Gents, is it just me or do you find this story distressing? Now I almost never one to second guess a person who was in a life or death situation as they were there, and I was not. However, the way for an LEO to "learn their lesson" is not from almost getting yourself killed by making virtually every mistake possible due to a lack of training.
I do not think most people realize how little firearms experience most big city PD have, especially in typically liberal anti gun areas such as the city she's in, which she sums up in her "lessons learned" #1 below.
The story makes me more angry than anything as I hate to see an LEO put in such a situation, and I have wonder she's well qualified to now teach recruits her "lessons learned" vs "we need and deserve more extensive training as it's that training you fall back on in such encounters"
Am I off base here? LEO specific opinions?
________________________________
The 25-year-old gangbanger was a significant player in the life of Chicago P.D. Officer Candace Milovich-Fitzsimmons for less than two minutes. In that flicker of time she says he changed her approach to policing forever.
He wanted to kill her, she believes, but instead he was the one who died, leaving a legacy of lessons that she's convinced will help her survive for the remainder of her career-and can help other officers better face the mean streets as well.
"I didn't go looking for this," she told PoliceOne in an exclusive interview recently. "It found me."
If her sergeant had been a bit indulgent, she wouldn't have confronted those watershed moments at all.
At about 10:45 one chilly Monday night last November, having just transported a prisoner for a tac team, Milovich-Fitzsimmons and her young partner, Matt Blomstrand, were hanging around their district station on Chicago's Northwest Side, hoping to get cut loose from duty since only 15 minutes remained of their shift. "Too early to check off," their sergeant said. "Get back out there." So they did, Milovich-Fitzsimmons driving.
As they approached an intersection a few blocks away, a black Ford Explorer caught their eye up a side street. "It was going about 5 or 10 miles an hour," Milovich-Fitzsimmons recalls, "jerking back and forth like someone was jiggling the steering, and the horn was blowing like a maniac."
A domestic, they figured…and kept going. "Then our conscience got the best of us, and we went looking for that car." They quickly found it on a dimly lit street in a neighborhood predominately of small, single-family houses.
As they swung in behind, a male jumped out of the rear passenger-side seat, ran a few yards, then apparently changed his mind and ran back, trying to climb back in as the SUV stuttered forward in a jerky series of stops and lurches.
No brake lights signaled the stops, and the third time the vehicle abruptly halted the squad car rear-ended it.
What the officers had interrupted would be revealed only after Milovich-Fitzsimmons endured the most violent encounter of her 10 years as a Chicago cop. According to what police later pieced together, the male who'd been trying to reenter the vehicle and two cholos inside were members of the vicious Spanish Cobras street gang. The other occupant was a 33-year-old man who a few minutes earlier had been walking up to his front door from work, carrying a jug of milk for his family.
He was hailed by a young male pedestrian with a cane who insistently asked him for a ride somewhere. The mark had a "bad feeling" about the guy, so rather than risk the safety of his family he decided to "sacrifice" himself, and agreed. As the two approached his Ford Explorer, two more individuals leaped from the shadows, pushed the victim into the SUV and took off with him. Their original plan apparently was to hold him for ransom.
Inside the car, the assailants reportedly took $350 and a cell phone from the victim, then started taking turns beating him with their fists and the cane. Investigators believe they changed their mind about their crime plan and instead decided to drive to a desolate industrial area in the district and there murder the man.
The herky-jerky movement of the SUV was caused by the desperate victim grabbing the gear-shift lever and jamming it in and out of PARK.
Immediately upon the collision with the squad car, the gangbanger outside the Explorer and the one who'd been driving bolted. Milovich-Fitzsimmons radioed in a foot pursuit and beat feet after the driver. Blomstrand was delayed in exiting their unit because the crash had jammed his door. By the time he crawled out through his window, Milovich-Fitzsimmons had disappeared into the darkness. Blomstrand, with less than three years on the job, focused his attention on the two running vehicles, the beating victim who tumbled out of the SUV in a bloody heap, and the cholo inside who was trying to climb out through a rear door.
