The Door Is the Most Dangerous Part

At about five o'clock in the morning on September 10, 2026, members of the Hernando County Sheriff's Office SWAT team approached a house in Spring Hill, Florida, to execute a search warrant connected to an investigation into cocaine sales. This wasn't a couple of patrol officers wandering blindly into an unknown disturbance. It was a planned operation. Marked police vehicles were outside with their emergency lights flashing. A SWAT BearCat was positioned near the residence. Deputies repeatedly announced over a loudspeaker that they were from the sheriff's office and ordered the occupant to come outside. (Hernando County Sheriff's Office)

Then they went to the door.

As deputies attempted to breach it, 29-year-old Anthony Cusati allegedly fired multiple rounds from inside the house, straight through the door. Deputy Jonathan Allion was struck in the arm. Sgt. Scott Lewis, an 11-year veteran, was hit in the upper left leg and in the center of his body armor. One of the rounds struck his body-worn camera. The deputies did not return fire because, according to Sheriff Al Nienhuis, they couldn't see the man shooting at them. Both deputies survived and were eventually released from the hospital. Cusati was taken into custody and faces multiple charges, including attempted murder of law-enforcement officers.

There is a lesson in those few seconds that every cop understands.

The door is the most dangerous part.

Not every door, of course. Most doors open and nothing happens. I stood in front of more doors during my police career than I could possibly remember. They belonged to houses, apartments, hotel rooms, businesses and places that probably shouldn't have qualified as residences at all. Behind them were victims, suspects, frightened children, angry husbands, crying wives, drunks, people having mental-health crises, people who didn't want the police there and people desperately waiting for us to arrive.

Most of the time, somebody opened the door.

That's precisely what makes doors dangerous.

Police work teaches you to recognize danger, but repetition teaches you something else. Do something a thousand times without being hurt and the extraordinary begins to feel ordinary. A domestic becomes another domestic. A disturbance becomes another disturbance. A welfare check becomes another welfare check.

And a door becomes just another door.

Until it isn't.

A closed door creates one of the fundamental inequalities of police work. The person on the inside may know considerably more than the officer standing outside. He knows the layout of the house. He knows where the furniture is. He knows where the hallway leads. He knows whether there is another exit. Most importantly, he knows what he intends to do when that door opens.

The officer may know none of those things.

The person inside may be watching through a peephole or a window. He may hear the officers talking. He may know exactly where they are standing. He may be frightened. He may be hiding. He may be destroying evidence. He may be holding a telephone.

Or he may be holding a gun.

The officer outside gets none of those answers from looking at the door.

That's why good police tactics begin with respecting the unknown. Officers can avoid unnecessarily standing directly in front of a doorway. They can use available cover and distance. Partners can position themselves so they aren't presenting one convenient target. Officers can pay attention not merely to the door but to windows and other places from which somebody might observe or attack them. They can gather as much information as circumstances permit before making contact and communicate what they see, hear and know to one another.

Sometimes the most important tactic is simply slowing down.

A radio call is only the information available when somebody transmitted it. The situation encountered by the officers belongs to them. Something heard through the door, movement behind a curtain, contradictory information from a neighbor or simply circumstances that don't fit what dispatch originally reported can change the problem. Good officers continually reassess what they are actually dealing with rather than stubbornly proceeding with what they were originally told.

And when circumstances allow it, sometimes the safest decision is not to go through the door at all—at least not yet.

None of that eliminates the danger.

The Florida shooting demonstrates that particularly well because these weren't inexperienced officers casually walking up to a house. They were SWAT personnel conducting a planned warrant service. They had equipment, preparation, multiple officers and advance knowledge that they were entering an environment associated with suspected criminal activity.

They still had to deal with the door.

Training isn't magic. Body armor isn't magic. A ballistic shield isn't magic. Experience certainly isn't magic. All of them can improve the odds, sometimes dramatically, but none gives an officer the one thing he would really like to have at that moment: the ability to see the future.

In fact, experience presents a danger of its own.

