 "Police
Execution" or
a Lightning-Fast, Justifiable Shooting?Findings from Force
Science Research Center Help a Federal Jury Decide
Until the Force Science Research Center entered the case, no one knew
precisely how Randall Carr ended up killed by a police bullet that tore
into his body near his rectum and blew a hole in his heart.
His angry relatives, with Johnnie Cochran’s legal team behind them,
insisted it had to be a deliberate police execution.
The officers involved vehemently denied that, of course. But they
couldn’t reconstruct the fatal details of Carr’s final moments or
explain the seemingly incriminating pattern of wounds documented at
autopsy.
With a $5 million federal civil rights lawsuit and the officers’
reputations at stake, attorneys for the officers contacted Dr. Bill
Lewinski, executive director of the nonprofit FSRC at Minnesota State
University-Mankato, in hopes that a scientific analysis of the shooting
could shed some light on its dark mysteries.
This much was known about the circumstances that began unfolding
about 11 o’clock one autumn night in the Maxwell House Apartments in
downtown Oklahoma City:
During an investigation of an assault on the landlord during a rent
dispute, 2 officers were questioning the accused tenant, Randall Carr,
38. Carr was acting “very excited and aggressive,” and was later found
to have evidence of cocaine use in his bloodstream. He declared, “I own
this building, I own Oklahoma City and I don’t have to pay rent!” Then
he punched one officer in the head, inflicting a cut over his right eye,
and kneed the other in the groin, and fled on foot. Multiple units
responded.
During a pursuit by foot and car, Carr at one point was whacked at
the knee with an expandable baton and sprayed directly in the eyes and
nose with OC, but he did not submit. Finally the cop who’d been kneed
during the initial call, Ofcr. Jerry Bowen, and a responding sergeant,
Randy Castle, cornered Carr in a small, dark churchyard a couple of
blocks from his apartment.
With a jagged piece of concrete about twice the size of a softball
clutched in his left hand, Carr (who was left handed) tried to scale a
spiked fence at one edge of the yard, but he couldn’t make it. The
officers were yelling at him to get down and to drop the concrete. He
dropped off the fence, turned and with his left arm raised started to
run directly at Castle, who was about 20 feet away.
Bowen was forward from Castle and to his right. In Bowen’s
perception, Carr was charging Castle intent on bashing in the sergeant’s
skull with the concrete chunk.
Both officers opened fire with their Glocks. Eleven rounds were
discharged. Seven struck Carr. When the shooting stopped he was slumped
against a wooden bench several feet to Castle’s left.
Castle had no clear recollection of the 5 shots he fired. He recalled
Carr “throwing” the concrete at him at a point. A left-hander like the
suspect, Castle instinctively turned away while raising his right hand
to protect his head, and fired his rounds blindly back at his assailant
with his left hand.
Bowen said he started shooting when Carr crossed his line of fire in
the dead run toward Castle. There was about 5 feet between Bowen and the
attacker at that moment. He fired a total of 6 rounds. Between the
moment he started shooting and an awareness that Carr was “suddenly” no
longer upright as a target, he had no relevant memories.
These days, white officers shooting and killing any black suspect
guarantees controversy. But in this case, the situation was exacerbated
by a disturbing medical examiner’s report.
The fatal round, which ballistics determined was fired by Bowen, has
entered to the left of Carr’s rectum and had followed a path roughly
paralleling his spinal column straight to his heart.
Through a local attorney, surviving relatives of Carr (who included a
professional football player) contacted Johnnie Cochran’s law office and
a federal civil suit inevitably materialized, alleging excessive force
by the officers and failure to train and supervise by the city. The
municipality got out of the case on a motion for summary judgment prior
to trial, but the officers remained as defendants.
At the heart of the plaintiffs’ case was an inflammatory premise:
Such a fatal bullet pathway could have occurred only if Carr was already
down on his hands and knees, butt in the air and no longer a threat,
when the killing shot was fired. Bowen must have advanced on the suspect
and pulled the trigger from behind him to create the resulting wound
channel. In effect, the fatal round was an unjustified execution.
Bill Lewinski says he approached this volatile situation with no
preconceived notions. “Mentally I kept myself neutral to how it would
come out, good or bad,” he says. “I was interested just in understanding
what happened.”