Milovich-Fitzsimmons, meanwhile, was sucked into a worsening series of clashes with the driver.
<Calibre Press Street Survival Seminar>
First she caught up with him on a parkway along the street and shoved him to his hands and knees. She had hold of his coat but before she could get a body grip, he pushed up, easily pulled out of the jacket and took off again. "That's why gangbangers never wear their coats closed," she told PoliceOne. "And they tend to wear a couple, so if they wiggle out of one they still have an outer garment."
The foot chase continued down an "extremely dark" gangway between two bungalows. Milovich-Fitzsimmons caught the driver again in an alley behind some garages and pushed him against a wrought-iron fence. "Get down on the ground!" she yelled.
Instead, "he whips around and starts fighting." During the tussle, her shoulder mike popped off, swinging around her legs out of reach for calling for help.
Milovich-Fitzsimmons felt no panic. Through a decade's experience, the 39-year-old, trim, blond officer with a tough-but-fair reputation was accustomed to scrapping with suspects and had never encountered a situation she couldn't control. "I was thinking very clearly, giving basic commands to myself to stay in the fight," she recalls. "I couldn't understand why he was so violent, though." Unaware of the kidnapping, she thought she was dealing just with a run-of-the-mill hot car.
At a point when Milovich-Fitzsimmons grabbed her adversary by the shirt, he tripped and fell to the ground. "Stay down!" she yelled. He raised his hands for a moment, "teetering on his ass" and looking beyond her, evidently checking for her partner. Then he lunged toward her, grabbed the butt of her holstered S&W 9mm and used it as leverage to pull himself up.
"I could feel the top strap unsnap and the holster open," Milovich-Fitzsimmons says. "It was the first time my weapon had ever been threatened. I thought, 'I'm in big trouble here.'"
What she calls "Neanderthal thoughts" guided her-Reach here! Do this! "Very loud, very basic, like someone yelling at me in my head." She fought to keep her gun in her Level II holster while the 'banger continued to yank at it with one hand while trying to smash her in the face with his other.
Finally she managed to break away from him and pull her gun. "Get on the ground!" she screamed. He lunged for her again. She squeezed the trigger and fired a round, "the first time I'd ever shot my weapon on duty. As soon as I pulled the trigger, I knew it was a good shoot."
Yes and no. The round went through the suspect's left hand and through his sleeve-then, incredibly, ricocheted off his forehead and ended up in the doorframe of a nearby garage.
Blood streaming down his face, the attacker grabbed again at Milovich-Fitzsimmons' semiauto. She beat him with it, directly on his wound, but he was unfazed. He shoved her against a row of garbage cans and fled across the alley into a vacant field, which soon became the third-and worst-scene of the progressive fight.
Milovich-Fitzsimmons holstered and secured her S&W, took out her cuffs and went after him. When she caught up to him, he'd fallen to his hands and knees. "I thought, 'Game over' and I moved in to take him into custody. Color me wrong.
"All I could see were his wrists-major tunnel vision. I heard that voice in my head, Wrist…cuff." But when she got close, the suspect tackled her and although she beat him with the handcuffs, he took her to the ground. The cuffs flew from her hand.
"We grappled all over the place," she says. "I was punching him, kicking him in the face and chest, twisting his balls for all I was worth. He never flinched…just got angrier." She drew her gun but couldn't get a shot. Seven inches taller and outweighing her by nearly 90 pounds, the suspect pinned her, smashed her in the face and fought again for control of her weapon.
"His hands were like hams," she says. "He was able to bend my wrist so the gun was pointing right against my throat. I got scratches from the muzzle." A weight trainer-"I'm stronger than I look"-Milovich-Fitzsimmons first managed to push the gun off target, then turn it toward him. She pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. The suspect was clamping the slide so it couldn't move.
The muzzle twisted back and forth as the officer fought desperately to save her life and the suspect fought to take it. "It seemed like an eternity. I fought with everything I had but I couldn't stop him. I was physically spent. I knew I couldn't hang on much longer."
