WAS SUSPECT'S SHOOTING A "POLICE EXECUTION"?
Scientific police investigations knew precisely how Randall Carr ended up killed by a police bullet that tore into his body near his rectum and blew a hole in his heart.
His angry relatives, with Johnnie Cochran's legal team behind them,
insisted it had to be a deliberate police execution. The officers involved vehemently denied that, of course. But they couldn't
reconstruct the fatal details of Carr's final moments or explain the
seemingly incriminating pattern of wounds documented at autopsy.
With a $5 million federal civil rights lawsuit and the officers'
reputations at stake, specialists worked in hopes that a scientific analysis of the shooting could shed some light on its dark mysteries.
This much was known about the circumstances that began unfolding about 11
o'clock one autumn night in the Maxwell House Apartments in downtown
Oklahoma City:
During an investigation of an assault on the landlord during a rent
dispute, 2 officers were questioning the accused tenant, Randall Carr, 38.
Carr was acting "very excited and aggressive," and was later found to have
evidence of cocaine use in his bloodstream. He declared, "I own this
building, I own Oklahoma City and I don't have to pay rent!" Then he
punched one officer in the head, inflicting a cut over his right eye, and
kneed the other in the groin, and fled on foot. Multiple units responded.
During a pursuit by foot and car, Carr at one point was whacked at the knee
with an expandable baton and sprayed directly in the eyes and nose with OC,
but he did not submit. Finally the cop who'd been kneed during the initial
call, Ofcr. Jerry Bowen, and a responding sergeant, Randy Castle, cornered
Carr in a small, dark churchyard a couple of blocks from his apartment.
With a jagged piece of concrete about twice the size of a softball clutched
in his left hand, Carr (who was left handed) tried to scale a spiked fence
at one edge of the yard, but he couldn't make it. The officers were yelling
at him to get down and to drop the concrete. He dropped off the fence,
turned and with his left arm raised started to run directly at Castle, who
was about 20 feet away.
Bowen was forward from Castle and to his right. In Bowen's perception, Carr
was charging Castle intent on bashing in the sergeant's skull with the
concrete chunk.
Both officers opened fire with their Glocks. Eleven rounds were discharged.
Seven struck Carr. When the shooting stopped he was slumped against a
wooden bench several feet to Castle's left.
Castle had no clear recollection of the 5 shots he fired. He recalled Carr
"throwing" the concrete at him at a point. A left-hander like the suspect,
Castle instinctively turned away while raising his right hand to protect
his head, and fired his rounds blindly back at his assailant with his left
hand.
Bowen said he started shooting when Carr crossed his line of fire in the
dead run toward Castle. There was about 5 feet between Bowen and the
attacker at that moment. He fired a total of 6 rounds. Between the moment
he started shooting and an awareness that Carr was "suddenly" no longer
upright as a target, he had no relevant memories.
These days, white officers shooting and killing any black suspect
guarantees controversy. But in this case, the situation was exacerbated by
a disturbing medical examiner's report.
The fatal round, which ballistics determined was fired by Bowen, has
entered to the left of Carr's rectum and had followed a path roughly
paralleling his spinal column straight to his heart.
Through a local attorney, surviving relatives of Carr (who included a
professional football player) contacted Johnnie Cochran's law office and a
federal civil suit inevitably materialized, alleging excessive force by the
officers and failure to train and supervise by the city. The municipality
got out of the case on a motion for summary judgment prior to trial, but
the officers remained as defendants.
At the heart of the plaintiffs' case was an inflammatory premise: Such a
fatal bullet pathway could have occurred only if Carr was already down on
his hands and knees, butt in the air and no longer a threat, when the
killing shot was fired. Bowen must have advanced on the suspect and pulled
the trigger from behind him to create the resulting wound channel. In
effect, the fatal round was an unjustified execution.
Bill Lewinski says he approached this volatile situation with no
preconceived notions. "Mentally I kept myself neutral to how it would come
out, good or bad," he says. "I was interested just in understanding what
happened."
Besides the fatal round, Carr had been shot in the left hip, the left
waistline, the right calf, the left wrist, the left thigh and the inside
right thigh. The autopsy report clearly established each wound channel,
confirming the trajectory on which each slug had penetrated into the
offender's body. All but one had struck him from the rear. However, the
sequencing of the shots, whose gun some of the rounds came from (those that
were through and through), and what time span the shooting covered--all
were among the case's many unknowns.
As one of the nation's foremost authorities on reaction times and shooting
dynamics, Lewinski felt that documenting the missing elements would be
critical to understanding how the shooting actually unfolded and
determining whether the plaintiffs' allegations of wrongdoing might, in
fact, be true.
He started by taking Ofcr. Bowen and Sgt. Castle to Oklahoma City PD's
firearms range. They'd told him that in an effort to stop the onrushing
Carr they had fired as fast as they could pull the trigger that fateful
night. He asked them to do that again--repeatedly--while they were
videotaped by Lewinski and Parris Ward. Ward, who heads the firm Biodynamics Engineering, is aprominent computer animator whose vivid reconstructions of police shootings and other controversial events are frequently introduced as pivotal
evidence in high-profile court cases.
