My Facebook memories reminded me that six years ago today, I responded to one of the most unusual calls of my entire police career. Time has passed. I’m now retired, but I still think about this case almost every day of my life. This will be a long article about my direct involvement in an “active shooter” style murder, an impossible suspect misidentification, some incredible luck, and the intensely curious supernatural events that followed. I think you will find the story intriguing and the supernatural aftermath will make you question what you know about our consensus reality. Let’s dive in.
It was October 31, 2019. Halloween trick-or-treat night in the town where I worked as a police officer. I was working second shift (1400-2200 hours) patrol in a wealthy suburb of Columbus, Ohio. Because it was beggar’s night, my agency doubled our normal manpower and we had 10 patrol cruisers and two sergeants working the streets. It was about 6:30 at night and I was parked at a firehouse in my patrol district working with our firefighters to hand out candy to all the kids.
Suddenly, my portable radio beeped with the priority alert tones and the dispatchers came on the air to report two people being shot inside a house in our city. Mentally, I was more than a bit jaded at the time. I no longer enjoyed most aspects of my job. I had less than a year before I could retire and was sick of dealing with inept supervisors, corrupt bureaucrats, and the seemingly endless dramatic nonsense our citizens concocted on a daily basis. A night passing out candy to happy children was much more appealing to me than doing my usual police work.
Back to the radio dispatch.
Our dispatchers aired an urgent call describing a double shooting at a residence in my city. The crime occurred near the geographic center of our city of 10 square miles. I was working in the patrol district on the far south side of the city. I wasn’t close to the crime scene.
Because of all of the extra manpower we had on the streets, eight police officers and two supervisors marked themselves enroute to the call. Upon hearing the call being aired, I thought:
“I’m not close. Ten other cops are enroute and will be there in less than five minutes. They can handle it. I’ve seen enough dead bodies in my career. I’m not going to respond to this one. I’ll let the other guys respond and I’ll keep free to handle all the rest of the calls which will inevitably start coming in as soon as officers tie themselves up on something this important.”
I was monitoring the radio traffic as dispatchers updated the officers racing to the scene.
A woman called 911 to report that her mentally ill adult daughter had suddenly gotten up from the dinner table and shot both the caller and the caller’s husband (the suspect’s parents) multiple times. The caller ran to another room after being shot twice in the upper body. The caller was injured severely and was unable to escape from the house. The caller’s husband was unresponsive on the floor of the dining room after being shot three times in the torso.
The caller informed dispatchers that her daughter had fired the shots. The caller stated that the daughter had run down into the house’s basement and was currently reloading the gun in order to come back and finish off her parents.
As this information was being aired, the junior working sergeant marked on-scene and instructed other officers to set up a perimeter and call SWAT for a barricade situation.
The problem was that this situation was not a static barricade. We had two severely wounded victims and a suspect who was still on scene reloading the gun to finish them off. This was an active shooter call, not a barricade situation. We had to make entry, evacuate the wounded, and find the killer before she shot anyone else. Sitting back and waiting for SWAT was the wrong answer.
I was content to stay clear of this mess originally. My thoughts quickly changed to:
“The boss is fucking this up. We can’t wait an hour for SWAT to arrive. I better go help so this doesn’t get any worse.”
I hopped in my car and sped to the scene. The radio traffic was frantic. Everyone on scene was tied up doing something important. I sent the dispatchers a chat message on our computer system asking for the name, address, physical description, and vehicle ownership information about our known suspect. As everyone else was handling the scene, I figured I’d start working on finding the killer if she had escaped while the mother was on the phone with 911.
As I was responding, a more senior sergeant arrived on scene and took control. He realized the danger the victims were in and organized a forced entry through the back door of the residence. Officers made entry. They quickly cleared the first floor of the ranch-style house and start providing medical aid to the victims. One officer covered the closed door to the basement where everyone thought our killer was hiding.
As I pulled up to the scene, a neighbor from across the street flagged me down.
“I heard the shots over there. Are you guys looking for the daughter? She’s wearing a black coat and she fled on foot about two minutes before you got here.”
He gave us a direction of travel for the suspect. I aired the information and instructed other responding units to start looking for her.
