Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.
James Webster
When is the best time to kill a vampire? While they’re asleep in their coffin, right? We’ve all seen the movies in which a brave soul sneaks into a gothic mansion, creeps down into a terrifying basement to find the casket, and ultimately plunges a wooden stake into the beast’s wicked heart. The hero saves her community, herself, and even the soul of the hellish monster in one mallet driven stroke. She emerges from the castle into daylight, and somehow we know her life will never be the same. She grew stronger and wiser in the process, and she has gained a newfound sense of courage and drive that will enrich her life.
Now, when is the best time to kill a beastly intimate partner who beat the crap out of you earlier that night, indicated he might kill you next time, and then passed out drunk on the couch? While he’s sleeping, right? Just like the heroine in the vampire movie, you could rid your life of a man who is literally sucking your vitality and thirst for life right out of your body. You have an opportunity as he lies there snoring and flatulent to remove this violent waste from the world forever, and all it will take is one mighty swing of that claw hammer you just retrieved from his tool cabinet. You know, the cabinet he bought with the money you’d saved to buy the kids some clothes for the new school year.
Just do it, you think! Slam the claw end down hard right into his temple and end his evil reign. I’ll be free and the world will be safer. He doesn’t deserve to live after all he’s done, and I certainly won’t be able to live my life as long as he’s alive. Control my breathing, get my pulse under control, and kill the beast before he wakes.
Except, of course, that you’d be committing murder, and your own life would be forfeit.
In every state of this country allowances are made in the law that permit individuals to defend themselves if they are under attack, or to defend someone else if they are under attack. This is what allows police officers to intervene on a stranger’s behalf if that person is in danger, and it is what allows, say, a woman who is being throttled by her boyfriend to crack him in the head with a baseball bat to get him to remove his hands from her throat before he kills her.
What is not allowed is outright murder or, in most cases, turning defensive actions into offensive ones. For example, let’s say you are walking through a park at night and a man grabs you and tries to pull you into some bushes so that he can rape you. In response you might pull out a canister of pepper spray, a pistol, or a knife with which to defend yourself. For the purposes of discussion, let’s say you’re the one with the pepper spray, and you hose this bad fish down with the whole damn can. He’s instantly blinded, and he falls to the ground writhing in agony. (Go team! The good guys are winning.)
At this point you’re faced with three choices. Choice one is to run like hell and call 911. Choice two is to try to take him into custody as a citizen’s arrest. Choice three is you beat the snot out of the guy for all the pain he has brought on the world, exacting justice and even insuring, in a limited way, domestic tranquility once you’re done with him.
For the record, choice one is probably your best bet. Unless you are trained and ready to actually take somebody into custody, you’re much safer to just get away from the sobbing fellow and call for police as soon as you’re at a safe distance. Choice three (the beating the hell out of him option) would certainly be the most gratifying, but at some point you will probably have crossed the line from simply defending yourself to becoming an offender.
Now, to be completely honest, most cops would chuckle if they knew you’d taken a few whacks at the guy. They certainly understand how fear and adrenaline drives people to get in a few extra licks, and any time we see a little person getting the better of a bully, we tend to be amused. However, you need to understand that vigilante justice is viewed dimly by the criminal justice system, and each additional kick or whack with a stick exposes you to increased criminal and civil liability. In other words, you could get arrested or the guy could turn around and sue you later.
We’ve all seen video of cops abusing a guy who just led them on a high-speed pursuit or resisted arrest. The adrenaline is pumping, and it is easy to get into the mindset of demanding a little street justice before the guy is carted off to jail. It’s wrong, of course, and those beatings are a stain on my profession that I resent greatly, but I certainly know that feeling of wanting to let the thug know he should never, ever do what he just did again.
Those videos play again and again on television and the Internet, and they often lead to a community outcry focusing on police brutality and calling for overhauls of the police department, firings of the officers involved, and additional training. These measures might well be valid and healthy for a department if the video footage demonstrates a department-wide sensibility and not just the actions of a rogue cop who went too far. It is just as likely that such video presents the cop’s actions out of context and don’t include all of the suspect’s actions leading up to the arrest and struggle. I’m just asking that everyone--media, public, police investigators, and judges--present the entire story before passing judgment.
Regardless, the scrutiny of the media and the public serve to remind us that vigilante justice is unacceptable. Just as it is true that while police officers are allowed to defend themselves and victims of abuse must be afforded the same consideration, it is also true that as police officers are expected to uphold the law during even the most trying of moments, citizens must be expected to do the same.
In other words, unless you are defending yourself in a moment of violence, you don’t get to act as judge and jury toward another human being, even if that person is wicked and will probably be dangerous toward you in the future. As expedient as it might seem to plunge the wooden stake into the heart of a vicious monster of a batterer might be we, as a culture that values the sanctity of fair investigation and due process, cannot abide by anything else.
Ellen had lived with her husband Robert for over twelve years before I ever met her. The police had been called to her house three times before the night my team and I first got involved in her life. All three previous instances involved hints and allegations that Robert had victimized her in some fashion, but Ellen evidently never would cooperate with the responding officers or make a disclosure about what he’d been doing to her.
It is fair to say that Ellen had opportunities to get help and, whether because of fear, loyalty, dread of losing Robert’s significant finances, or just shortsightedness, Ellen never took advantage of those offers.
