Cap kept going, starting down the outside stairwell as the team had figured, funneling into the hands of the van team. The second man out had his gun in his hand. When he came out the door, Redman put the scope on him. When the guy turned to look at the deputies on the walkway and began to raise his 9mm, Redman fired a .308 WIN boat-tail bullet into the man’s chest, one inch below his heart and slightly anterior. It sheared the breastbone as it went in, and the velocity expansion that fans out three inches in diameter around the bullet pulverized the two right chambers of the heart. He was dead within seconds.
That was when Redman heard the reports of the van team’s own MP5s. The first man down the stairway had pulled his 9mm from his waistband but did not get the chance to fire. Redman moved the scope down in time to see two blossoms sprout on the man’s chest like tiny roses opening in an accelerated-time-flash film.
Voices continued to sound and Redman swung the sights and caught a glimpse of a booted foot leaving the targeting field. He moved his eye from the scope and watched a man leap over the walkway railing and hit the ground. The guy rolled, using his rifle to absorb the shock, and scrambled to his feet: a runner. Up on the walkway, the deputies plowed full into the fourth man who stepped out of the room, tackling him but also losing chase on the runner. Watching the confusion, Redman lifted his rifle, slid on his ass across the top of the dresser and took two steps to the window. From there he had an angle on the runner, who had in his hands the automatic rifle he’d been trying to sell. The parking lot deputies never saw him and Redman called out, “On the fence! On the fence!” as a warning and then swung his scope to the right, steadying the rifle against the window frame. He had a full view of the runner, who had made the chain-link fence and was scrambling up. He watched him throw one leg over and then, straddling the top, sling the rifle up to his shoulder and aim back at the parking lot. Redman’s shot was perfect given the circumstances. The boat-tail caught the man just below the left sideburn, half an inch in front of the earhole. He was dead in a millisecond.
In the investigation that follows every time a lawman fires his weapon, the operation came out clean. The SWAT team acted exactly as it had been trained to. They’d done an assessment of the danger and secured the room. They’d assigned adequate overwhelming force. When hostile weapons were identified, and when those weapons became a danger to team members, those members shot to kill. It all went down as it should have under quickly changing circumstances.
Only the media questioned the operation, which, Redman knew, is what the media does. When someone dies by the hand of a cop, journalists seem to be sent out to determine if it was a fair fight. But SWAT officers know it is never a fair fight. It’s never supposed to be. It’s not a game.
The sheriff was adept at spinning the local media. The public information officers dealt with the reporters they had relationships with. But it had been Redman’s fifth killing in the line of duty. The editorial writers, dusty white collars in isolated offices who only watched TV and hadn’t been on the streets in years, had their opinions.
Redman could still quote the editorial written in the Daily News only two days after the SWAT shooting:
Since all witnesses to the contrary are dead, it may be impossible to know exactly what occurred in the middle of a darkened motel parking lot last Tuesday. Of course the Sheriff’s Office has cleared itself—using its own investigators—but a taxpayer-supported agency that is given the mandate to protect and serve does not have a license to kill as if they were some kind of 007 squad. Deputy Redman has fired the fatal shots on five SWAT unit killings in the last seven years. If the man has a quick trigger finger or a questionable lust for the job, he should be arraigned or at least fired. If he has confused his role with that of the Marine sniper he once was in the Gulf War, that mind-set should not be allowed to roam our civilian