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Trooper Shooting Home Owner Found Justified

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#1 · (Edited by Moderator)
#2 ·
I understand that it's difficult to comprehend how the law works in such cases. You have to look to Graham v. Connor (a 1989 Supreme Court ruling) to understand how such matters are viewed as a matter of law. The situation was looked at from the eyes of a reasonable police officer and their belief of the objective reality of the situation at the moment they used force.

Just put out a book on the subject of the police use of force; Use of Force in Modern Policing (Amazon). Our nation has evolved over the years from basically a "self-policing" society, to the hiring of individuals (law officers) tasked with enforcing our laws and protecting the general public.
 
#4 ·
I wonder how he will fare in the civil trial?...
Different standard. Preponderance of the evidence carries the day. As for the Trooper, he will be unscathed as he will be held harmless and the citizenry will pick up the tab. That's our current system.
 
#5 ·
Sounds like a lot of blame to go around. I suspect some of the deeper pockets will pay a lot.

I am not sure I would be as understanding as he was about getting shot in the groin. That's getting a little too close to home.

wp
 
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#7 ·
I am surprised a person of that age survived.

I feel bad for both the home owner and the trooper. You cannot trust that people pounding on you door saying they are police, are in fact police. Police responding to a 911 hang up cant trust that the person saying there was no 911 call are no bad people doing bad things. The trooper, while being cleared and actions are understandable, probably does not feel good about what happened.

City may have to pay for the mistake. With land lines, the police could be pretty sure of the location of a call. With cellphones, not really. That is one reason why I still have a landline.
 
#9 ·
You cannot trust that people pounding on you door saying they are police, are in fact police. Police responding to a 911 hang up cant trust that the person saying there was no 911 call are no bad people doing bad things.
Quite correct. Requires prudence on the part of both parties.
 
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#12 ·
Was home owner found to be justified for shooting (grazing) the Trooper? Or is he facing attempted murder charges.

Seems this was a giant clusterphuck, and neither the Troopers or the home owner did anything unreasonable, one would hope nobody is getting charged.

Has the county dispatcher been fired?
I was wondering this myself. I also wonder if the Trooper has tried to make any apologetic gesture to the Homeowner. I understand the Trooper was in a very bad situation not knowing of other circumstances so he must feel really bad about it too. Bad for both parties.
 
#13 ·
If someone is outside my home in the middle of the night - and I think they are up to no good - maybe even wanting to break in - rob & kill me

I wouldn't open my door and try to shoot them

Seems like you would be better of taking cover inside and let them come to you


I don't know standard police procedure - but if they show up at a 911 hang up call - and everything looks quiet - would they kick in the door - come in the house and start going room to room?

I sure hope not - because that sounds like a totally stupid procedure.

In the mean time my wife would be calling 911 and I assume when they show up that things would be sorted out without anyone getting shot.

---------------------
I think there is a big difference between outside my home and inside my home

If this would have been a no knock warrant being served then I could see the old guy going for and shooting his gun - but that is a totally different situation.
 
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#18 ·
And WTF is this:

"One of the troopers also shined a flashlight on the other trooper’s uniform to show they were state police, authorities said."

What kind of tactic is that? I would beat the phucker silly for lighting me up as a target.
You made good observations. I find it strange too, but i'm not a cop, but if they're trained that way then they may want to do a little revisiting of their syllabus.
 
#16 · (Edited)
I did a quick read of the article. Am extremely puzzled now, I am. Extremely.

First, I find it amazing that an old man (76 years old) with three gunshot wounds (two to the chest) was able to walk out to the lawn:
Inside the home, Sykes called 911 and said he had been shot by "prowlers.” He then placed his shotgun on the front porch and walked to the front lawn, where other troopers who had responded handcuffed him until paramedics arrived.​

And this part got me all confused:
The transfer was quickly canceled but came through to Vineland as a call that lasted two seconds, the Attorney General’s Office said. A Vineland dispatcher interpreted the call as a 911 hangup, looked up the location — which came up as the cell tower next to Sykes’ home — and alerted state police.​

How did Sykes' address (or phone number) come up?
-- Did Sykes' address pop up just because it was the nearest habitat to the cell tower location?
-- Did a database application display Sykes' address for the cell tower location? If so, that software application had got some serious bugs in it.

So many of these kinds of mistakes -- LE showing up at the wrong address -- have been made in the past, that I'd have thought that the official procedures would involve at least a double-check to verify that the LE have the correct address and are actually at that physical address. Especially when doing this in the middle of the night.