The videotapes offered gross time stamps of the officers shooting. But back
in his lab in Pacific Palisades, CA, Ward's ultra-sophisticated equipment
was able to break down the sample firings into hundredths of a second. That
revealed that the officers had been able to shoot in a range of .233 to
.268 of a second per round.
Now Lewinski, working with Ward and his precision equipment, set about the
laborious task of calculating the sequence and timing of every round that
had struck Carr.
Lewinski figured that the round which entered Carr's left side at waist
level had to have been the initial round fired by Bowen and the first of
the fusillade to hit the running suspect. "This would could only have come
from one officer at one point in the action," Lewinski says.
Almost simultaneous to that round, according to investigators' reports,
Carr had stumbled and had "thrown" the concrete at Castle, who was then
less than 5 feet away. The chunk hit Castle's left shoulder.
At about the point Carr had reached in his line of travel when all this
happened there was a depression in the ground that accommodated a drain
grate. In the dark and malevolently focused on rushing Castle, Carr would
not likely have seen this hole. If his left foot had gone down in it he
would certainly have stumbled, his raised left hand would likely have
involuntarily released the concrete and--most important, Lewinski knew from
his extensive study of physical dynamics--his body would have thrust
sharply forward and then twisted to the right as he tried unsuccessfully to
regain his balance and his right leg collapsed from the sudden, unexpected
shift of his body weight. Bowen's shots coming from the left would have
contributed to this motion.
Turning right and then falling face down toward the ground would have
positioned him so that most of Bowen's 5 shots that connected--including
the troublesome fatal round--would have hit him from the rear, without
Bowen advancing significantly toward him.
Painstakingly, Lewinski and Ward gradually reconstructed this probable
timing and sequence:
0.000 second: Bowen's first shot to Carr's left hip (timing baseline).
0.233 second: Bowen's second round, to the left waistline, slightly to the rear
0.500 second: Bowen's third round, to the left buttock (the fatal shot)
0.600 second: Castle's first round, a miss
0.733 second: Bowen's fourth round, to the right rear calf
0.867 second: Castle's second round, to the left wrist
0.967 second: Bowen's fifth round, to the left rear thigh
1.133 seconds: Castle's third round, to the inner right thigh
1.200 seconds: Bowen's sixth (last) round, a miss to the suspect's right
1.400 seconds: Castle's fourth round, a miss
1.600 seconds: Castle's fifth round, a miss (last round fired).
"This sequence of rounds, matched to bullet trajectories and times, when
put all together makes a sensible scenario of what occurred," Lewinski
says. "Things can only happen in a certain way, and based on the science of
the situation, we are confident this is the way."
In confirming the incredible speed in which police shootings can go down,
incidentally, this is a classic case: 11 rounds fired by these 2 officers
in just 1.6 seconds, start to finish.
When the lawsuit went to trial in U.S. District Court last November, Ward's
elegant and gripping color animation of the shooting and Lewinski's
detailed explanation of the science behind it were highlights of the
officers' defense presented by attorneys Robert Manchester (brother of the
famed historian William Manchester) and Susan Knight (wife of an Oklahoma
peace officer). The jury was shown the conflict recreated in time-coded
slow motion, in freeze-frames and in actual time, from a variety of angles.
The key element was the placement of Bowen's fatal round early in the
sequence. Without that being plausibly positioned and explained, the
plaintiff's spectre of a final, fatal "execution" shot might have seem much
more credible.
Johnnie Cochran, who had been expected to head the plaintiff's case, failed
to show, reportedly because of health problems. An associate from Hawaii
replaced him.
This attorney tried to convince the jury that Ward's animation was
unrealistic. During cross examination, he had Lewinski get down on the
courtroom floor, with his butt thrust toward the jury, and try to assume
the position that he claimed Carr had been in when he took the fatal round.
Lewinski could not do so--because, as he patiently explained, this was a
dynamic posture that occurred ever so briefly while the suspect was falling.
The plaintiffs presented their own animated version of the shooting. But it
was built backward from the alleged "execution shot," which the plaintiffs
claimed was fired after Carr had come to rest against the bench. In
critiquing this scenario, Lewinski explained in detail why it was illogical
and inaccurate and not based on sound principles. "They ignored science for
the purpose of constructing a story that fit their conception of the
shooting," he says.
Among other things, Lewinski also why the officers could not have instantly stopped shooting once Carr started to fall and was no longer an imminent threat.
On Nov. 22, after days of testimony and arguments, the jury returned its
verdict. Four long years after the shooting occurred, the officers were
finally exonerated. The plaintiffs were granted nothing, and there was no
reimbursement for the substantial funds the plaintiffs' attorneys had put
forth to prepare for trial.
This case, incidentally, is the third in which Lewinski has helped to
successfully defend officers against Johnnie Cochran's legal armada.