A rookie can be afraid of every door. Everything is new, and everything therefore looks potentially dangerous. Twenty years later, the problem can reverse itself. The experienced officer has knocked on thousands of doors. Almost all of them opened without somebody shooting through them.

That experience is invaluable. It can also whisper something dangerous:

You've done this before.

That's where professionalism has to overcome familiarity. The objective isn't to make every officer terrified every time he walks onto a porch. Fear isn't a tactic. The objective is to maintain enough respect for uncertainty that the thousandth door receives the attention that might save you when it happens to be the wrong one.

There is another uncomfortable truth here. The only way to eliminate the danger completely is not to approach the door.

Police officers don't have that option.

Somebody has to answer the domestic disturbance. Somebody has to check on the elderly woman whose neighbors haven't seen her for three days. Somebody has to investigate the screaming coming from an apartment. Somebody has to find the armed suspect. Somebody has to serve the warrant.

Somebody still has to go.

That means officer safety can never mean eliminating danger. Policing itself makes that impossible. The professional objective is to identify foreseeable dangers, reduce unnecessary exposure and improve the odds while still accomplishing the job society has sent the officer there to do.

Then comes something else I've come to appreciate about police shootings and body-camera video: afterward, everybody gets to see through the door.

Investigators eventually know who was inside. They know what weapon he possessed. They know where he was standing. They reconstruct where the bullets traveled. Attorneys can examine the evidence. Supervisors can replay the video. Reporters can interview witnesses. People on social media can freeze three seconds of footage and study those three seconds for three days.

All of that scrutiny has a legitimate place. Police decisions should be reviewed, and bad decisions should not be excused merely because policing is dangerous.

But hindsight gives the rest of us something the officer standing on the porch never had.

The cutaway view.

Imagine the scene as a painting. It is nighttime. Two officers stand beneath an ordinary porch light. One is positioned beside the door. The other raises his hand to knock.

Now remove the wall for the viewer.

On the other side is a disheveled man staring through the peephole. He has a shotgun in his hands. He knows exactly where the officers are.

We know what's coming.

The officers don't.

Position matters. Cover matters. Communication matters. Training matters. Experience matters. Each can move the odds in the officer's favor, and sometimes one small tactical decision is the reason an officer goes home.

But none of them can remove the unknown from the other side of the door.

Eventually, somebody still has to knock.

And that's why the door may be the most dangerous part.

DEA Marks 25 Years After 9/11 by Honoring Fallen Task Force Officers and Opening Special Museum Exhibit

Never Forget: 25 Years After 9/11 Features Artifacts from the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and United Flight 93

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration commemorated the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks with a ceremony at DEA Headquarters honoring those killed that day and those who later died from 9/11-related illnesses. The ceremony also marked the opening of Never Forget: 25 Years After 9/11, a DEA Museum limited-run exhibit.

“Never Forget” is DEA’s solemn promise to preserve the legacy of those lost in the line of duty and to honor the courage, service, and sacrifice demonstrated in the days, months, and years following the attacks.

During the ceremony, DEA Administrator Terry Cole unveiled the names of two New York Drug Enforcement Task Force Officers newly added to the DEA’s 9/11 memorial:

• New York State Police Investigator Anthony B. Ashe, who died on November 4, 2024
• New York City Police Department Detective James J. Motto, who died on January 12, 2025
• DEA dedicated the memorial in 2022 to honor members of the New York Drug Task Force who died from illnesses or diseases related to their work at Ground Zero.  The memorial bears the names of:
• New York State Police Senior Investigator Thomas G. Moran, Jr., who died on July 22, 2012
• New York City Police Department Detective Traci L. Tack-Czajkowski, who died on January 15, 2013
• New York State Police Investigator Paul R. Stuewer, who died on October 5, 2016
• New York City Police Department Detective Mark Mkwanazi, who died on February 16, 2017
• New York City Police Department Detective Thomas J. Barnitt, who died on June 11, 2018
• New York City Police Department Sergeant Robert P. Masci, who died on June 9, 2018
• New York City Police Department Detective Terence P. Mulvey, who died on December 1, 2021