Then the voice in her head came back. "Loud as day," three names echoed in her skull: Jake…Alex…Eddie. Her three sons.
"I can't give up!" she told herself. Despite her exhaustion, she continued to keep the muzzle away from her head and body until she glimpsed "my angel"-a man in a blue uniform shirt-running toward them from the alley. He was a responding officer whom her partner had sent in the direction he'd last seen her run as she pursued the suspect fleeing from the collision.
"Shoot this mother****er!" she screamed. "He's got my gun!"
Almost at contact distance, the officer fired four fast rounds. One grazed Milovich-Fitzsimmons' right hand. Three hit the suspect. He collapsed, dead, on top of her.
"By then," Milovich-Fitzsimmons says, "I think I was slipping into shock. I could hear voices but I couldn't respond to them or move or even open my eyes. And I couldn't stop shaking. I was vibrating from head to toe."
From the moment she radioed in the foot pursuit until the backup officer called in the fatal shooting, only 1 minute 45 seconds elapsed. What happened during that brief time "changed me tremendously," says Milovich-Fitzsimmons, whose husband and sister are Chicago P.D. sergeants. She enumerates the mistakes she believes she made and the lessons she learned:
1. "When we were fighting in the alley and I shot, I should have kept shooting. When I had firearms training in the academy, we shot once, holstered and waited for the next instruction. We talked about two to the chest and one to the head, but we didn't do it. You perform like you train. My greatest regret is that I didn't light him up in the alley when I had the chance. I won't stop short like that again. If I'm justified in shooting, I'll shoot and keep shooting and not look so much to other avenues."
2. "When I reholstered my weapon, I deescalated prematurely, going for my cuffs. I should have made a greater effort to grab my radio and get help. I should have anticipated that the fight might not be over yet."
3. "When we were fighting, I used constant verbal commands. Yelling at him took a lot of energy, exhausted me. We're required to give verbal commands, but I would limit them more and concentrate on physically overcoming my adversary."
4. "Would I carry an extra gun? Absolutely not. I was in the fight of my life to retain just one. What if I'd had a backup gun in an ankle holster when I kicked him and he'd grabbed it? It's hard enough to hold onto one gun without having to keep track of two."
5. "The first thing I said when I finally went off duty that night was, 'I want a different gun, a .45.' I went to the range and tried several weapons. I ended up selecting a Sig-Sauer 9mm. It's light, with an easy trigger pull. I shot a tight group the first time I fired it. I'm going to the range more often now. I want to feel more comfortable with a gun. It wasn't second nature to me when I needed to use it."
6. "I find myself less tolerant to resistance from suspects now. If someone gets jumpy, I throw the cuffs on them. I'm not going to play anymore. I find myself analyzing people and situations a lot more closely. I will never, ever allow myself to be put in that situation again."
7. "After I had some time off and then went back on duty, I felt like I was coming down with the flu one night. I asked myself, 'If I have to get into something tonight, can I defend myself?' I decided to stay home. Before, I would have brushed it off and gone in, full of bravado. Now I know I need to be on top of my game when I'm working. I can't imagine going through the kind of fight I had feeling sick."
8. "At the station, some cops were talking about my incident, and one of the females said, 'If that had been me, I'd be dead.' Others nodded in agreement. I went off on them. 'Never give up!' I said. 'The minute you think that way, you've lost! If you're thinking you can't survive, you won't, and you'll be just another officer on a mass card.' I try to talk to other officers about what happened, because I want them to see what can be learned from it."
9. "I've become more involved with fitness. Sometimes I work out 10 times a week now. Before the incident, I could bench press 110 on a good day. Now I've set a goal of 238, the weight of the guy who attacked me. I'm already up to 160."
Officer Milovich-Fitzsimmons teaches a psychology workshop for recruits at the Chicago Police Academy. She knows something about motivation. She keeps a Polaroid of her assailant's body, decorated with gang tattoos, at her gym.