So one night Ellen shot him while he slept. Then Ellen recruited her brother-in-law to help her dispose of the body, promising Robert’s little brother half of Robert’s assets once the dust settled. Robert’s little brother was a meth-head and far more loyal to his addiction than Robert. I’ve often wondered over the years if Ellen and Little Brother had a thing going behind Robert’s back, but I guess we’ll never know.
Ellen and Little Brother hauled Robert downstairs and wrapped him in plastic bubble wrap and blankets so that when they were done Robert looked like a great big burrito. And then, for whatever reason, Little Brother just left him down there in the garage.
Several days later Ellen started to figure out that Little Brother was out of his mind, and I think it started to dawn on her that he might just get it into his head to get rid of her as well so that he wouldn’t have to share a single penny. This must have irritated Ellen greatly because it was her original plan, after all. One might assume that Ellen would take the initiative to rid herself of Little Brother as well, but that would still leave her with the body disposal problem. The problem, by the way, was growing steadily more cumbersome because Little Brother’s girlfriend moved into the house and brought her toddler daughter. Oh, and Robert was starting to melt inside the burrito, and no amount of deodorizer, baking soda, and lye was going to keep covering the resultant smell from seeping out into the quiet little neighborhood.
Ellen had to take drastic action, and so four days after she killed her husband she walked into a police station in a completely different city and made a sobbing confession about how she’d had to kill her husband before he killed her.
Ellen also told the officers that Little Brother was heavily armed, extremely paranoid, and decidedly unwilling to be taken to jail. She didn’t mention the toddler or the girlfriend, but I’m sure she had other things on her mind.
Given the nature of the crime, the fact that the house was situated in the small, peaceful neighborhood, and the knowledge that Little Brother would probably not come out of the house willingly, a decision was made early on that the Emergency Response Team (also known as SWAT) would make entry into the house in the middle of the night with the hope that Little Brother would be asleep and could be taken quickly by surprise.
One might argue after the fact that we could have captured the guy as he ran errands or went out to lunch at some point in the future, but we knew we were dealing with an accomplice to murder who was reportedly wigged out on crystal meth, heavily armed and had nothing to lose in trying to flee in a car chase or shoot it out with police right in the middle of the subdivision. Our SWAT team was well practiced and experienced, and it was simply expected that the team would be able to “take” the house and make it safe in less than ten seconds.
I was a medic for the team in those days. My job was to be as close to the team as possible and to render emergency treatment in the event that an officer went down under fire until the scene could be made safe for ambulance paramedics to come in and take over. It was an awesome responsibility I was very proud to have had in those days. The assignment afforded me very close-up views to the precision and discipline of that team of men, and I was able to be right on the front lines as they served warrants on some of the most dangerous of criminals.
Until that night I’d never seen any of them get shot at or have any experience other than complete, dramatic, and lightening fast success. That night, however, Little Brother, who was wide-awake on a meth binge, started shooting as soon as the first man entered the house, despite the fact that his girlfriend and her child were in the home. A round went through the side of the house and struck the home across the street hard enough that the family inside heard the thump and felt the vibration.
The men that went in Ellen’s house that night deserve incredible praise because instead of spraying the retreating bastard with automatic rifle fire they realized within a tenth of a second that two innocents were inside as well. They could have justifiably opened up on him right through the sheetrock walls, but they hunkered down, got the woman and her child out, and then talked Little Brother into surrendering.
And then we made the grizzly discovery of wrapped-up-Robert in the basement.
The rest of the story is fairly benign. Ellen and Little Brother both picked up guilty verdicts, and both are slated to spend the majority of the rest of their lives behind bars. It didn’t need to be that way, of course. Ellen was most certainly frightened of Robert, and if she had taken any of the several opportunities offered to her for help she might have actually found her freedom and not had to stoop to murder to do so.
Some may frown at me for saying so, but I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Ellen. Part of her motivation was greed, plain and simple. She lived in a city in which the police really did care and would certainly have gotten her out of harms way and into a safer environment if she had worked with us even a little bit. Instead, her solution was to kill a man while he slept, and then collaborate with his own brother to rid her house of his rotting corpse and split his money. Robert was an asshole, I imagine, but she was a murdering, greedy bitch.
There have been other women, though, who have felt so trapped, so alienated by friends and family, and so let down by the police and court’s systems, that they have honestly come to the conclusion that killing their sleeping or defenseless spouse is akin to self defense. I can’t help but wonder if they were, in fact, let down by the local police agency and, if so, could one proactive, supportive cop have made the difference?
The only honest answer to that question is--maybe. And if the answer is maybe, then we as police officers, and we as communities are duty bound to do everything in our power to help victims of violence in the home have better choices for their life than the taking of another’s. Ellen was flat wrong in what she did, but if a woman like Ellen asks for help and doesn’t get it, maybe she’ll come up with the idea that no other choice exists. If her friends tell her to leave him without offering a couch or an alternative place for her to go; if the police tell her there’s nothing they can do; if the shelters are full and a social worker doesn’t take the time to help her come up with a Plan B; if the judge won’t give her an order of protection because she got stage fright at the hearing and couldn’t tell him why she was afraid of this man; and if the suspect himself keeps haunting and torturing her and telling her again and again that he might just kill her next time, maybe she’ll just one night decide there is never going to be a next time. If that happens, we all have to bear some of the responsibility for the resultant course of events.