The same mistakes, with some changes in flavoring, are constantly being made. After all these pricey lawsuits, you'd think that procedures would've been updated by now. But maybe not since it's only the taxpayers' monies that's getting paid out.

What really riled me up was this:
It is standard procedure in New Jersey for the Attorney General’s Office to investigate whether a police officer was justified in using deadly force. In a statement Friday, the office said, “Mr. Sykes was armed, did not comply with troopers’ commands, and approached to within a few feet of the troopers with his shotgun and revolver.”​

BUT Mr. Sykes was inside his own home! The LE wasn't supposed to even be there. No crime was being committed at that home at that time. There was no suspicious activity occurring within that home. The only suspicious activity possibly occurring there was that of the LE officers.

In general, I support those in blue. But when I see stupid **** like this ... Guess it's the lack of proper training, maybe.

----------------------------
ADDED: From another news article (that was linked to at the end of the OP's article) was this tidbit:
Kaser said Thursday he believed the original call bounced off a cellphone tower next to Sykes' home before disconnecting. Kaser said the call was made from within Cumberland County, but more than a mile from Sykes' house.​

Was the dispatcher and the LE officers that arrived at the home aware of that info that the caller's location was more than a mile from Sykes' house?
 
#20 ·
First, I find it amazing that an old man (76 years old) with three gunshot wounds (two to the chest) was able to walk out to the lawn:

I had a case (in another life, as a prosecutor) where a prostitute took two taps of 45acp point blank to the chest. When I say point blank, I mean close enough for burned clothing. She walked a 1/2 mile to a convenience store, called 911 on the pay phone, and smoked cigs till the ambulance got there.


City may have to pay for the mistake.
From the article:
"Miscommunications among emergency dispatchers ..."

That's a kind way to say negligence. LEO's wouldn't have been at that home if there had been no negligence. Officers may be blameless, but someone screwed the pooch in putting them there.
 
#17 ·
I have had a SO Deputy drive down my long, lonely driveway @ 10:30 PM one night to tell me a deviated prevert had moved across the street. He turned on his strobe lights and I put the gun away.

Seemed like a rational move on both our parts.

wp
 
#22 ·
Remember the thread about the noise in the night, where the guy armed himself and went running around the inside of his house to "clear it"?

This incident points out why I would not leave my bedroom if I really thought it might be somebody inside or outside the house. I'd arm my self and me or the wife would get busy calling 911 ASAP. Hopefully things would get straightened out before the shooting starts, if it really is LEO's out there. As pointed out above, crooks sometimes use the 'This is the police.' trick to get someone to answer the door.
 
#23 · (Edited)
The use of the word justified is purposely misleading on the journalists behalf. Exonerated is a better term.

Uniformed officers announcing themselves as police don't expect to get a gun a pointed at them by a good guy.

Police go to the "wrong house" all the time. Mistakes, bad information received from a call, houses with poorly visibly street numbers etc...

It's not uncommon for me to knock a door in the night and announce myself as a police officer and speak through the door to the homeowner. "Hi ma'am, I am investigating a 911 call we had and we are not sure if it came from this address or not, are you ok In here?"

If you don't believe that happens ALL the time you don't have a clue.

This unfortunate man likely had old age, poor eyesight, poor hearing, and slower cognitive function working against him that night. It was an unfortunate set of circumstances and nothing else.

Sending the SWAT team to the wrong house with a no knock warrant is negligent, sending patrol to the wrong house on a 911 hang up call is a mistake that should not lead to deadly results.

Phase 3 location often gets us within a house or two of a 911 call. It has helped save countless lives of people needing help and in the process a few "wrong house" homeowners have been woken up. I personally have found several women being beaten by their husbands after they called 911 and they took the phone away and hung up before she could tell dispatch what was going on. I also found a woman who called 911 and passed out from a heart attack before being able to speak and confirm her address. Paramedics saved her life. I knocked on two other homes doors before finding the right one and seeing her collapsed on the floor through a window.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1

I swear some of yall would blame the police for a lightning strike.
 
#26 ·
The officers probably would have liked to know exactly where the call came from.

Issue 1 - The FCC requires cellular providers to provide the location (ALI) of a 911 call to within 100 meters in 67% of calls and 300 meters for 95% of the calls. Or 50 meters and 100 meters for phones with GPS 911 capability. (Just because the phone has GPS does not mean the carrier uses GPS technology.) I believe this is due to change to narrower parameters sometime in the next couple of years but I forget off the top of my head the requirements.