Our medics were on scene but were not making entry because everyone still thought the killer was still inside the house. I approached the fire battalion chief at the improvised incident command post just up the street from the residence.
He looked at me and said “Where is the shooter?”
I informed him that we initially thought she was inside, but I just had a witness telling me that she had fled.
The battalion chief looked at me and said “I’ll send my medics in if you can find a cop to go with them as an armed escort.”
Knowing that two people were bleeding out inside the house, I said “I’m your escort. Let’s go.” I notified the officers inside the house that we were coming in and I escorted two teams of medics into the house.
The medics and I grabbed both injured victims and quickly carried them out to the waiting ambulances. Both were in very bad shape with multiple gun shot wounds to the upper body. The husband was not breathing and had no pulse. The medics started CPR in the back of the ambulance and I returned to the house.
With the victims evacuated, we could do a slow search of the rest of the house. Another officer and I cleared the basement. No suspect.
As we finished clearing the house, the dispatchers called me with the information I had previously requested. The suspect was a white female in her 30s who was suffering from extreme schizophrenia. She had brown hair, drove a brown sedan, and was wearing a black coat. She lived in a condo in our city about five miles from the crime scene. I shared this information with the supervisors on the scene. They asked me to go find her.
The killer’s mug shot.
I grabbed four other officers and we raced to the woman’s condo.
We parked on the back side of the condo and approached her building on foot. I was covering the house on our approach as we made our way through the suspect’s back yard. One officer went ahead to look around the corner of the building to visualize the front door and see if the suspect’s car was parked outside.
As he peeked around the corner, he motioned me to come up and take a look.
We were looking for a mentally ill woman who was about 30 years old and had brown hair. She was wearing a black coat and driving a brown sedan.
I looked around the corner and saw a brown sedan parked directly in front of the suspect’s condo. The windows of the car were all covered with aluminum foil. Brown car owned by a mentally ill suspect? Check.
There was a woman kneeling in the parking lot on the driver’s side of the car. She appeared to be hiding something under the front seat of the car. The woman was white, had brown hair, and was wearing a black coat. Check. We have our shooting suspect.
We made a hasty plan. I would provide lethal force cover while the other officer made verbal commands and would do the handcuffing.
We advanced on the woman. I held her at gunpoint while the other officer ordered her into a kneeling handcuffing position. The woman complied.
We approached and as the second officer grabbed her arm to handcuff her, the woman jumped to her feet, yelled “No!” and attempted to run away. We took her to the ground and we got her cuffed. I rolled her over and started to search her.
The woman appeared to be in her late 50s. She didn’t look like a 30-year old suspect.
We got her ID. We ran the plate of the car she was in. The names matched up. This was not our suspect. It just so happened that we encountered another random crazy woman who had parked her car directly in front of the suspect’s house and loosely matched the suspect’s description. How could that happen?
As we were sorting out the mistaken identity, I looked over towards the suspect’s condo. She was standing on the front porch about 15 feet away from us watching us tackle the other woman. She could have easily killed us if she had wanted to.
I approached the suspect and patted her down. No weapons. The woman was catatonic and had the “1000-yard stare.” I asked her some questions. She replied: “I really don’t want to talk about that.” We arrested her and executed a search warrant on her residence. We found the gun in the pocket of a coat she had placed in her bedroom. It was a Smith and Wesson model 637 airweight .38 snub. It had five empty cases in the cylinder. There were 15 remaining rounds of Federal Hydrashock bullets still in the box in the same coat pocket. She had extra ammo, but she didn’t reload after shooting her parents.
I’m very glad she didn’t reload her gun because she could have very easily shot us while we were struggling with the other woman outside of her house.
As a side note, when we took down the first woman, we actually broke her femur. Oops. The city paid her medical bills and wrote her a big check to avoid a lawsuit. What a strange set of circumstances that could never possibly happen again.
The father had been shot three times in the torso. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. The mother lived. She was shot twice. Once in the shoulder and once in the upper back. She spent some time in the hospital but was eventually released and has apparently recovered.
The suspect was judged mentally incompetent to stand trial. She is indefinitely confined to a state mental health facility until she either recovers her mental faculties for trial or she dies.
This crazy story is about to get crazier.
