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Accident a pain in rear for cop

Josey1Josey1 Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
edited August 2002 in General Discussion
Accident a pain in rear for cop




RUSS OLIVO, Staff Writer August 06, 2002




WOONSOCKET -- The commanding officer of the city's undercover drug squad accidentally shot himself in the buttocks in a park outside the Frank J. Licht Judicial Complex on South Main Street in Providence yesterday afternoon, police said.
Detective Lt. Walter Warot was taken to Rhode Island Hospital with a "canoe-shaped" wound in his right buttock which he suffered when his service issue .45-caliber handgun discharged shortly after noon, said Deputy Police Chief William J. Shea. Warot was released from the hospital several hours later and is expected to spend the next two to three weeks recovering at home, Shea said.

"It took a good chunk of skin out of him," said Shea.

Warot, 44, is a 20-year veteran of the police department who has been in charge of the Vice Unit, the undercover narcotics arm of the force, for several years.

Shea said the shooting is under investigation by the Providence Police Department and the Woonsocket Police Department's in-house Shooting Review Board. The deputy chief said he does not expect Warot to face any charges of wrongdoing.

"It was just an unfortunate accident," said Shea. "I'm surprised, but also glad, this sort of thing doesn't happen more often. Our weapons are tools we work with every day. You try not to let your guard down, but sometimes accidents happen."

"No criminal charges," affirmed Providence Detective Lt. Stephen Campbell.

Campbell said the investigation is complete unless there is some new and unexpected revelation in the matter.

Shea said Warot and two other Vice Unit detectives had just left Superior Court after bringing a suspect in for arraignment when the shooting happened. As they were leaving the courthouse, he said, the three detectives saw a former Woonsocket police officer they recognized in a park across South Main Street, overlooking the Providence River. The park is where Providence holds its popular "WaterFire" rite.

The Woonsocket detectives walked over to the park to talk to their erstwhile colleague, former Lt. Detective Paul SanSouci, now an investigator for the Department of the Attorney General. Warot was carrying his Austrian-made, Glock firearm tucked in the right-hand side waistband of his pants -- a routine method of carrying weapons for undercover cops, for whom holsters would be a cover-blowing accessory.

After greeting SanSouci, Warot began sitting on the cement base of a light-pole stanchion. As he did so, Shea said, Warot adjusted the position of the weapon in his waistband. Warot unwittingly depressed the trigger of the weapon as he reached for the gun, firing one round of ammunition which struck his buttock.

One of Warot's colleagues, Detective Sgt. Edward M. Roy Jr., called the Providence Police Department on his cellular telephone, Shea said. Roy explained that there had been an accidental shooting and asked for a rescue squad.

Shea said Warot's weapon was loaded with .45-caliber, hollow-point ammunition, a type of ordnance which has a concave nose where typical bullets are rounded or pointed. Designed to fragment upon impact, the hollow point is often favored by police because it is less likely to pierce its target, injuring bystanders, and because it has more stopping power than typical ammunition. Similarly, the fragmenting tendencies of hollow points can cause extraordinary internal damage to body tissues.

But Shea said that under the circumstances, the bullet did not have a chance to fragment-- not in Warot's body. Shea said the wound was a grazing-type injury, albeit a deep one, as opposed to a classic piercing. The ammunition left a gouge in Warot's flesh about two inches long and a half-inch deep before striking the concrete beneath the officer and shattering.

Shea said a small fragment of the bullet was recovered by investigators at the scene of the shooting.

Luckily, said Shea, Warot's pride was injured more than his body.

"He's embarrassed," Shea said.
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=4962894&BRD=1712&PAG=461&dept_id=24361&rfi=6


"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878

Comments

  • Josey1Josey1 Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
    edited November -1
    Ex-Chicago woman, cop die in shootout

    August 4, 2002








    MINNEAPOLIS--Police in Minneapolis were trying to cope Friday after the shooting of officer Melissa Schmidt, who was fatally wounded while answering a call about a woman with a gun at a public housing complex.

    The 60-year-old suspect, Martha Donald, who lived at the complex and used to live in Chicago, also was killed in the shootout Thursday night.

    The department was "just trying to regroup and muddle through" Friday, police spokeswoman Cyndi Barrington said. "Just a wide range of emotions going on right now--anger, frustration and sadness. It's just a tough day."

    Terrance Jones, Donald's son, said the shootings didn't make sense. But he said he knew his mother regularly carried a gun. He said she had done so ever since she was attacked and robbed while living in Chicago.

    "It's unbelievable. I just talked to my mom yesterday," he said Friday. "Yesterday--and today she's gone. And not gone from natural causes or dying from old age or cancer, but from gunshot wounds."

    Schmidt, 35, had been with the department for about six years. She had worked as a community crime prevention officer before switching to the public housing patrol in February. Her gun was in her hand when she was found, police said.