DEA’s 9/11 memorial is a lasting tribute to the selfless service of the men and women who responded to the attacks and a reminder that, for many responders and their families, the sacrifice continued long after September 11, 2001.                                                                                                  

“Twenty-five years later, the pain of September 11 remains, as does our profound gratitude for every person who answered the call to serve,” said DEA Administrator Terry Cole. “Today, as we add two more names to DEA’s memorial, we are reminded that the sacrifice of 9/11 did not end when the smoke cleared. We honor those we lost, stand with the families who carry their memory, and remember the courage of those who stepped forward when our nation needed them most. For DEA, ‘Never Forget’ is more than a promise. It is a responsibility we carry forward through our service to this country.”

Following the 9/11 attacks, DEA brought unique authorities and expertise to the nation’s response to terrorism, targeting the intersection of drug trafficking and terrorist financing. DEA subsequently established the Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team (FAST) program, which deployed an elite team of DEA agents to work alongside U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Working with the DEA Kabul Country Office (KCO), FAST/KCO teams identified and targeted Afghanistan's top drug traffickers, disrupted the opium and heroin trade, and dismantled financial networks that helped fund and support the terrorist organizations connected to the 9/11 attacks.

This history carries special significance for DEA’s current leadership team including Administrator Cole and several other senior DEA leaders who served with FAST/KCO during DEA’s mission in Afghanistan. Artifacts from this time are currently on display in the DEA Museum. 

Today’s ceremony also marked the official opening of Never Forget: 25 Years After 9/11. For the first time, the DEA Museum is displaying artifacts connected to all three attacks on September 11 – the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the crash site of United Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The exhibit features powerful images, firsthand accounts, and rarely displayed artifacts, including rubble from the Pentagon, metal recovered from the World Trade Center, and objects from the Flight 93 crash site. It also includes accounts from retired DEA personnel who were at DEA Headquarters on September 11 and witnessed the attack on the Pentagon.

The exhibit chronicles DEA’s response to the attacks, including the agency’s assistance at the Pentagon and Ground Zero; Aviation Division missions transporting blood supplies and conducting flights over Ground Zero; and the service of more than 1,000 DEA Special Agents who volunteered for temporary assignments as Federal Air Marshals.

Never Forget: 25 Years After 9/11 will remain on display through October 3, 2026.

The DEA Museum and Visitors Center is located at 700 Army Navy Drive, Arlington, Va., is free and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

For additional information, visit museum.dea.gov

 

The Day Sweet Bobby Lost His Mind Over a Watermelon

Almost forty-five years ago, when I was a probationary police officer assigned to Newton Street, I learned that some of the best stories in a police station were the ones you didn't actually see happen. This is one of those. I saw some of the aftermath firsthand, but most of what happened I pieced together from conversations around the station, listening to the people who had been there and the people who had heard about it before I did. That's the way stories traveled through a police division in those days, and by the time I arrived, this one had already become part of Newton Street lore.

We had a watch commander I'll call Sweet Bobby Jones. Sweet Bobby was a big man, an overweight African American sergeant who had strong opinions about almost everything and wasn't particularly reluctant to share them. More importantly, he was a Sergeant II. On an LAPD uniform that meant three stripes with a rocker underneath, and making Sergeant II in those days was an accomplishment. Whatever else anybody thought about Sweet Bobby, he had earned some rank and authority along the way.

He also had a tendency to rant. He could come into roll call, find something that offended his sense of how police work ought to be done, and get going. He was funny, though, and I think he knew it. Once Sweet Bobby got wound up, everybody got the benefit of his opinion, and apparently a couple of officers decided one night that it might be entertaining to help him get wound up.

Their plan was simple enough. They created a completely fictitious assault-with-a-deadly-weapon report and waited until close to end of watch to turn it in. Timing was part of the joke. Sweet Bobby would be trying to get through the last of the paperwork, sign everything that needed to be signed, clear the watch and go home. The officers apparently suspected that under those circumstances he wasn't reading every word of every report put in front of him, and they decided to test the theory.