"He was in my life such a short time, but he altered so much of me," she says. "I look at that picture, and it gets me very angry. It pushes me to work harder."
I do not think most people realize how little firearms experience most big city PD have, especially in typically liberal anti gun areas such as the city she's in, which she sums up in her "lessons learned" #1 below.
The story makes me more angry than anything as I hate to see an LEO put in such a situation, and I have wonder she's well qualified to now teach recruits her "lessons learned" vs "we need and deserve more extensive training as it's that training you fall back on in such encounters"
Am I off base here? LEO specific opinions?
________________________________
The 25-year-old gangbanger was a significant player in the life of Chicago P.D. Officer Candace Milovich-Fitzsimmons for less than two minutes. In that flicker of time she says he changed her approach to policing forever.
He wanted to kill her, she believes, but instead he was the one who died, leaving a legacy of lessons that she's convinced will help her survive for the remainder of her career-and can help other officers better face the mean streets as well.
"I didn't go looking for this," she told PoliceOne in an exclusive interview recently. "It found me."
If her sergeant had been a bit indulgent, she wouldn't have confronted those watershed moments at all.
At about 10:45 one chilly Monday night last November, having just transported a prisoner for a tac team, Milovich-Fitzsimmons and her young partner, Matt Blomstrand, were hanging around their district station on Chicago's Northwest Side, hoping to get cut loose from duty since only 15 minutes remained of their shift. "Too early to check off," their sergeant said. "Get back out there." So they did, Milovich-Fitzsimmons driving.
As they approached an intersection a few blocks away, a black Ford Explorer caught their eye up a side street. "It was going about 5 or 10 miles an hour," Milovich-Fitzsimmons recalls, "jerking back and forth like someone was jiggling the steering, and the horn was blowing like a maniac."
A domestic, they figured…and kept going. "Then our conscience got the best of us, and we went looking for that car." They quickly found it on a dimly lit street in a neighborhood predominately of small, single-family houses.
As they swung in behind, a male jumped out of the rear passenger-side seat, ran a few yards, then apparently changed his mind and ran back, trying to climb back in as the SUV stuttered forward in a jerky series of stops and lurches.
No brake lights signaled the stops, and the third time the vehicle abruptly halted the squad car rear-ended it.
What the officers had interrupted would be revealed only after Milovich-Fitzsimmons endured the most violent encounter of her 10 years as a Chicago cop. According to what police later pieced together, the male who'd been trying to reenter the vehicle and two cholos inside were members of the vicious Spanish Cobras street gang. The other occupant was a 33-year-old man who a few minutes earlier had been walking up to his front door from work, carrying a jug of milk for his family.
He was hailed by a young male pedestrian with a cane who insistently asked him for a ride somewhere. The mark had a "bad feeling" about the guy, so rather than risk the safety of his family he decided to "sacrifice" himself, and agreed. As the two approached his Ford Explorer, two more individuals leaped from the shadows, pushed the victim into the SUV and took off with him. Their original plan apparently was to hold him for ransom.
Inside the car, the assailants reportedly took $350 and a cell phone from the victim, then started taking turns beating him with their fists and the cane. Investigators believe they changed their mind about their crime plan and instead decided to drive to a desolate industrial area in the district and there murder the man.
The herky-jerky movement of the SUV was caused by the desperate victim grabbing the gear-shift lever and jamming it in and out of PARK.
Immediately upon the collision with the squad car, the gangbanger outside the Explorer and the one who'd been driving bolted. Milovich-Fitzsimmons radioed in a foot pursuit and beat feet after the driver. Blomstrand was delayed in exiting their unit because the crash had jammed his door. By the time he crawled out through his window, Milovich-Fitzsimmons had disappeared into the darkness. Blomstrand, with less than three years on the job, focused his attention on the two running vehicles, the beating victim who tumbled out of the SUV in a bloody heap, and the cholo inside who was trying to climb out through a rear door.
Milovich-Fitzsimmons, meanwhile, was sucked into a worsening series of clashes with the driver.