I was feeling pretty good about my performance. Initially. I wasn’t even going to respond to the call. I ended up organizing the rescue efforts, clearing the crime scene house, and leading the team that found and arrested the murderer. Not a bad night’s work. While at first I didn’t think my coworkers needed my help, it turned out that they really did. I was glad to be in a position where I could put my skills to use.
I went home at about midnight and went to bed. When I woke up, I was completely blind in my left eye.
What the fuck? Only I could break my eyeball while sleeping. What was going on?
I didn’t suffer any head injuries during the arrest. My left eyeball appeared normal with no visible trauma. Pupil size was normal and I was able to track side to side motion. Everything appeared OK with the eye, but all I could see was very wavy and distorted shadows. I couldn’t read with my left eye or see with it at distance.
I called off work and scheduled an emergency appointment with my ophthalmologist. She examined my eye and said “There’s something wrong with your retina. I don’t know what it is. I’m going to refer you to a retina specialist.” It was Friday. She got me in to the retina specialist on Monday morning.
During the weekend while I was awaiting my appointment with the retina specialist, I got a random call from my late friend Marcus Wynne. Marcus was a super genius. One of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He did some infantry military service which eventually led to his working overseas with some covert three-letter agencies. After he grew tired of that work, he became an air marshal. He worked his way up that organization until he became the head firearms instructor in the pre-9/11 world when the air marshals were the best trained law enforcement officers in the country. Marcus got stage four stomach cancer and had to medically retire.
He transitioned to life as a best selling fictional author and wrote about a dozen amazing books. He was very interested in hypnosis, shamanism, and the supernatural. When his cancer became terminal, Marcus checked himself into the Mayo clinic. While there, he put himself into a hypnotic trance that appeared to be a coma. He remained comatose for a couple weeks and then woke himself up. When he regained consciousness, his stage four cancer was completely gone without any medical intervention. Marcus was a unique individual with the ability to contact the spiritual realms in a manner that I still can’t explain.
I was telling Marcus about my blindness. I had not yet told him about the murder scene I had responded to immediately before I woke up blind. After I described my symptoms, Marcus said:
“That’s an easy fix. Your blindness is your body’s way of telling you that you are seeing horrible things that no human is meant to see. What happened at your job the night before you woke up blind?”
I had to tell Marcus about the double shooting I had responded to the night before.
He replied:
“That’s it. Your body is telling you that you aren’t meant to see that shit. You are going to remain blind until you quit your police job. It’s your body’s way of telling you that your job is negatively affecting your psyche.”
What a bunch of woo-woo bullshit. I always knew Marcus was a bit crazy. I laughed off his advice and went to my doctor’s appointment the following day.
The docs diagnosed me as having retinal neovascularization. I had rogue blood vessels growing on the back of my retina. Those vessels leaked fluid that put pressure on my retina and deformed it.
The treatment involved getting injections into my eyeball to destroy the rogue blood vessels. The docs said that I would need regular eye injections for the rest of my life. They said that my vision probably wouldn’t improve with the injections, but the shots would prevent my vision from getting worse for awhile. Eventually, the injections would stop working and I would be totally blind in my left eye.
I got my first injection. After a couple weeks, my vision improved enough that I was able to go back to work. I still had really blurry vision in that eye, but I could see a little bit.
I got additional injections every six weeks and my vision improved slightly with every shot. I continued to work until my retirement date eight months later.
In August of the following year, my vision stabilized. I was 20/30 in the eye before the retinal damage. After a bunch of injections my vision stabilized at 20/60. My vision has remained stable without injections for more than five years now.
My vision stabilized in August of 2020. Do you know what else happened in August of 2020? I retired from my police job.
I can’t explain it, but my friend Marcus was right. When I stopped seeing horrific stuff in my cop job, my vision improved. Was it the injections that helped my eye? Or was it the fact that I was no longer seeing horrific crime scenes? My vision improvement shocked my doctors, but Marcus wasn’t surprised at all. He knew what was going on way before I had a diagnosis from the retina specialists.
The world is a crazy place full of things we just don’t understand. I’m glad I can see again without injections into my eyeball. I’m also glad I’m no longer regularly seeing gory crime scenes.
Happy Halloween.
