The Naked Gun: Out of the Shower and Into the Fight
Situation: You’re in the shower when an armed home invader breaks in.
Lesson: Get your gun first, then worry about the bathrobe.
When retired lawman Floyd Lee Smith (he goes by “Lee”) took my MAG-40 class in Idaho last year, he was kind enough to do an after-class breakout session on one of his experiences. The students found it compelling. So did I and I think you will too.
A lot of private citizens get the impression that police experiences don’t relate to them. That’s wrong. For one thing, many whom the cops shoot it out with did something horrible to a citizen before the cops got there, and the citizen victim would have been well advised to know how to fight back. For another, an off-duty cop is a whole lot closer in a situation to an armed citizen than to a uniformed officer with body armor, multiple guns and ammo readily at hand and immediate communication for reinforcements.
In The Shower
It’s a bit after 11 a.m. on December 9, 1991. Smith, a cop first for five and a half years in Newport Beach and for the last eight years in Anaheim, is off duty at home in his condo in Fullerton, Calif. The condo is in a nice neighborhood near a university … the kind of place where naïve people feel safe and criminals know there’s good stuff to steal. Lee returned home at about 4 a.m. from the night shift, working the APD gang unit. He has just gotten out of bed, worked on a paper for a criminal justice class he’s taking, and jumped in the shower.
He is alerted by pounding on his front door. With the water pouring over him, he thought at first it might be his upstairs neighbor pounding on something. Then he hears it again, hammering in rapid succession, and realizes it’s his front door. He wonders how someone got past the locked gate to get there in the first place. He turns off the water and steps out of the shower.
From the bathroom door, a glance down the hallway shows him the main door, located between two sliding windows. He sees the silhouette of a man at the window, whose arm comes up. There is a sound of metal on glass, as if someone is prying the window. Then Lee hears the glass crack and realizes it’s a break-in.
To avoid being seen, he low-crawls down the carpeted hall to his bedroom, the location of the nearest land-line phone to call 9-1-1. It’s also where a closet contains some unloaded hunting shotguns and boxes of shells, but he hears more glass break, and a glance down the hallway reveals hands pulling glass shards out of the window frame: no time to load a shotgun. He instead grabs his loaded Colt Government Model .45, cocked and locked, from his off-duty shoulder holster in the bedroom. His first thought is to hunker down in a closet and surprise the man, but his inner cop tells him to engage.
Confrontation
Lee feels his fear factor escalate as he moves forward in a low crouch and sees the intruder reach in, defeat the window locks, and slide the window open. A leg comes in first, then the whole body, with a stumble and regaining of balance.
Lee turns the corner and faces the intruder from no more than 10 feet away. No mask. The intruder is a male Hispanic wearing several layers of clothing (it’s about 50 degrees), looking about Lee’s size: 5’11” or so, maybe 170–180 lbs., with a few days growth of beard and thick black hair. He is holding something in his right hand. Lee sees it in his peripheral vision, but he can’t precisely identify it. Lee reflexively yells, “Police! Get on the ground!” or words to that effect.
But the man does not move. They stare at each other. Time seems to stop. The man’s expression is angry and unafraid, an expression this streetwise cop has seen on the faces of many perpetrators. What goes through Lee’s mind is the word “parolee.”
And then the frozen tableau breaks.
Shots Fired
Without a word yet, the intruder takes a step toward Lee, the last mistake of what turns out to be a mistake-filled life.
Lee Smith fires a fast double-tap to the chest area. He sees the man’s body begin to turn at the first shot and rock backward at the second. The intruder stops moving forward. He blades his body, finally speaks — “F@@k you!” — and lunges toward the window, climbing out with another “F@@k you!” The attack has broken off, and Lee ceases fire. The man climbs out the window. Lee hears him push the outside gate open, hears running feet, and then a car starting up. He thinks, “Possible accomplice at the wheel?” Then, the vehicle roars away.
Lee runs to the window, considers going after him, then realizes, “Broken glass; I’m nude; bad idea.” Instead, he gets on the phone, IDs himself to 9-1-1 as an Anaheim officer, and reports what happened. While talking to dispatch, he can hear them putting out the word and hears two Fullerton motorcycle officers acknowledge, stating they will be on the scene momentarily.
And Lee Smith realizes his home has just become a crime scene.
Immediate Aftermath
While Smith was throwing some clothes on, responding Fullerton motor officers were discovering a crashed silver-colored Honda Civic that had come to rest on a broken fire hydrant, spraying water high into the sky. In the front seat was the offender, slumped over on the weapon he had used to break in and was holding when he moved toward Smith: a wicked-looking, long-bladed filet knife. Within 20 minutes, police had secured the scene, with detectives from both Fullerton and bordering Anaheim police departments there, soon followed by investigators from the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.
