Of U.S. Courts They Don't Show On 'Law & Order.'

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