I received really positive feedback after the last column and people expressed an interest in more of the same. I’m going to share two more stories about incidents I’m personally familiar with and wrap it up with an explanation regarding why I’m sharing all of this.

One night while on patrol, I heard a high priority radio call broadcast of a “Domestic Violence/ADW (assault with a deadly weapon) suspect. The broadcast went on to provide a physical description of the suspect, who was said to be armed with a handgun. The call was given an emergency Code 3 designation, which meant the officers were to respond with lights and siren. Since I was relatively close, I got a hold of the assigned unit on a tactical frequency and we began coordinating our response. We decided that my K9 partner and I would deploy to the rear of the location, while the assigned two-officer unit made contact at the front. I was paralleling the assigned unit on a different street and remember hearing their siren over the radio as we formulated our plan.

As we neared the location, I heard one of the officers frantically broadcasting that they needed help. I knew that they were still a few blocks from the target address, so my initial assumption was that they had encountered the armed suspect as he fled the location. I wish that had been the case! Almost immediately after the initial request for help, the same officer again broadcast that they needed help and an ambulance for a 3-year-old male, unconscious and not breathing, who had been struck by their vehicle.

As one would imagine, the scene was chaotic. The 3-year-old boy was transported to a nearby hospital, but pronounced dead on arrival. As the situation evolved, we learned that the toddler had been standing on the sidewalk with his family when they heard the police vehicle’s siren. According to the family, the little boy was fascinated by emergency vehicles driving with lights and sirens (a common occurrence in this particular area) and would often run to a location so he could watch them pass. The combined opinion was that the little boy had heard the approaching police car siren and ran out into the street to watch it pass. It was there that he was struck by the police car.

Each of the officers was completely inconsolable. Each was the parent of young children, so it’s easy to understand how difficult this all was for them. In fact, I find it incredible that they were able to function at all in this set of circumstances. My own son was three at the time and it was extremely difficult for me to even be at the scene. There were many people present (I don’t know how many were parents) and all were absolutely devastated.

As I said before, I think it’s human nature to try and attach blame when something bad like this happens. We seek some sort of an explanation hoping, I believe, that we can somehow unravel it all and make sense of things. In this instance, all of the obvious questions were asked trying to understand how/why this all happened. Although they were assigned a Code 3 response, were the officers driving too fast? Why wasn’t someone holding the child’s hand when he was so near the street? What was a 3-year-old doing out on the street so late at night (this happened around 11 p.m.)? In the end, there were no answers to these questions that helped make sense of it all. Would answers make anyone involved somehow feel better?

What made all of this even harder to grasp (and even more horrible), is what we learned about the radio call that drove this tragic chain of events. That call was bogus! There was no man with a gun. There was a domestic incident where the boyfriend had violated a restraining order. He had gotten into an argument with his girlfriend and then refused to leave the location. The girlfriend had called the police because she wanted the boyfriend out of the house. All of the information regarding the handgun had been fabricated. The girlfriend admitted that she made it all up because she had been told that when she needed the police, if she mentioned that a gun was somehow involved in the situation, the police response would be elevated. In short, the cops would get to her faster. She was so afraid of her boyfriend that she lied to the dispatcher. This is something that happens quite frequently and, although illegal, is seldom prosecuted.

By definition, opinion columns should be thought provoking and that’s certainly my goal. So I’d ask the reader, is anyone at fault here? And if so, who? Who should be held accountable? Can the people involved be punished more than they undoubtedly already punish themselves? I’d be curious to hear opinions. Maybe you can guess where I’m going with all of this.

Blaine Blackstone is a retired Los Angeles Police Sergeant who enjoys the simpler life in Thompson Falls. He can be reached by email at [email protected].