Two or three hours later, Smith learned the man had died at the hospital. One of the Silvertips had entered by the left nipple, the other a bit below, and massive loss of blood had caused death by exsanguination. Both projectiles had gone through and through, unusual for the 185-grain Silvertip and probably due to the bullet noses plugging as they passed through the multiple layers of clothing. The bullets had lodged in a block wall on the other side of the window through which the intruder made entry. The deceased was identified as Antonio Galindo, 30, and the toxicology screen showed positive for cocaine and heroin. Galindo had a record of burglary, robbery and possession of deadly weapons. Smith’s impression of “parolee” was correct: The man was indeed on parole.
Altered Perceptions
Tunnel vision was profoundly in effect, Lee remembers. One element of that is that opponents may appear larger than they actually are. Galindo turned out to be shorter than Smith thought, 5’6″, but also heavier at some 200 lbs. Heavy clothing, such as Galindo’s multiple layers, can make weight judgment difficult in the best of circumstances.
Investigators first thought it might be a targeted “hit.” Smith was, after all, investigating multiple Hispanic gangs, and his testimony had sent some of their members to prison for life. However, no such connection was made, and it is believed the convicted burglar had simply made a fatal choice in pursuit of a “routine daytime burglary.” The shooting was, of course, ruled justified. Had Smith not fired when Galindo began moving toward him with that knife, he could have been stabbed to death in less than a second.
Lessons
Decades before his guest lecture in my class, Smith was asked to share his experience with FBI Instructor School candidates in Irvine, Calif. and at many other area law enforcement agencies. He shares some of what he shared with them here.
He experienced several of the classic altered perceptions that occur in near-death experiences. Time distortion? You bet. He said, “Time froze,” as the two men faced each other. The expert on witness memory of traumatic incidents, clinical psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, has called this “snapshot memory.” Auditory exclusion? Check. Lee told American Handgunner, “I heard nothing. I don’t recall even hearing the two .45 rounds going off in that enclosed room.” Imperfect memory? Check. He thinks he said, “Police! Get on the ground,” but isn’t 100% certain. As Dr. Loftus is famous for saying, no one is a human tape recorder. Earwitnesses elsewhere in the complex heard “Police (something something).”
Above all, he remembers the fear and the need to overcome it, and this is the core of much of his lecture to brother and sister officers. He emphasizes that he followed his training. His gun was aimed at the upper torso mass, and when the time came, he unhesitatingly launched two bullets as fast as he could. They hit the upper torso mass and stopped the fight.
Smith cautions us not to think that because we have a powerful gun, our bullets will instantly stop the threat. Despite two fatal hits from large caliber pistol bullets, the assailant was able to continue considerable conscious, purposeful physical activity before he bled out, lost consciousness and crashed.
All of us are creatures of our training and of our personal experiences. Lee Smith had no shortage of the latter.
The incident described was his fifth and final shooting. Let’s look for some lessons from what had come before that prepared him to stand naked before deadly danger and prevail.
Incident #1, 1983
Like many young cops off duty, Smith was casual about armament and had only a 2″ J-Frame .38 Special in his truck as he waited outside a strip mall for his brother, who was getting a haircut. An armed robber caught his attention by quickly exiting a nearby grocery store clutching a paper bag like a football. Smith saw a black & white patrol car approaching swiftly and silently, and so did the robber, who opened fire on the uniformed officer, who stopped and stepped out of the vehicle. The cop returned fire as he doubled over and went to the ground.
The gunman ran down an alley around a building to where his getaway car was parked. Smith grabbed the .38 and ran around the opposite side of the building to intercept the gunman where he thought he would appear. Unbeknownst to Smith, the gunman was in his getaway car alone; he had parked it out of sight on the other side of the building.
Smith fired at the man he thought he’d just seen shoot a cop, but none of his five bullets hit the mark, and the suspect escaped. Smith ran back to help the officer, who turned out to be unharmed; he had merely ducked and hit the ground when the perp shot at him and had fired at his antagonist until his service revolver jammed on the sixth round.
The cop reloaded his own revolver with one speedloader and handed another to Smith, who jumped into the patrol car with the uniformed officer to join the vehicle pursuit. However, the uniformed officer was carrying a larger caliber gun, and the rounds wouldn’t fit Smith’s .38 snub. He asked the cop to unlock the shotgun rack for him, but he couldn’t: It was a key-lock gun rack, and the key was on the key ring that was in the ignition. Smith couldn’t get a loaded gun in hand until the vehicle came to a stop, by which time they had lost the suspect, who, it turned out, had later broken into a private home and taken hostages before finally being captured.
Lessons: Now you know why, thereafter, Smith’s off-duty gun was the same full-size Colt 1911 .45 auto he carried on duty, backed up by a couple of spare magazines. The theory that a pocket snubby with five shots is enough because “I’m off duty” and “I just need a ‘get off me’ gun” is fallacious: None of us can predict a future gunfight. A short-range, hard-to-shoot gun with only five shots is a very limited resource.