Besides the fatal round, Carr had been shot in the left hip, the left
waistline, the right calf, the left wrist, the left thigh and the inside
right thigh. The autopsy report clearly established each wound channel,
confirming the trajectory on which each slug had penetrated into the
offender’s body. All but one had struck him from the rear. However, the
sequencing of the shots, whose gun some of the rounds came from (those
that were through and through), and what time span the shooting
covered--all were among the case’s many unknowns.
As one of the nation’s foremost authorities on reaction times and
shooting dynamics, Lewinski felt that documenting the missing elements
would be critical to understanding how the shooting actually unfolded
and determining whether the plaintiffs’ allegations of wrongdoing might,
in fact, be true.
He started by taking Ofcr. Bowen and Sgt. Castle to Oklahoma City
PD’s firearms range. They’d told him that in an effort to stop the
onrushing Carr they had fired as fast as they could pull the trigger
that fateful night. He asked them to do that again--repeatedly--while
they were videotaped by Lewinski and one of FSRC’s National Advisory
Board members, Parris Ward. Ward, who heads the firm Biodynamics
Engineering, is a prominent computer animator whose vivid
reconstructions of police shootings and other controversial events are
frequently introduced as pivotal evidence in high-profile court cases.
The videotapes offered gross time stamps of the officers shooting.
But back in his lab in Pacific Palisades, CA, Ward’s ultra-sophisticated
equipment was able to break down the sample firings into hundredths of a
second. That revealed that the officers had been able to shoot in a
range of .233 to .268 of a second per round.
Now Lewinski, working with Ward and his precision equipment, set
about the laborious task of calculating the sequence and timing of every
round that had struck Carr.
Lewinski figured that the round which entered Carr’s left side at
waist level had to have been the initial round fired by Bowen and the
first of the fusillade to hit the running suspect. “This could only have
come from one officer at one point in the action,” Lewinski says.
Almost simultaneous to that round, according to investigators’
reports, Carr had stumbled and had “thrown” the concrete at Castle, who
was then less than 5 feet away. The chunk hit Castle’s left shoulder.
At about the point Carr had reached in his line of travel when all
this happened there was a depression in the ground that accommodated a
drain grate. In the dark and malevolently focused on rushing Castle,
Carr would not likely have seen this hole. If his left foot had gone
down in it he would certainly have stumbled, his raised left hand would
likely have involuntarily released the concrete and--most important,
Lewinski knew from his extensive study of physical dynamics--his body
would have thrust sharply forward and then twisted to the right as he
tried unsuccessfully to regain his balance and his right leg collapsed
from the sudden, unexpected shift of his body weight. Bowen’s shots
coming from the left would have contributed to this motion.
Turning right and then falling face down toward the ground would have
positioned him so that most of Bowen’s 5 shots that connected--including
the troublesome fatal round--would have hit him from the rear, without
Bowen advancing significantly toward him.
Painstakingly, Lewinski and Ward gradually reconstructed this
probable timing and sequence:
- 0.000 second: Bowen’s first shot to Carr’s left hip (timing
baseline).
- 0.233 second: Bowen’s second round, to the left waistline,
slightly to the rear
- 0.500 second: Bowen’s third round, to the left buttock (the
fatal shot)
- 0.600 second: Castle’s first round, a miss
- 0.733 second: Bowen’s fourth round, to the right rear calf
- 0.867 second: Castle’s second round, to the left wrist
- 0.967 second: Bowen’s fifth round, to the left rear thigh
- 1.133 seconds: Castle’s third round, to the inner right thigh
- 1.200 seconds: Bowen’s sixth (last) round, a miss to the
suspect’s right
- 1.400 seconds: Castle’s fourth round, a miss
- 1.600 seconds: Castle’s fifth round, a miss (last round fired).
“This sequence of rounds, matched to bullet trajectories and times,
when put all together makes a sensible scenario of what occurred,”
Lewinski says. “Things can only happen in a certain way, and based on
the science of the situation, we are confident this is the way.”
In confirming the incredible speed in which police shootings can go
down, incidentally, this is a classic case: 11 rounds fired by these 2
officers in just 1.6 seconds, start to finish.
Parris Ward’s
4 dramatic animation clips recreating the shooting.
Versions for all 4 clips are available in both high- and low-resolution
versions and can be played in both QuickTime and Windows Media Player.