Issue 2 - The system is designed to work when the caller is connected to a 911 call. If the call is disconnected i.e. the caller hangs up location may have not been transmitted or transmitted accurately.

Issue 3 -The first ALI (location) information transmitted to the 911 center may not be accurate. The 911 call taker may have to re-bid the call - ask the cellphone network to update the location. Rebids take time. Sometimes it takes a few seconds. Sometimes thirty seconds r longer. Sometimes a call must be re-bid a few times.

Issue 4 - If a cellphone has had service suspended for nonpayment it will still make a 911 call but will not receive calls, even from a 911 center.

Issue 5 - Sometimes information about how the call was routed or who the phone belongs to or other information about the call/phone has to be done by calling the cellular provider. Because of their volume of calls it is typical for the 911 call taker (or supervisor) to call the cellular provider and tell them what they need. In order for the cellular company to determine with certain it is a real 911 center they sometimes will take the information and then call the center back at the number they have for same. This process can often take 15 minutes. Sometimes longer.

Issue 6 - Every two days in the US on the average there are more than a million 911 calls. Estimates are that depending on the location 50% to 70% are wireless calls.

I am going to make a guess that some of the information about the call in the original post was developed well after the shooting.

Even if only 1% of 911 calls have location issues that means every day there are 6500 calls with less than perfect location information. And 1% is being unreasonably kind.
All that info was interesting to read, but I'm not getting how it's related to this incident.

The first big issue is: How did the dispatcher, or LE or whoever it is, get Sykes' address?

The 911 call did not originate from that address, nor was the cell phone tower located at that address (it was over a mile away). So that Sykes' address was miles and miles far away from any of the callers and over a mile from the cell tower that was involved in this mishap.

Who or what provide Sykes' address into this chain of events?

Was the culprit some faulty software that spat out the Sykes' address because it was the nearest residence to that cell tower? If so, did it do so with a message saying that Sykes' address was being provided only because it is the nearest residence to the cell tower (over a mile away). Just because a 911 call was dropped shouldn't cause someone to automatically assume that the call had to have come from inside a house, and in this case, from the nearest house to a cell tower (this is assuming that Sykes' house is the nearest one to the cell tower). imo.

With those calls which do you believe would be the better response - to wait to dispatch an officer until better information has been determined as to location which may take 5 or 15 or 30 minutes or may never come at all - or dispatch the officers with whatever information is available and update it if/when received. ( maybe re-read post 23 above before you decide )
I'm not sure what part of post 23 is relevant here, perhaps you could point to that part to help me out? (I'm an old man in my sixties, so I'm probably a little slow on the getup nowadays, especially if I get woken up in the middle of the night or during a nap.)

No specific offense but having read some articles about police ending up at the wrong address for a variety of reasons may not necessarily equate to it happening constantly. Given the number of 911 calls per year and the number of police responses and investigations and warrants served and exigent searches and entries without warrants I am going to take a guess that part of the reason that these events are newsworthy is because they are a relatively rare event.
Yup, I agree. :)

When you expect that claimants have collected a lot of money, have you factored in that in many states and municipalities the amount of a law suit judgement against a government entity is limited by statute?
I don't know of those specifics (I'm not a practicing lawyer), but of the incidents that I'm aware of, it seems that the plaintiffs can often get a bunch of taxpayers' monies from government entities. (Aside: Remember the BOA robbery in Kommiefornia some years back where the bank robber(s) had body armor and rifles and did a slow retreat walking beside their car in a gun battle with the cops? The cops didn't have rifles then that could penetrate the perp(s) body armor back then, and the cops were entering (breaking in?) local gunshops to get heavy caliber rifles to use. Anyway, the estate of the dead perp(s) sued, and the estate WON! The children of the dead perp(s) got a whole bunch of money, such as money for college. Supposedly the perp's children won because the perp was left dying on the street as the cops went searching for any other perps that might have been involved (and it seemed that maybe no medics wanted to risk going out in the open to aid the dying perp, or perhaps they weren't allowed to go out there?).)

Anyway, I'd think that the Sykes have more than reasonable grounds to go after people or entities or whatever was involved in this mishap. There is no reasonable reason or cause for Sykes' address to have been spitted out as the approximate physical location of a 911 call, imo. No witness or 911 caller provided Sykes' address in their call. No cell phone provided Sykes' address (via GPS locator). No cell phone tower was at Sykes' address (it was over a mile away, if these news articles can be believed).