<Calibre Press Street Survival Seminar>
First she caught up with him on a parkway along the street and shoved him to his hands and knees. She had hold of his coat but before she could get a body grip, he pushed up, easily pulled out of the jacket and took off again. "That's why gangbangers never wear their coats closed," she told PoliceOne. "And they tend to wear a couple, so if they wiggle out of one they still have an outer garment."
The foot chase continued down an "extremely dark" gangway between two bungalows. Milovich-Fitzsimmons caught the driver again in an alley behind some garages and pushed him against a wrought-iron fence. "Get down on the ground!" she yelled.
Instead, "he whips around and starts fighting." During the tussle, her shoulder mike popped off, swinging around her legs out of reach for calling for help.
Milovich-Fitzsimmons felt no panic. Through a decade's experience, the 39-year-old, trim, blond officer with a tough-but-fair reputation was accustomed to scrapping with suspects and had never encountered a situation she couldn't control. "I was thinking very clearly, giving basic commands to myself to stay in the fight," she recalls. "I couldn't understand why he was so violent, though." Unaware of the kidnapping, she thought she was dealing just with a run-of-the-mill hot car.
At a point when Milovich-Fitzsimmons grabbed her adversary by the shirt, he tripped and fell to the ground. "Stay down!" she yelled. He raised his hands for a moment, "teetering on his ass" and looking beyond her, evidently checking for her partner. Then he lunged toward her, grabbed the butt of her holstered S&W 9mm and used it as leverage to pull himself up.
"I could feel the top strap unsnap and the holster open," Milovich-Fitzsimmons says. "It was the first time my weapon had ever been threatened. I thought, 'I'm in big trouble here.'"
What she calls "Neanderthal thoughts" guided her-Reach here! Do this! "Very loud, very basic, like someone yelling at me in my head." She fought to keep her gun in her Level II holster while the 'banger continued to yank at it with one hand while trying to smash her in the face with his other.
Finally she managed to break away from him and pull her gun. "Get on the ground!" she screamed. He lunged for her again. She squeezed the trigger and fired a round, "the first time I'd ever shot my weapon on duty. As soon as I pulled the trigger, I knew it was a good shoot."
Yes and no. The round went through the suspect's left hand and through his sleeve-then, incredibly, ricocheted off his forehead and ended up in the doorframe of a nearby garage.
Blood streaming down his face, the attacker grabbed again at Milovich-Fitzsimmons' semiauto. She beat him with it, directly on his wound, but he was unfazed. He shoved her against a row of garbage cans and fled across the alley into a vacant field, which soon became the third-and worst-scene of the progressive fight.
Milovich-Fitzsimmons holstered and secured her S&W, took out her cuffs and went after him. When she caught up to him, he'd fallen to his hands and knees. "I thought, 'Game over' and I moved in to take him into custody. Color me wrong.
"All I could see were his wrists-major tunnel vision. I heard that voice in my head, Wrist…cuff." But when she got close, the suspect tackled her and although she beat him with the handcuffs, he took her to the ground. The cuffs flew from her hand.
"We grappled all over the place," she says. "I was punching him, kicking him in the face and chest, twisting his balls for all I was worth. He never flinched…just got angrier." She drew her gun but couldn't get a shot. Seven inches taller and outweighing her by nearly 90 pounds, the suspect pinned her, smashed her in the face and fought again for control of her weapon.
"His hands were like hams," she says. "He was able to bend my wrist so the gun was pointing right against my throat. I got scratches from the muzzle." A weight trainer-"I'm stronger than I look"-Milovich-Fitzsimmons first managed to push the gun off target, then turn it toward him. She pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. The suspect was clamping the slide so it couldn't move.
The muzzle twisted back and forth as the officer fought desperately to save her life and the suspect fought to take it. "It seemed like an eternity. I fought with everything I had but I couldn't stop him. I was physically spent. I knew I couldn't hang on much longer."
Then the voice in her head came back. "Loud as day," three names echoed in her skull: Jake…Alex…Eddie. Her three sons.
