Artificial intelligence cannot offer exact stats on how many officers each year are killed while they sit in their patol cars. They estmate each year some 3–8 officers are killed while sitting in patrol cars and perhaps 10–20 shot but surviving in similar situations. Back in the 1970s, the ’80s, and even the ’90s, the phrase “the car as a coffin” was already a warning, a cop training phrase, a “word to the wise” about being stuck in a car and getting killed by an outside shooter. The advice was simple:
“Get out of the car! Because the car is a coffin. Or shoot fast. Or drive away fast! Or shoot and drive both! Fast! The car is a coffin.”
When things got hot and you predict bullets could, or would fly, or while bullets were indeed flying, you try to get out of the car. Get out because the car is an enclosed coffin. So we got out if we could. Because you know…sometimes in a second you can’t get out. I followed this golden rule. But even when you believe in it, you can still get caught there in an instant.
Like I did one disturbing Saturday summer night in 1980. When I got stuck…
“Sixty-one,” the dispatcher said.
“Go ahead,” my reserve police partner Joe Reilly said.
“Domestic. Brothers fighting in back yard. The Starnes brothers. Mother called it in. 615 Jasper Street.”
“Ten-four.”
“Ask if the two brothers are wanted,” I told Reilly.
“Dispatcher, check wants and warrants on the brothers.”
“In progress… and they’re clear wants and warrants.”
“Ten-four.”
Damn. The Starnes brothers. About half-crazy troublemakers. Almost twins, born so close together they looked like mirror images. And in just about the same kinds of twin trouble. Drugs, fighting, burglaries. It wasn’t too late yet in the evening. About 8 p.m. Too early for the real trouble these neighborhoods brewed. We drove through the busy streets on the warm night. We didn’t need to look up 615 Jasper on the map. We’d been there before.
We pulled up. Reilly and I got out and heard the loud argument in the backyard behind the long, old white house. We walked up the driveway beside the house, passed through the metal chain-link gate, and into the yard. The mom was there in a house dress, arms folded. A neighbor we knew by sight, a very big dude, a good dude, was calmly standing by. When he needed to, he pushed the brothers apart. The brothers were neck-vein-popping mad over something.
“Hey!” I said loudly. “What’s going on?”
The mother spoke up and relayed the problem which, frankly, I don’t recall well enough to report here.We all talked it over for a moment, and I appreciated the presence of the neighbor. But upon our arrival, the brothers suddenly wanted to disappear. Afraid of being arrested again? Something else?
I don’t know. But it seemed like our very appearance ended the fight. Brother Buddy Starnes was shirtless and wearing very, very tight, light-colored jeans. This will be important later. Just about the time I was officially wrapping up the conversation, Buddy left prematurely. Looking back now, it was obvious he had something to hide, or something to worry about. He turned and walked away well before I finished, and I casually walked after him down the driveway. Reilly lagged back a few seconds more to finish up with the mom. Buddy led the way down the driveway toward the street, and I looked him over from behind.
Still looking him over, there were no clothing prints of weapons that I could see in those tight pants as we walked off.
“Buddy, next time don’t leave until we’re through,” I said.
I wasn’t trying to be bossy or a prick. I just wanted to say something to see what he would say or do. Checking the “temperature.” He looked over his shoulder and gave me a real dirty look. Which, you know…sticks and stones. A look never hurt me. A look will just alert-not-hurt. He strutted off onto the street toward a crowd of folks up the next avenue. I walked around the front of the patrol car, opened the door, and sat behind the wheel.
The very instant my butt hit the seat and the door clicked closed, I caught motion in the corner of my left eye. Buddy was strutting back toward me, his right hand burrowing into his right pocket.
Shit. Coffin. Instinctively, instantly, I pulled my revolver. The window was already down, and I laid the four-inch barrel of my magnum on top of the door. Barrel right at him. It’s big. And he saw it.
“WHAT you pulling?” I growled.
He yanked his empty hand out of his pocket and stood there. Expressionless. Looking at the hole in the barrel of my gun. Now I tell you, I stared hard at that pocket. It was flat. Flat, flat, flat. His jeans were very tight. I made a snap decision. He couldn’t have anything in that pocket. Or any pocket, for that matter.
“Get the fuck outta here,” I told him in a very quiet, very sinister way.