This is not a "well, sh** happens" type of mishap. This type of mishap is not excusable -- If the responding officers had known that the only reason they were to go to Sykes' address was because it was the nearest residence to the location of a so-called dropped 911 call (the cell tower location) and that cell tower was over a mile away, er, they're probably first scratch their heads and say "Huh? What?", and then perhaps ask dispatch why they were going to Sykes' house if the location of the dropped call (the cell tower) was over a mile away from that house. There's probably a lot of road within a mile radius of that cell tower. So it could just as easily, or more easily, be a motorist on the road that made that so-called dropped 911 call. Or the dropped call could have come from a hiker in the woods. (And why the Sykes' address, why not one of their neighbors? Surely there's probably another house within 1.2 miles of the cell tower?)

What in the world would cause the Sykes' address to get spit up? I just don't get it.

Maybe there'll be more info coming out in the following days, maybe ... :)
 
#31 ·
All that info was interesting to read, but I'm not getting how it's related to this incident.

The first big issue is: How did the dispatcher, or LE or whoever it is, get Sykes' address?

The 911 call did not originate from that address, nor was the cell phone tower located at that address (it was over a mile away). So that Sykes' address was miles and miles far away from any of the callers and over a mile from the cell tower that was involved in this mishap.

Who or what provide Sykes' address into this chain of events?
Every day thousands of calls to 911 centers from cell phones are delivered to the 911 centers with an incorrect location attached to them. Sometimes as the call continues the location is updated and comes closer to the actual location of the caller. But regularly the location is not correct and can not be corrected. If I understand the specifics in this incident the 911 center in Vineland got a 2 second call and "A Vineland dispatcher interpreted the call as a 911 hangup, looked up the location — which came up as the cell tower next to Sykes’ home — and alerted state police."


.....

I'm not sure what part of post 23 is relevant here, perhaps you could point to that part to help me out? (I'm an old man in my sixties, so I'm probably a little slow on the getup nowadays, especially if I get woken up in the middle of the night or during a nap.)


....
.
Some - more than a few- 911 calls come in with a wrong or inaccurate location. Many of them get some location closer in seconds. Sometimes location gets closer in a minute. Sometimes it takes longer, possibly fifteen minutes or a half hour. Sometimes there never is anything close to a good location or any location at all.

An agency needs to establish a policy as to how to handle a 911 call that has not been completed but has an address attached to it. They can send officers to the address they have and then if they get better information redirect the officers. Or they can wait and not send officers until the address has been verified with the cellular provider. Except the cellular provider may never be able to provide the correct location of the call, or may only get within 100 or 300 meters. The process may take seconds. Or it may take 20 minutes.


...... I also found a woman who called 911 and passed out from a heart attack before being able to speak and confirm her address. Paramedics saved her life. I knocked on two other homes doors before finding the right one and seeing her collapsed on the floor through a window.

....
Should the policy be to send officers immediately if they are available or should the policy be to wait until everything has been done that can be done to find the correct location of the call?

In the incident with the woman collapsed on the floor above, it is possible that the 911 center working with the cellular provider could have figured out the exact address by the 911 center asking the cellular provider to give them the address of the person who pays the bill. But that process can take fifteen minutes or longer. And the call that the 911 center gets back may also be the billing address of the woman who moved twice since she opened the account but pays the bill on line. So then after a 15 minute the 911 center has a general area narrowed down to three or four houses and an address twenty miles away. And a woman who has collapsed from a heart attack and been down on the floor for fifteen minutes.

Just off the top of my head, I am thinking the better policy is to send the officers immediately.
 
#70 ·
First of all, this thread is about two weeks old. But since I got dinged with an alert due to your two posts, I guess I can try to rehash one of my points that I was trying to make that I'd have thought would be uncontroversial. But from your two responses, it seems that either it ain't uncontroversial or perhaps that I didn't, or am not, making my point clear enough. Let me try again.

In one of my earlier posts, I had said this:


When new modern technology is incorporated into LE's/Call-center's procedures, new types of errors shouldn't be introduced. If and/or when those new types of errors are discovered, then they ought to be removed or at least marked so that the people involved -- such as LE and dispatchers and the call centers -- will be aware of those potential new, and unexpected, types of errors.

Now these new types of errors cannot be laid down either totally or partially at the feet of the homeowner. These types of errors are totally the responsibility of those parties involved with that new system -- they can divvy it up among themselves. These parties can include the software company that provided that new modern technology, those who were responsible for writing the specs for that technology, those who were responsible for testing that technology, etc.