When the lawsuit went to trial in U.S. District Court last November,
Ward’s elegant and gripping color animation of the shooting and
Lewinski’s detailed explanation of the science behind it were highlights
of the officers’ defense presented by attorneys Robert Manchester
(brother of the famed historian William Manchester) and Susan Knight
(wife of an Oklahoma peace officer). The jury was shown the conflict
recreated in time-coded slow motion, in freeze-frames and in actual
time, from a variety of angles.
The key element was the placement of Bowen’s fatal round early in the
sequence. Without that being plausibly positioned and explained, the
plaintiff’s spectre of a final, fatal “execution” shot might have seem
much more credible.
Johnnie Cochran, who had been expected to head the plaintiff’s case,
failed to show, reportedly because of health problems. An associate from
Hawaii replaced him.
The new attorney tried to convince the jury that Ward’s animation was
unrealistic. During cross examination, he had Lewinski get down on the
courtroom floor, with his butt thrust toward the jury, and try to assume
the position that he claimed Carr had been in when he took the fatal
round. Lewinski could not do so--because, as he patiently explained,
this was a dynamic posture that occurred ever so briefly while the
suspect was falling.
The plaintiffs presented their own animated version of the shooting.
But it was built backward from the alleged “execution shot,” which the
plaintiffs claimed was fired after Carr had come to rest against the
bench. In critiquing this scenario, Lewinski explained in detail why it
was illogical and inaccurate and not based on sound principles. “They
ignored science for the purpose of constructing a story that fit their
conception of the shooting,” he says.
Among other things, Lewinski also testified about FSRC research that
documents why the officers could not have instantly stopped shooting
once Carr started to fall and was no longer an imminent threat. (This
research is detailed in an article for The Police Marksman magazine
titled “Time to Start Shooting, Time to Stop Shooting” and can be
accessed through the FSRC website: www.forcescience.org.
A member of FSRC’s Technical Advisory Board, Dr. Paul Michel, an
optometrist from Littleton, CO, also testified for the defense. He
explained the ambient light levels that would have existed in the
courtyard and how the darkened conditions would have affected the
officers’ ability to immediately perceive details of the action.
Two other defense experts have recently been added to FSRC’s
Technical Board. They are Greg Karim, a retired Oklahoma City cop now
heading a regional ballistics lab in Austin, TX, who testified about
shell-casing ejection patterns and other firearms-related technical
material, and Joe Callanan, a former Los Angeles County (CA) Sheriff’s
officer now with Specialized Training Consultants in Morro Bay, CA, who
reviewed the police tactics used in trying to deal with Carr.
On Nov. 22, after days of testimony and arguments, the jury returned
its verdict. Four long years after the shooting occurred, the officers
were finally exonerated. The plaintiffs were granted nothing, and there
was no reimbursement for the substantial funds the plaintiffs’ attorneys
had put forth to prepare for trial.
This case, incidentally, is the third in which Lewinski has helped to
successfully defend officers against Johnnie Cochran’s legal armada.
II. TIMELY INFO ON “SHOTS FIRED”
A timely article on “Surviving ‘Shots Fired’ Calls” by FSRC National
Advisory Board member Dave Grossi appears in The Law Enforcement Trainer
magazine (4th quarter 2004), just published by the American Society for
Law Enforcement Training.
Grossi reinforces the risks of these common but hazardous calls by
citing a number of cases of officer deaths resulting from them, and
reviews appropriate tactics for approaching them.
The value of the article was underscored a few days ago in Ceres, CA,
when an AWOL Marine fired a shot into the pavement of a liquor store
parking lot. He then went inside and told the clerk, “Somebody just
fired at me. Call the police.”
Minutes later officers arrived in multiple units. Waiting with an
assault rifle, the suspect shot 2 officers, who went down. One was able
to crawl to safety. The other died when the suspect ran up to him and
fired 2 more rounds into the back of his head.
Several hours later in another confrontation with police, the suspect
himself was killed, apparently the successful initiator of a
suicide-by-cop.
A good reminder not to take any dispatch for granted. In this case,
the “victim/complainant” turned out to be the perpetrator. Under such
circumstances any officer responding in the wrong mindset could be a
ready candidate for assassination.
View actual
video surveillance footage and news reports on this incident.
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