Expressionless, he waited in a stare-down with me and the gun for a second or two. Then he turned and walked away in his original direction. I didn’t holster my Python. I just watched him walk off. Reilly slipped into the passenger seat and froze when he saw me—gun out. Barrel resting atop the door.
“Wha…?”
“I don’t know,” I told him, “he turned back on me, and it looked like he was pulling something from his pocket.”
“Okay.”
“But I can’t imagine he had anything in there. Those pants are skintight.”
“Yeah. I looked him over too. I didn’t see anything.”
I put my gun away, started the car, and we drove off.
Not even half a minute later…
“Sixty-one, are you still on Jasper Street?” the dispatcher asked.
“Just a block away,” Reilly answered.
“Man shot on porch, 619 Jasper. Ambulance en route.”
What? Like just next door to where we just were? I whipped the car around and blasted over to 619 Jasper. We slid up in front and ran to the porch where an older woman was tending to a man lying on the porch floorboards. He was down, shot in the chest. I propped him up slightly. We told her to get us a towel, and Reilly ran to the trunk for our first-aid kit. Reilly also radioed the dispatcher and put Buddy Starnes out on the air as the shooting suspect. We “plugged” the hole and applied pressure. The old man could talk. He said he was sitting on his porch when “that boy,” without a shirt and wearing tan pants, walked by in the street, looked at him, and then shot him.
“Was that Buddy Starnes?” I asked as the ambulance sirens closed in.
“It couldna’ been… but I don’t see real well. Not far. At night.”
The bullet hole didn’t look very big, but a chest wound is a chest wound. The EMTs arrived and took over.
We, and several other units scoured the streets for Buddy. Reilly and I checked every nightclub in the district. Asked everyone on the street. For hours.
Nothing. And I knew I had screwed up. I made a snap decision and let that little piece of shit walk away.
He did have a thin gun after all. Must have. Probably a small semi-auto tucked in that pocket. That bullet was meant for me. But since he couldn’t shoot me, frustrated, he walked a few houses away and shot that old man instead. I should have stepped out and patted him down. But I let a visual-search-only trick my judgment.
I met with the detective on call that night and told him what had happened. He hunted Starnes with us in his own car. I can’t remember which detective it was. He asked Reilly and me to write supplements to the shooting report when we got back to HQ.
CID worked up a case on Starnes. The old man lived. It turned out to be a .32-caliber bullet that didn’t do much damage. Within a day or two, detectives found Buddy. but they never found the gun. He confessed to shooting the old man. Said he’d always had trouble with the neighbor growing up. A cranky old-neighbor motive? But deep down, I knew what really happened. I had ticked Buddy off first. He wanted to shoot me in the car, but I got the drop on him. And since I let him walk away, he shot that old man instead.
Months later, and even years later I would stop and talk to that old man whenever I saw him sitting out on that same porch. Even when I later became a detective. He frequently reminded me that he and Buddy had problems since Buddy was a kid, and that’s why he was shot. But I still feel like I was the precursor to his shooting. I know I was. What… what do you say to a man like that to make any kind of amends?
The old man died in the 1990s. I still think about it sometimes. The old man. I still see Starnes walking toward me and the car. Just a flashback of him taking a few steps, hand half-way into his pocket.
My good, trusty compadre and still working Texas cop, Jeff “Rawhide” Laun, told me that even now, fifty years later, they still use that phrase “Car-Cofffin” in police work and training. Good.
Today, officers are even more trapped in the driver’s seat with all the techno systems between the seats.
No crawling across the front seat to escape?
No dropping out the passenger door?
No diving under the dash?
You are stuck?
The coffin shrinks?
But this was as close as I ever got to being trapped in a car and shot. My friends have been shot at while inside cars. Those are other stories. But no matter how well I understood this, much I believed in it and worried about that classic training line…“The car is a coffin.” In a single instant, I still got stuck in there.
I am alive today because several times over the years I got my gun out first, and fast. I’m not some kind of quick-draw artist. Not at all. I’m just… quick to draw. My gun just appeared up and in my hand when I needed it. Practice, I guess. I always say when teaching that the best quick draw is getting your gun out just before you relly needed it.
Can’t drive off? If you have to shoot through the glass of your car—shoot. Don’t worry about the finer points of trajectory and how bullets may go slightly up or down through angled glass. You don’t have time to run the math. Just shoot. Make a hole, and maybe shoot through that hole if the suspect hasn’t moved.
Look here for a sales deal on both books…