    Schmidt and her partner were investigating a report of a woman with a gun at the Horn Towers complex. The woman asked the officers if she could use the bathroom. It wasn't immediately known whether the officers searched Donald before they escorted her into the bathroom.

    Precisely what happened after that, and who shot first, remained unclear Friday. But there was a shootout about 7:40 p.m., and Schmidt was wounded in the abdomen, just below her bulletproof vest. She died four hours later at Hennepin County Medical Center with her family at her side. Donald also died at the hospital, shortly after the shootings.

    Donald had lived in Horn Towers since January. Most of the residents are elderly. Public housing officials and residents described it as a peaceful place with little crime.

    http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-shot04.html
    POINT: Here we have a senior citizen female who has been attacked by armed thieves and who was exercising her right to keep and bear arms to assure she could defend herself -- assaulted by law enforcement officers for nothing more than exercising her right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, self-defense and all that goes with these rights.

    From all information reported on this incident so far, Martha Donald exerted her rights, by force, and sacrificed her life to make her point. We still haven't seen a single report that says she did anything wrong with her firearm to justify being accosted by the police. Yet every report seen in the Minnesota papers weeps over the loss of the officer while making Martha Donald out to be the bad guy. A closer inspection with a view toward inalienable rights suggests they've got it exactly backwards.





    "If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
  • Josey1Josey1 Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
    edited November -1
    Officials Say Ex-Cop Wanted Officers To Kill Him
    Sheriff Karnes Says He Waved His Gun In The Air

    POSTED: 6:53 a.m. EDT August 6, 2002
    UPDATED: 6:58 a.m. EDT August 6, 2002

    COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The Franklin County sheriff said a former Columbus police officer suspected of killing his wife and leading authorities on a chase up Interstate 71 wanted officers to kill him.

    Sheriff Jim Karnes said Hermando Harton was desperate when he led officers on the chase last week through northern Ohio.


    Karnes said he could tell by the way Harton came out of his vehicle waving his guns in the air that he wanted to die.


    Harton is suspected of killing his wife, Elizabeth, before leading officers on a chase and holding them at bay for about four hours. He was shot as he fled on foot and remains in critical condition this morning at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland.


    Officials say Harton is paralyzed and in an induced coma.


    Karnes says Harton will be charged by a Franklin County grand jury because that's where Harton's wife was killed. http://www.newsnet5.com/news/1595891/detail.html

    "If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878

    Edited by - Josey1 on 08/07/2002 05:59:03
  • Josey1Josey1 Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
    edited November -1
    Atlanta police department suspends vice unit following fatal shooting

    Copyright c 2002 AP Online

    Search the archive for: Georgia

    The Associated Press


    ATLANTA (August 6, 2002 1:45 p.m. EDT) - The police department has suspended undercover vice operations aimed at prostitution after an officer shot and killed a suspected prostitute - one of four fatal police shootings in the past three months.

    Members of the 10-member vice squad will be temporarily reassigned while officers in marked cars perform their duties.

    Police Chief Richard Pennington said he suspended the undercover vice operations "out of concern for the safety of our officers and citizens."

    Atlanta police have shot 12 people this year, killing five. That is the largest number of police shootings since 1995.

    Despite the increase, Pennington defended his officers' record.

    "This department has a great reputation in terms of not being involved in excessive use of force," said Pennington, formerly police chief in New Orleans.

    On Monday, an officer shot the suspected prostitute four times after she sprayed him with pepper gas and stabbed him in the face and arms when he tried to arrest her, police said. The officer was in stable condition at Grady Memorial Hospital.

    On July 14, a plainclothes officer killed an 18-year-old, who police said was trying to run over the officer. Relatives and friends said the teen was fleeing because he felt threatened.

    Two officers shot a man they said drove a car at them after a chase on July 2. And on May 26, an officer investigating a report that a man had stabbed his girlfriend shot the man during a scuffle.

    http://www.nando.com/nation/story/490364p-3913413c.html


    "If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
  • Josey1Josey1 Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
    edited November -1
    Martin Lawrence Confronts Troubled Past
    Comedian Returns to Stand-Up to Talk About Guns, Drugs, Arrests and Coma

    By Buck Wolf



    Aug. 1 - Remember back in 1996 when Martin Lawrence was picked up at a busy Los Angels intersection, screaming obscenities at motorists, with a loaded pistol in his pocket? Lawrence sure does.



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    Having been turned into a tabloid oddity, Lawrence lashes back in a soul-baring concert documentary film, recorded in January and opening Friday, Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat.
    Of course, the former host of TV's Def Comedy Jam is still doing raunchy routines, the sort that drew enormous success - not to mention an NC-17 rating - for his last concert film, 1994's You So Crazy.

    But Lawrence also is out to set the record straight and blast the media, which he says exaggerated his drug use and made up facts just to sell papers and boost ratings.

    "They're the scum of the earth to me," he says.