Incident #2, 2.2.89
Lee Smith was on uniformed patrol in downtown Anaheim at 11:30 p.m. when police radio informed him of a pursuit some dozen miles distant that was headed his way. Smith set up at a major intersection, and when the fugitive vehicle passed him, he became the primary pursuit unit, heading toward Disneyland. The suspect made a big U-turn, tried to ram his patrol car, went the opposite way and pulled into a hotel parking lot, where he jumped out and ran.
Smith told Handgunner, “My partner and I chased him on foot. He ran into an enclosed stairwell. I told my partner, ‘Watch out, we could get ambushed.’ We heard him running up the stairs to a balcony walkway about 30 feet above us. He spun and reached for his waistband, and we opened up on him, me with my Colt .45 auto and my partner with his S&W .45 Colt caliber Model 25-5. It turned out to be my round that hit him. He died. It turned out he was unarmed.”
Smith adds, “The family sued us. I was on trial for several weeks. We finally won and got some good OIS case law. I was the defendant. The lead defense attorney, Bruce Pract, a former cop, did a great job.”
Lessons: Never forget, you don’t have to be right; you have to be reasonable. This was a classic furtive movement shooting. “Within the totality of the circumstances,” a standard of the courts, the reach to the waistband while aggressively resisting arrest was consistent with going for a weapon and not reasonably consistent with anything else.
Incident #3, 10.10.89
Working patrol in a gang-infested area known for narcotics crime, Smith received information that a Garden Grove police officer had been assaulted and severely beaten by an Anaheim gang member who was known to frequent this neighborhood. Smith and his partner were hanging in the shadows on foot, looking for the suspect. Smith recalls, “We had tan uniforms then, and my partner and I were wearing black jackets. In the dark we probably didn’t appear to be cops unless people looked closely. A white surfer-looking dude with long blonde hair walked into the area, apparently looking to score some dope because at 10 feet away, I could see he had a Coke can converted to a meth pipe. As I turned around, he saw the front of my uniform, looked at my partner, and turned and ran.”
The Supreme Court of the United States’ later decision in Illinois v. Wardlow says, in essence, that headlong flight upon seeing a police officer is not proof positive of having committed a crime but is a damn good clue, allowing police to pursue. Smith and his partner accordingly gave chase. When Smith caught up with him, there was a struggle; the suspect got Smith in a half-Nelson hold and tried to rip his Colt .45 from its holster. Smith yelled, “He’s going for my gun!”; and his partner whaled on the attacker with a baton to no effect. Lee finally gained enough control of his gun to go to a retention position he had learned at Gunsite and ripped off six shots, dropping the would-be cop-killer. All six bullets struck home and the attacker died.
Smith told Handgunner, “I was sued and was on trial for two weeks. The Orange County Register newspaper printed a list of my other shootings. I don’t know how many jurors saw it, but the judge declared a mistrial. The lawyers said they settled out of court for $300,000 because it was more cost-effective, even though they were confident in the case.”
Lessons: Such cases get settled by bean counters, not those zealously pursuing justice. A man trying to take a cop’s gun isn’t an unarmed man; he’s a person trying to kill the legitimate owner of that gun, which is why such cases are usually won by the police defense side when properly defended.
Incident #4, 1989
In a smaller, neighboring community, police were called about a recent parolee who was threatening a woman who worked at a local bar. The first officer on the scene encountered him: He pulled a gun and shot it out with the cop, wounding him so badly he would subsequently have to retire on medical disability, and fled just as the second officer arrived. Smith joined the 20-minute pursuit, which ended with the man barricaded behind a car 50 yards away from the nearest officers. Lee, long a member of the department SWAT team, was armed with a USMC-surplus M16. He made his way to a cover position that enfiladed the would-be cop-killer from some 75 yards away. When the man started shooting at police, they returned a hail of gunfire, and Smith’s 5.56 round was the bullet that killed the cop-shooter.
Lessons: Smith told us, “That was a classic example of the importance of having patrol rifles, even one like mine that had iron sights.” At 50 yards or 75 yards in poor light, the rifle gives a distinct advantage. Smith’s maneuvering to the side to enfilade the gunman and negate the criminal’s cover was critical to this decisive outcome.
Incident #5 was the home invasion when Smith was in the shower, discussed in detail at the beginning of this article.
Bottom Line
Note that Smith took his job seriously enough to train on his own at places like Gunsite. Note that he learned from each of his experiences. Never forget that he credits his training for his survival in five different lethal danger situations. Today, in retirement, Smith continues his training and carries serious guns: You’ll typically find him with nothing less than a .40 caliber S&W Shield, a 14-shot .40 caliber GLOCK 23, or a .45 caliber GLOCK 30 and, of course, spare ammunition. Foot pursuits and fights taught him to stay in good physical shape.
American Handgunner thanks Lee Smith for sharing his extensive experience with today’s good guys and gals and for his cooperation in making this article possible.