The report described an assault with a deadly weapon. The names were fictitious, the circumstances were fictitious, the crime was fictitious, and buried in the narrative was the detail they expected would bring Sweet Bobby to life.

The deadly weapon was a watermelon.

Somebody had supposedly assaulted somebody else with a watermelon, and the officers who created the report expected Sweet Bobby to get to that part, realize what they had handed him and explode. Presumably they would get a memorable end-of-watch rant out of him, everybody would have a good laugh, and the report would disappear.

Except Sweet Bobby didn't read it.

He signed it.

That should have ended the joke. The officers had proven whatever point they were trying to prove: put something in front of Sweet Bobby at the end of watch, when he was in a hurry to get everything cleared, and there was a good chance he would sign it without reading it closely. They had their story. Somebody should have pulled the report out of the paperwork, admitted what they had done and thrown the thing away.

Instead, somehow, the report kept going.

It went to Records, where nobody had any particular reason to suspect that a properly completed crime report bearing the watch commander's signature was a practical joke. It was processed and duplicated. It received the appropriate numbers, including its division reference number, and entered the LAPD system as what it purported to be: an actual assault-with-a-deadly-weapon report.

By the next morning, the watermelon had made it to detectives.

Normally, the Detective III supervising the crimes-against-persons table would have handled the assignment of incoming cases, but he happened to be off. Another detective was filling in and doing the Detective III's job that morning, which included assigning cases to investigators. Across his desk came an apparently legitimate ADW report. It had been written, approved by a watch commander, processed through Records and given all the numbers an actual crime report was supposed to have.

So he assigned it to a pair of seasoned detectives.

And they began investigating it.

By then, this ridiculous watermelon had traveled remarkably far through the Los Angeles Police Department. A couple of patrol officers had invented the crime. A Sergeant II had signed the report without reading it. Records had processed it. The system had accepted it. A detective acting in a supervisory capacity had assigned it, and now two experienced investigators were spending their time trying to solve an assault that had never occurred.

Somewhere in the course of that investigation, the thing finally began to unravel. There was no victim to interview, no suspect to find and no crime scene to examine. The names in the report weren't real because the officers who wrote it had invented them. Eventually the seasoned detectives reached the only conclusion available to them: there hadn't been an assault with a deadly weapon. There hadn't been an assault at all.

There hadn't even been a watermelon.

At that point, however, there actually was something to investigate. Somebody had created a fictitious crime report and introduced it into the LAPD reporting system. What had begun as a practical joke intended to make a watch commander rant had gone through Records and far enough into the investigative process that two detectives had actually begun working the case.

I don't remember all of what happened administratively after that, and almost forty-five years later I'm not going to manufacture details to fill in what I don't know. I was a probationary officer at Newton Street when I heard about it, and I saw enough of the aftermath firsthand to know that the joke had gone considerably farther than anybody who created it had intended. The rest came through the conversations that followed, because something like this wasn't going to happen in a police station without everybody eventually hearing about it.

I do know that somewhere along the way Sweet Bobby learned what had happened. He learned that the report he'd signed without reading was a setup, that the deadly weapon was a watermelon, and that his signature had allowed the joke to escape the station and turn into an actual detective investigation.

And then Sweet Bobby went off.

Which, when you think about it, was exactly what the officers had wanted him to do in the first place.

It had just taken a little longer than they expected.

That was the day Sweet Bobby Jones lost his mind over a watermelon.

Knowing Nothing Probably Saved My Life

Maybe there’s an advantage to not knowing anything.

It was Christmas Eve, 1981, and I was working graveyard at LAPD’s Southwest Division. We went to work around 10:00 that night and would finish at 7:00 Christmas morning. Almost everybody else had been given the night off, and I remember looking around the roll call room and seeing something I don't think I ever saw again during my career. Nobody had stripes except the sergeant. There wasn't a lieutenant. There was just one three-striper running the watch and a room full of slick sleeves.

