More police issues with guns
Cops in Detroit were trying to shoot a dog, the result:
It happened Jan. 13. The four-legged suspect, named Bugsy, was loose, and the cops said it attacked them. They nailed Bugsy after firing more than 20 shots. Their bullets also hit two houses and a plastic tank filled with gas.
The Detroit Police Department’s internal affairs unit and Office of the Chief Investigator, which handles citizen complaints, are investigating the incident, involving three officers from the 5th (Jefferson) Precinct.
Claiborne, who is a Detroit firefighter, is still livid when he talks about the officers running up and down his block on Harvard and firing their guns repeatedly. One of the shots went through his front window as he was holding his daughter in the kitchen, slamming into a wall several feet from them.
“I still don’t really know how the bullet missed us,” Claiborne said. “There must have been an angel in the room.”
His neighbors, Gerald and Candace Wheeler, surveyed the damage to their two-car garage in awe after the police killed Bugsy, a 1-year-old Neapolitan mastiff who died in an alley a block away at Grayton, near Chandler Park Drive.
There are eight bullet holes in the garage. One bullet grazed the plastic handle of a full gas can inside the garage.
“That gas can could have easily blown up,” said Gerald Wheeler.
After the officers killed the dog, Wheeler said one of them approached him and nonchalantly uttered, “Wow, your garage looks like a piece of Swiss cheese.”
“I asked him, ‘Who is going to pay for this?’ ” Wheeler said. “He told me to turn it in to my insurance company.”
Then there’s the dog’s owner, Timothy Johnson, who lives on Grayton. He bought the dog as a family pet on Christmas Eve 2002 to surprise his 3-year-old daughter Jordan. Johnson said Bugsy, who was about 150 pounds, dug his way out of a kennel in the backyard while the family was out.
“This was really unnecessary,” Johnson, 41, said. “I grew up in Detroit and Highland Park and I really don’t want to give the city a bad rap, but Bugsy was not a vicious dog. If the officers would have taken a little time, they could have easily found out who owned the dog.”
Seems one of those gun safety rules is be sure of your target and what’s behind it.
March 16th, 2004 at 10:10 am
I can only hope there are some facts that we aren’t aware of that would make sense of this whole thing. I mean, this just can’t be the whole story. Can it?
March 16th, 2004 at 10:19 am
I hope not but the link doesn’t offer much more info.
March 21st, 2004 at 6:34 pm
The part I like best is the bit about the bullet grazing a plastic gas can and the opinion that it could have easily blown up. Gasoline just isn’t that flammable. I’m not much of a gun nut, but I’ve certainly played with my share of fire. Liquid gas isn’t very volatile. You can toss lit matches into a gas can and they’ll extinguish when they hit the liquid.
I’ve applied torches to metal containers of white gas, waved open flames right over the surface of the gas, and not gotten it to light. You have to get the flame real close to a heavy concentration of the gas before you get any combustion.
I’ve cleaned up quite a few gas spills (my friends and I are klutzy and stupid), and have done this while smoking. Indoors. Had no problems.
Try shooting a full propane tank with a rifle. You’ll end up with a tank with a hole in it. If you lay a lit gas-soaked rag on the tank, then shoot it, you’ve just set off a rather large molotov cocktail. Even THAT doesn’t explode. It just starts spewing flame. You can keep shooting it as it jumps and spews until it runs out of gas. Sure it’s a fire hazard, but the danger of blowing anything up is pretty low.
So don’t worry too much about normal bullets sparking fires in common gas fuels.