"I can't give up!" she told herself. Despite her exhaustion, she continued to keep the muzzle away from her head and body until she glimpsed "my angel"-a man in a blue uniform shirt-running toward them from the alley. He was a responding officer whom her partner had sent in the direction he'd last seen her run as she pursued the suspect fleeing from the collision.
"Shoot this mother****er!" she screamed. "He's got my gun!"
Almost at contact distance, the officer fired four fast rounds. One grazed Milovich-Fitzsimmons' right hand. Three hit the suspect. He collapsed, dead, on top of her.
"By then," Milovich-Fitzsimmons says, "I think I was slipping into shock. I could hear voices but I couldn't respond to them or move or even open my eyes. And I couldn't stop shaking. I was vibrating from head to toe."
From the moment she radioed in the foot pursuit until the backup officer called in the fatal shooting, only 1 minute 45 seconds elapsed. What happened during that brief time "changed me tremendously," says Milovich-Fitzsimmons, whose husband and sister are Chicago P.D. sergeants. She enumerates the mistakes she believes she made and the lessons she learned:
1. "When we were fighting in the alley and I shot, I should have kept shooting. When I had firearms training in the academy, we shot once, holstered and waited for the next instruction. We talked about two to the chest and one to the head, but we didn't do it. You perform like you train. My greatest regret is that I didn't light him up in the alley when I had the chance. I won't stop short like that again. If I'm justified in shooting, I'll shoot and keep shooting and not look so much to other avenues."
2. "When I reholstered my weapon, I deescalated prematurely, going for my cuffs. I should have made a greater effort to grab my radio and get help. I should have anticipated that the fight might not be over yet."
3. "When we were fighting, I used constant verbal commands. Yelling at him took a lot of energy, exhausted me. We're required to give verbal commands, but I would limit them more and concentrate on physically overcoming my adversary."
4. "Would I carry an extra gun? Absolutely not. I was in the fight of my life to retain just one. What if I'd had a backup gun in an ankle holster when I kicked him and he'd grabbed it? It's hard enough to hold onto one gun without having to keep track of two."
5. "The first thing I said when I finally went off duty that night was, 'I want a different gun, a .45.' I went to the range and tried several weapons. I ended up selecting a Sig-Sauer 9mm. It's light, with an easy trigger pull. I shot a tight group the first time I fired it. I'm going to the range more often now. I want to feel more comfortable with a gun. It wasn't second nature to me when I needed to use it."
6. "I find myself less tolerant to resistance from suspects now. If someone gets jumpy, I throw the cuffs on them. I'm not going to play anymore. I find myself analyzing people and situations a lot more closely. I will never, ever allow myself to be put in that situation again."
7. "After I had some time off and then went back on duty, I felt like I was coming down with the flu one night. I asked myself, 'If I have to get into something tonight, can I defend myself?' I decided to stay home. Before, I would have brushed it off and gone in, full of bravado. Now I know I need to be on top of my game when I'm working. I can't imagine going through the kind of fight I had feeling sick."
8. "At the station, some cops were talking about my incident, and one of the females said, 'If that had been me, I'd be dead.' Others nodded in agreement. I went off on them. 'Never give up!' I said. 'The minute you think that way, you've lost! If you're thinking you can't survive, you won't, and you'll be just another officer on a mass card.' I try to talk to other officers about what happened, because I want them to see what can be learned from it."
9. "I've become more involved with fitness. Sometimes I work out 10 times a week now. Before the incident, I could bench press 110 on a good day. Now I've set a goal of 238, the weight of the guy who attacked me. I'm already up to 160."
Officer Milovich-Fitzsimmons teaches a psychology workshop for recruits at the Chicago Police Academy. She knows something about motivation. She keeps a Polaroid of her assailant's body, decorated with gang tattoos, at her gym.
"He was in my life such a short time, but he altered so much of me," she says. "I look at that picture, and it gets me very angry. It pushes me to work harder."