I was definitely one of them. I had about twenty months on the job and had been off probation for maybe two months. I was 22 years old and brand new to Southwest. My partner was even newer. He had less than a month on the job. We knew nothing, although at the time we didn't know that we knew nothing. At 22, I probably thought twenty months made me fairly experienced. More than forty-five years later, I can assure you it did not.

Right out of roll call, we drove over to a donut shop around Exposition and Crenshaw. It was open even on Christmas Eve, and we got some coffee. There wasn't much happening on the radio, so I spent some time getting to know the kid sitting next to me. It was cold for Los Angeles, one of those wonderfully crisp winter nights when the onshore flow has blown all the garbage out of the air and everything seems unusually clear. I was wearing a long-sleeved uniform shirt, but there wasn't a single service stripe on it. You can see that in the photograph.

We finished our coffee, got back into the radio car and started driving. Somewhere around Crenshaw and Adams, I smelled something. It smelled bad, very bad, and it was strong enough that I turned the car around. There were industrial properties scattered through that part of the division, so I figured something might be coming from one of them. I didn't say much to my partner because I didn't really have anything to tell him. He knew even less than I did.

I drove south on Crenshaw and started working the side streets, trying to figure out where the smell was coming from. The farther I went, the stronger it became. It was unmistakably chemical, although I couldn't have told you what chemical. Eventually I worked my way into an alley somewhere around Jefferson and Second or Third Avenue, and there the smell became almost overwhelming. Whatever it was, I had found it.

We pulled over and put ourselves Code Six for a general investigation. Nothing dramatic. We were just getting out of the car to see what was going on. But getting out of a police car in 1981 was different from getting out of one today. We didn't have portable radios. The radio was in the car, so when you walked away from the car, you walked away from your communications. That's what the two of us did. We left the radio car and walked down the alley trying to find the source of the smell.

There was an open garage door, and when I looked inside, there was what appeared to be a chemical factory operating in the garage. I had no idea what kind of factory it was. I didn't know what they were making, and I certainly didn't know that I was looking at a massive clandestine PCP laboratory where something had apparently gone wrong with the system that was supposed to contain the fumes. I didn't know any of that. I just knew that what I was looking at wasn't right.

Then I noticed the guns. There were rifles stacked against the garage wall toward the rear. Even with only twenty months on the job, I understood enough to realize that this had suddenly become something more than two cops trying to figure out where a bad smell was coming from. We got some help coming, and from that point forward Christmas morning changed considerably.

People who had probably expected to sleep through Christmas morning started getting telephone calls. Detectives came out. Narcotics people came. Crime scene and fingerprint people came. Specialists had to deal with the chemicals and determine what we had actually walked into and whether it was safe. More police officers arrived. Evidence started coming out of the location. Before long, newspaper reporters and photographers were there. Our very quiet Christmas graveyard shift had turned into a major police operation.

As everything was sorted out, the scale of what we had stumbled across became apparent. It was a major PCP laboratory containing an estimated $3 million in street-value PCP. There was marijuana, two plastic bags containing a substantial amount of heroin, and containers filled with assorted pills. Then there were the guns. There were 64 of them.

The photograph taken later tells a lot of that story if you know what you're looking at. I'm holding a large bag filled with marijuana. The two plastic bags sitting on top of it contain heroin. You can see ammunition, containers and boxes of evidence around me. In the background are some of the rifles, including a sawed-off M1 carbine. Some of the weapons have a strange silver appearance because by then the fingerprint people had dusted them for prints. The picture isn't just a young cop posing with a drug seizure. It's a photograph of a crime scene that had become such a big deal that a whole bunch of people had been awakened on Christmas morning because of it.

The operation was connected to the Black Guerrilla Family, a violent prison gang. This wasn't a couple of guys making a little dope in their garage. We had wandered into a substantial criminal operation involving dangerous chemicals, large quantities of narcotics, ammunition and dozens upon dozens of firearms. That's the part of the photograph that looks very different to me today than it did when I was 22.

