How things go wrong

Rocky Mountain News

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Reid Wilkening / Special To The Rocky

I work at home. My office is in the front of our single-story house. At one end of the entry hall is the front door, at the other end are French doors that lead to a big backyard.

The architecture, though unremarkable, is important.

I am at my desk working, alone, when I hear a scraping sound from the direction of the yard. Curious, I begin to walk down the entry hall.

One of the French doors is open. In nice weather, one door is usually open.

When I'm 10 feet from the doors, I see the silhouette of a person wearing dark clothes.

It is less than an hour before dusk. The sun is low in the western sky. That time of day the shade of a big blue spruce paints our patio in deep shadows.

The light, though nothing unusual, is important.

I am not accustomed to seeing strangers on my patio.

My home is in a good Denver neighborhood. The lots are large. Crime is infrequent. To get to the backyard a stranger must either be quite determined or quite lost. The driveway is long. A flagstone path winds around to the patio.

The moment I recognize that a person is on the patio, my heart races. There is no good reason for anyone to be on the other side of the door.

I am wary. OK, I'm afraid. By nature I am a bit of a coward.

I slow my steps.

My inclination toward avoiding physical confrontation is important.

In my best king-of-the-castle voice I say, "Can I help you?" My tone isn't generous. I want to know what the hell this person is doing at my back door.

The entry hall is unlit. I am wearing black sweat pants and a long-sleeved navy polo shirt. I am as much of a silhouette as is the person on the patio.

I am a middle-aged white man.

In retrospect, I'm afraid that is important.

The person takes a step. Toward me. The angle changes slightly. I see a gun.

It's a pistol. The barrel is pointed at my torso. The target is somewhere between my left shoulder and my sternum.

The person says, "Stop." The command is spoken crisply, but not yelled or barked.

The command is unnecessary. I stopped at the sight of the gun. I hold my hands out wide so that - if I'm luckier than I'm feeling - the person can see them.

My hands are empty.

I'm 100 percent sure that is important.

My sense is that the intruder is as stunned as I am.

"Who are you?" the person asks. In my head I'm asking a version of the same question: Who the hell are you?

It's my house, but the person on the patio has the gun and all the authority. I answer the question. "I live here. This is my house." I give my name.

The gun doesn't move. Still pointed at my chest.

"We got an alarm to this address." The tone is almost apologetic. Almost.

Alarm. I realize that I'm talking to a cop. I note light reflecting off a badge. I spot the familiar contours of the uniform, the outlines of all the patrol paraphernalia hanging from the belt.

But the cop did not say, "Stop! Denver Police." The cop said only, "Stop."

"This is my house," I repeat. "I've been here all afternoon. There hasn't been an alarm."

In the few seconds we've been talking I've already surmised the whole complex sequence of events that led the cop to draw a weapon at my back door.

The house the cop is looking for belongs to a neighbor around the corner. Same four-digit house number as ours. Same street name. But ours is "Lane," theirs is "Drive." In the dozen years I've lived here the cops have confused the addresses three or four times. So have roofers, plumbers, the UPS guy, the FedEx guy, the backup mailman, Dominos, and the takeout guy from our local Chinese restaurant.

Almost a victim

After a lifetime that lasts another couple of seconds, the officer lowers the gun.

I am beginning to realize that I was almost just shot. In my extremities I start to feel the insistent tremors of spent adrenaline. I'm shaking.

A moment later I join the cop on the patio to explain about the neighbors around the corner with almost the same address. I realize that the cop's hands and voice, too, have started to shake.

We both know it was close.

In recent months, there had been a couple of police killings of civilians in Denver. I think of Frank Lobato. He had been in bed, armed with a pop can. The cops are testy about it. The citizens are testy about it.

I am aware that I was almost the next unarmed victim of a Denver cop's gun.

This cop was almost the Denver cop who shot the next unarmed victim.

Two silhouettes

Here's how it happened, how simply things go wrong:

The Denver Police Department received a report of an alarm signal originally generated from a garage-door sensor. The dispatch computer's database had a flaw. The computer sent out our address, not that of our neighbor, to a patrol officer near my home.

The system had spit out the wrong address in response to our neighbor's alarm before. I had complained before. The city had promised to fix it before.

It hadn't been fixed. Apparently.

From the street in front of our home where the cop parked, it was clear that the door to our detached garage, far from the road, was open. Since a garage door was the source of the alarm signal, the officer decided to investigate.

That's the job.

The officer noted that the side door of our house, too, was open. That side door leads from the driveway to a small mudroom. The cop checked the open garage and continued to investigate, walking down the flagstone path to the back of the house.

At some point the officer drew a weapon. I don't know at what point. I was still at my desk, oblivious to the unfolding drama.

The cop continued to our patio and saw yet another open door - the French door at the back of our entry hall. We had a new puppy then, and had placed a temporary low metal fence around the patio to contain the dog's exuberance. The cop clipped the fence scissoring over it.

That was the source of the noise I heard from my office.

By then, the cop was convinced that a burglar had tripped the alarm.

I was thinking I had an unwelcome intruder - likely a stray dog or one of the local red foxes - in my yard.

As I left my office I had no way to know that the cop and I were about to meet as two silhouettes in dark clothing, one in the late afternoon shadows of a Colorado blue spruce, one in an unlit entry hall.

One armed with a gun.

The other one, not.

We were the squeeze of an index finger away from a tragedy that would change both of our lives forever.

Or, more likely, change the cop's life forever.

It would have ended mine.

Thanks for not shooting

The cop doesn't quite believe my story at first, insisting that the alarm was from our garage, not our neighbor's.

"An attached garage?" I ask. I know the drill. I've done this before.

The cop says, "Yes."

I explain that the neighbors with the similar address have an attached garage that is alarmed. We have a detached garage that is not alarmed. I explain that the screw-up is a rerun. I don't point out that the previous instances involved false-alarm penalties sent by mail, not cops in my back yard with guns.

The officer is feeling the echoes that must inevitably come from almost shooting the life out of an unarmed civilian homeowner. The cop is desperate to believe that the mistake wasn't so simple, that the system couldn't get the addresses mixed up.

I explain again that the system just did, and has before.

"The side door to the house was open," the cop argues.

"I'm home," I explain. "Sometimes I leave it open." I'm thinking, It's my door - I'm allowed to leave it open. It may be stupid, but it's not a crime.

"The back door is open, too," the cop points out.

I realize the officer is rationalizing. As though the fact that I had the temerity to leave a couple of doors open to enjoy a lovely Colorado evening would make it perfectly understandable why a police officer had to shoot me inside my own home.

I say, "We get a breeze when it's open." It sounds lame, even to me.

Eventually, I convince the cop what happened.

The officer promises to get the database corrected.

I have an urge to thank the cop for not shooting me.

How crazy is that?

That's how things go wrong.

By Stephen White

A psychologist and best-selling author of crime fiction, White's most recent book is Dry Ice. He wrote this account, based on his own chilling experience in 2004, not long after a Denver police officer shot and killed an unarmed Frank Lobato. White's story is published here for the first time. The city this week approved a $900,000 settlement to the Lobato family.