    Of course, Lawrence isn't so fed up with the press that he won't sit down with reporters to plug his movie.

    Should I be scared? I ask him, considering that he uses nearly every dirty word in the book to describe journalists.

    "You should be," he says, with an amused grin, "if you are one of the f----d up media!

    "Not that I'm going to do anything to you," he reassures me.

    With a $20 Million Payday, Why Take Risks?

    At 37, Lawrence still has an edge. In 1994, he was temporarily banned from NBC for remarks on Saturday Night Live that sent network executives through the roof.

    Still, he went on to prove himself as the star of his own hit sitcom, Martin. He's had mixed success at the box office. But studios may allow for stinkers like Black Knight after a $100 million surprise blockbuster on the order of Big Momma's House.

    Things are going pretty well. He's earning a cool $20 million for his next film, National Security. So why dredge up events that faded from the tabloids years ago?

    Perhaps Richard Pryor has something to do with it. Pryor brought confessional comedy to new extremes. If Lawrence's hero could joke about how he nearly died freebasing cocaine, finding life-affirming humor in a mistake that nearly claimed his life, Lawrence could do likewise.

    "I've got to tell my story," he says. "I can't let E! True Hollywood Story tell my story."

    `God Laid Me Down and Woke Me Up'

    Lawrence now doesn't deny that drugs played a part in some past transgressions. And it did seem that in the late 1990s, his life was spiraling out of control. But he says a lot of the stories were distorted, or just plain fabricated - like the reports that he suffered from a bipolar disorder.

    "They made a lot of things up to sell a better story," he says. "You don't know what that's like until you've been through it."

    But even without the gossip-page speculation and nameless sources, Lawrence undeniably had some troubles.

    In May of 1996, when Los Angeles police found him wandering and disoriented in a crowded area on Ventura Boulevard with a loaded pistol in his pocket, he was hospitalized. A spokesman said hat he was exhausted and dehydrated.

    Two months later, Lawrence was stopped again at Burbank Airport, carrying a loaded pistol. He later served two months' probation for the offense.

    He was arrested again in March of 1997, for punching a nightclub patron, and later ordered to perform community service.

    Then came the event Lawrence says changed his life. He lapsed into a three-day coma after collapsing from heat exhaustion while jogging in hot weather with a nylon jogging suit and a wool cap.

    "I felt like, in the coma, God laid me down and woke me up to be able to see a lot more clearer, and it's humbled me a great deal, you know?" he said.

    `We Fall Down, But We Get Back Up'

    Always an unapologetic potty-mouth on-stage, now he jokes about the weeks after coming out of the coma, when he was incontinent and wore a diaper, needing physical therapy to regain the ability to walk.

    "Obviously, when those things are going on, you don't ever really get the opportunity to say what you want to say right then and there," he says.

    "Through laughs, I can honestly talk about the things I see and believe and feel," Lawrence says. "One thing I truly learned. We fall down, but we get back up again."

    While he was struggling, Magic Johnson, M.C. Hammer and other celebrity friends offered advice. What did they say?

    "I don't know," Lawrence laughs. "I was high."

    Now, he says, he no longer smokes pot and takes better care of himself. He feels his life experiences add dimension to his humor.

    "I don't think it's affected my sense of humor at all. The film obviously shows you that. I just think I've grown a lot more and matured and I know a lot more about what I'm talking about as opposed to just being a young comic with a mic in his hand."
    http://abcnews.go.com/sections/entertainment/DailyNews/lawrence020801.html


    "If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
  • NighthawkNighthawk Member Posts: 12,022 ✭✭✭
    edited November -1
    At least they finally referred to the firearm as a tool.?

    Rugster
  • Judge DreadJudge Dread Member Posts: 2,372 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited November -1
    MMMM ! I have allways refered to them as that too ,its so important to select the right set of tools for a job....
    Specialy to keep the proctologist away from your *.

    JD

    400 million cows can't be wrong ( EAT GRASS !!! )
  • UNIVERSITY50UNIVERSITY50 Member Posts: 1,705 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited November -1
    what the heck is that b.s. at the end of the post on the 70 yr old lady that shot the police officer! she was accosted by the police? yeah right! that is why they were letting the old lady go to the bathroom, in the middle of accosting her, oh! wait! stop! i got to pee!, stop your accosting so i can walk into bathroom and get the gun to kill you. hello!!! wake up!! the officer was doing her job! answering a CALL, for service from someone that call the police. they did not go randomly through the apt. building roughing up old people looking for something to do! come on people, you will yell at the oddballs from the left, but what about the Aholes on the far far right, what ever scum bag reporter wrote that is just as bad as the leftwing radicals that want the stupid laws on gun control. come on people a little common horse sense here!! well i'm done venting! let me have it! from all the armchair anti police/gov judges that think her rights were violated by the police for answering a call for service.
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