At 22, I saw the bust. Today, I see the guns. I see the fingerprint powder on them and the ammunition sitting nearby. I see all the evidence that had to be processed. I think about the detectives, narcotics officers, fingerprint people and chemical specialists who had expected to spend Christmas morning somewhere else. I think about the reporters and photographers who showed up because the two slick sleeves from Southwest had somehow managed to stumble into something big enough to make the newspaper.

And then I think about how we found it. We weren't conducting a narcotics investigation. We didn't have an informant. Nobody had given us intelligence about a PCP laboratory or a prison gang. We didn't recognize the smell of PCP, didn't know what kind of operation could produce an odor like that, didn't know who might be protecting it and certainly didn't know there were 64 guns associated with the place. We smelled something bad and followed our noses until we found an open garage door.

There are a dozen ways I can explain today why walking down that alley was a bad idea. If I had understood what I was smelling, I would have approached the situation completely differently. I would have been thinking about cover, suspects, weapons, chemical exposure, containment, backup and escape routes. I would have been thinking about all the things that experience eventually teaches a police officer to think about.

Instead, I was thinking, What the hell is that smell?

And strangely enough, I sometimes wonder if that ignorance saved us. Maybe nobody was there. Maybe whoever was there saw us coming and disappeared. Maybe they didn't perceive two young patrol cops wandering around an alley as much of a threat. After all these years, I don't know exactly what happened on the other side of that garage door before we arrived, and I'm certainly not going to manufacture an answer now.

But there is another possibility that has occurred to me over the years. Maybe Christmas Eve worked both ways. Southwest Division was clearly running the B team that night. The experienced people had Christmas off. There wasn't even a lieutenant in the building. One sergeant and a collection of slick sleeves were holding down the fort. My partner had less than a month on the job, and I had twenty months and probably considerably more confidence than knowledge.

Maybe the PCP lab was running its B team, too. Maybe the people who normally protected an operation containing millions of dollars in drugs and 64 guns had Christmas Eve off themselves. Maybe whoever had been left behind wasn't paying attention. Maybe when the containment system failed and the fumes started pouring into the neighborhood, they decided that discretion was the better part of spending Christmas morning somewhere else. I have no idea, but given what was ultimately found inside that place, something kept this from becoming a very different story.

The B team had stumbled onto the B team.

That may have been our only advantage. Two inexperienced cops wandered into a major drug operation connected to a violent prison gang, and nothing happened to us. If their A team had been there, I suspect they would have handled our arrival very differently. If our A team had been working, they certainly would have handled the discovery differently. Instead, for whatever reason, a couple of slick sleeves walked into something they didn't understand and walked back out again.

The photograph ended up appearing inside the Los Angeles Herald Examiner on December 26, 1981. The newspaper itself disappeared years ago. I don't think the photograph had anything to do with that.

I've kept the picture ever since, and people have seen it sitting in my office over the years: a very young cop with no service stripes, holding a bag of marijuana and surrounded by drugs, ammunition, evidence and fingerprint-dusted guns. At 22, I looked at that photograph and saw a hell of a drug bust. Today, I look at those 64 guns and think about two slick sleeves walking down an alley without portable radios because something smelled bad.

That's really what the photograph is to me now. A 22-year-old cop with twenty months on the job, a partner with less than one, an almost empty Southwest Division, a cold and crystal-clear Los Angeles night, a cup of coffee and a terrible chemical smell that we were just ignorant enough to follow down an alley.

There are plenty of times in police work when not knowing what you're doing can get you killed. On Christmas morning in 1981, I think the opposite happened. Maybe the B team at Southwest simply got lucky and stumbled onto the B team at the PCP lab. Whatever happened, more than forty-five years later, I can look at that photograph and recognize something I couldn't possibly have understood when it was taken.

Knowing nothing probably saved my life.

ATF joins Coudersport’s celebration of Special Agent Eliot Ness’s 100th law enforcement career anniversary, Saturday, August 22

PHILADELPHIA – ATF Philadelphia Field Division will join the Coudersport community to celebrate Special Agent Eliot Ness’s 100th Law Enforcement Career Anniversary, with the Eliot Ness Museum, Borough of Coudersport, Potter County Historical Society, Cleveland Police Historical Society & Museum and more.

Saturday, August 22

Downtown Coudersport, Pa.

www.visitpottertioga.com/event/eliot-ness-day

Special Agent Eliot Ness was sworn in to the Bureau of Prohibition, August 2026. At the conclusion of Prohibition, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division was developed with the added responsibility of enforcing federal firearms laws. In 1972, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was created with its current mission of preventing violent crimes through the enforcement of firearms and explosives laws.

ATF Philadelphia’s Field Division is responsible for ATF criminal enforcement and industry regulatory activities in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Our dedicated work force is comprised of special agents, investigators, canine handlers, auditors, technicians, legal counsel and support staff.

Father whose toddler fatally shot himself charged federally for illegally possessing firearm as previously convicted felon

U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of Ohio

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A previously convicted felon whose toddler died by gunshot wound from an unsecured gun now faces a federal charge for illegally possessing a firearm.

Deshawn Levelle Butler, 35, of Columbus, was arrested by federal agents earlier today and appeared in federal court in Columbus at 1:30pm. 

“As a previously convicted felon, Butler was prohibited from possessing firearms and ammunition at the time of this incident,” said U.S. Attorney Dominick S. Gerace II. “Nothing can bring back the toddler who tragically died at the hands of Butler’s weapon, but we will use every federal tool at our disposal to ensure justice is accomplished in this matter.”

According to charging documents, on July 11, Columbus police officers responded to a report of a shooting on Quinby Drive in Columbus. When officers arrived, they located a 21-month-old child suffering from an apparent gunshot wound and were told the child had accidentally shot himself. The victim was transported to Mount Carmel East Hospital and later pronounced deceased.

An affidavit details that Butler was allegedly with the child during the shooting and had fled the scene prior to law enforcement officials’ arrival. 

Butler turned himself in the next morning to Columbus police headquarters, where he allegedly told officers his son had discovered Butler’s 9mm handgun in an open safe in a bedroom. 

Butler was previously convicted of aggravated burglary and, as a result, is legally prohibited from possessing a firearm or ammunition. Butler also had outstanding warrants for misdemeanor domestic violence charges.

Possessing a firearm as a convicted felon is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

Dominick S. Gerace II, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio; Jorge Rosendo, Special Agent in Charge, U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF), and Columbus Police Chief Elaine Bryant announced the charges. Assistant United States Attorney Elizabeth A. Geraghty is representing the United States in this case.

A criminal complaint merely contains allegations, and defendants are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in a court of law.

Officer Down... Sort Of

Rain changes a city.

Most people think of Los Angeles as sunshine and palm trees. Cops know a different Los Angeles. Sometime around three in the morning, after a winter rain, downtown became another world. The streets glistened beneath the streetlights. Storefronts shimmered in the wet pavement. There were no pedestrians, no traffic, and almost no sound beyond the occasional hiss of tires somewhere blocks away. In the mid-1980s, very few people actually lived downtown. Once the businesses closed, much of Central Division became a ghost town.

On nights like that, Wayne and I traded our foot beat for a radio car.

The call was a Code 30—a silent commercial burglary alarm on the fifteenth floor of an office building near the Jewelry District. Burglary alarms were funny things. They were dispatched as low-priority calls because most turned out to be nothing. Rain leaked into alarm systems. Thunder rattled windows. Electrical contacts failed. You could spend an entire rainy shift answering false alarms.

The mistake was assuming they were always false.

Commercial burglaries were common in Central Division, and many of the professionals didn't bother with doors or windows. They came through the roof.

Normally we'd ask Air Support to check it. Piper Technical Center—Piper Tech to everyone on the street—was only a few minutes away on the north end of the division and housed what was then the world's largest rooftop heliport. But after a rainy night, especially around three in the morning, helicopters weren't always flying.

If you wanted the roof checked, sometimes you checked it yourself.

Some officers carried grappling hooks in the trunk of their black-and-whites, tossing them over roof parapets and climbing hand over hand to the top. I never got quite that ambitious, but I'd climbed more than one telephone pole after parking on the sidewalk so I could reach the utility pegs and step onto a warehouse roof.

This building offered something easier.

As we pulled into the alley behind it, we found the exterior fire escape hanging just low enough that, standing on the hood of the patrol car, we could pull the bottom section down.

Someone could have used it.

That was enough for me.

We started climbing.

I took the lead while Wayne followed a few steps behind. The old steel fire escape had probably been hanging on the side of that building since Roosevelt was president. Every step echoed through the metal.

About four floors up Wayne called out.

"You're walking too heavy."

I stopped and looked down.

"What do you mean I'm walking too heavy?"

"You're making the whole damn thing shake."

Sure enough, every step sent a shiver through the old fire escape.

So, naturally, when I reached the next landing, I jumped.

I landed as hard as I could.

The entire fire escape exploded into rattles, bangs, and vibrations that seemed to travel all the way to the sidewalk fifteen stories below.

There was a moment of silence.

Then Wayne yelled, "You're an asshole!"

Another pause.

"You can go the rest of the way yourself."

I laughed.

What I didn't appreciate at the time was that Wayne wasn't just irritated.

He didn't like heights.

To him, that ancient fire escape wasn't just making a little noise. It was announcing its intention to tear itself off the side of the building with both of us attached to it.

He climbed back down.

I climbed the remaining ten stories alone.

By the time I reached the roof, I was breathing hard. My heavy LAPD bomber jacket—with its synthetic shell and thick wool collar—felt like it had doubled in weight after fifteen flights of stairs. Add in the leather Sam Browne belt, revolver, spare ammunition, handcuffs, baton, portable radio, and flashlight, and every step had become a workout.

The roof was empty.

I swept it with my Streamlight. It wasn't department-issued; I'd bought it with my own money. Streamlights were expensive enough that owning one was almost a point of pride. The replacement bulbs alone cost nearly a day's pay. That's one reason I always smiled when someone claimed cops routinely hit people with their flashlights. Maybe somebody did somewhere, but not with a Streamlight. Breaking that bulb would have cost you close to a hundred dollars in 1980s money.

No burglars.

No tools.

No fresh footprints.

I switched my portable radio to the partner channel, the little toggle that let us talk without the dispatcher hearing.

"Hey, Wayne. Nothing up here. I'll be heading back down."

I switched back and walked toward the fire escape.

That's when I noticed the trash bag.

It was a large black plastic trash bag lying near the edge of the roof.

An idea immediately presented itself.

I dragged the bag over to the fire escape and stepped onto the top landing.

"Hey, Wayne!" I shouted.

"I'm coming down!"

A second later I yelled, "I slipped!"

Then I screamed.

"Ahhhhh!"

At the same time, I hurled the trash bag over the side.

From Wayne's position on the ground, all he could see was my flashlight suddenly bouncing wildly across the side of the building, hear me screaming, and watch a large dark object tumble fifteen stories toward the patrol car.

The bag hit the hood with a tremendous smack and burst open in every direction.

Wayne was convinced he'd just watched his partner fall to his death.

Without hesitation, he grabbed his microphone.

"Officer needs help!"

Then he requested an ambulance.

Still standing safely on the fire escape, I grabbed my radio.

"Wayne... cancel it."

Silence.

"Wayne... cancel it."

A long pause.

"You son of a bitch..."

By the time I reached the sidewalk, I was laughing so hard I could barely stand.

Wayne wasn't.

Not even a little.

In the space of about three seconds, he'd gone from irritated...to terrified...to furious.

Nearly twenty years later I introduced him to my wife.

She smiled and said, "Oh...you're that Wayne."

He looked at me.

Then at her.

Then back at me.

"I still haven't forgiven him."

Police officers remember shootings.

They remember pursuits.

They remember the calls that almost got them killed.

Wayne remembered the rainy night he thought his partner had fallen fifteen stories to his death because that partner happened to be the biggest smart-ass in Central Division.