I don't know who dropped the ball, but the ball was dropped somewhere among those parties. What I do know is that the homeowner had nothing to do with anything that was involved with these types of new errors that were introduced by that new technology.

Now, these new errors cannot be excused as:
"Well, **** happens" sort of situation.
as one of you put it in your posts.

There are some types of errors that can be put down to "s*** happens", such as when the address is mistyped or miswritten or misunderstood somewhere down the line. We've all run into them, where numbers are mixed up, where "street" instead of "boulevard" is used, etc. Those are the types of errors that are, er, "normal", when LE or anyone has to get somewhere.

These "normal" errors cause a permutation of the correct address. But the type of error that occurred in the incident under discussion does not fall into one of those types. That is, it is not a permutation of a correct address.

The error that occurred is uniquely due to the new technology combined with the new (buggy?) software. It is an artificial type of error. That is, it is not something that a reasonable person would be expected to accept as being an understandable error. This type of error is completely foreign, completely unnatural, and is an error due to inadequate specifications and/or design and/or testing.

Let me try using an analogy:
As bank customers, we try to do online banking, and often, we'd get some weird error message or weird behavior that doesn't make any sense to us, yet, to those software programmers who wrote the code it does. I sorta remember trying to do a little transfer or something within my bank account, and everything was going normal until the point where my account looked unexpectedly empty and I got a weird error message.

That was a shock to me. I went and scrambled around trying to reach customer service, for I was thinking that someone had hacked into my account and had emptied it while I was there online. Well, to make the story short, the problem was that the bank was doing one of its financially balancing of accounts or something during the middle of the night, and so, it wasn't displaying the values of my accounts.

Now the behavior of what was being displayed made sense to the software designers and to those in customer support because they knew what was happening from knowing the internals of the software or by having been told. But I didn't know, and their software behavior and their error messages didn't make sense to me as a typical customer. (Something better that they could've done: They could have easily frozen the online screens I was seeing and displayed a message saying that the bank was updating the accounts and for me to please wait a few minutes.)​

I'm seeing this be somewhat parallel to the problem we're having:

You, meaning the LE and the dispatch center and others that are involve on that side of the fence, are like the banking people. You've been conditioned to accept the errors that are introduced by the new technology -- and many of you have stopped questioning the reasonableness of those weird new errors.

Me, like the older adult crowd, having lived normal lives, know that it is reasonable to run into errors that involve permutations of correct addresses. We expect that to happen now and then. Those types of errors are unfortunate, but they do happen. We put those errors down to "Well, **** happens" sort of situation. But that uniquely new type of error -- getting a cell-tower address which somehow got introduced into the system as a residential address -- is not one of those "Well, **** happens" type of error.

ASIDE: I've worked on many new technology systems, and I've debugged them at low levels and at high system levels. I've seen too many "features" pass through into newly released software. And I've seen this phenomenon of where the implementers/programmers think the system behavior and messages is fine but where the end-user is confused by that behavior and those messages.
Once again, you refuse to find any blame except that you decide should be laid at the feet of the officers involved. ONCE AGAIN you cannot or will not remove your biases and hold law enforcement to an unreasonable standard. That, to put a word on it, is ridiculous.

Now, to entertain your "parallel," I'll grant you that Sykes was essentially you, the bank customer, and that the troopers responding were the banking establishment. In your parallel case, dispatch is the internet service provider. Because they are having a problem, which is exceedingly uncommon, but not unheard of, you believe it is reasonable for the banking establishment (troopers) to essentially see into the future to predict every possible negative outcome and somehow find the rare one which turned out to be this exact situation, and... Do what to prevent it, exactly?

Bringing this back to reality, which I know is going to be difficult for you, this is what the troopers on scene knew, WHICH IS THE STANDARD BY WHICH THEY MUST BE JUDGED, THANKS TO GRAHAM VS. CONNOR:

1. A call was put through to their dispatch center, which lasted for approximately 2 seconds, during which no verbal communication was given.

2. When that call was ended (in LE parlance, a "911 hang-up"), the only location information was that of the cell tower the call had bounced off of.

3. The closest/most likely residence to said cell tower was Sykes address.

4. In keeping with their standard operating procedures, two troopers responded to Sykes address, in an attempt to make contact and confirm the 911 hang-up was a false alarm.

5. In checking the house to look for signs of forced entry after having announced their office and reason for being there, they encountered Sykes approaching the sliding glass door armed with not one, but two firearms.

6. Sykes, possibly believing the troopers to be impostors, aimed one or both of the guns he had in the troopers direction.

7. The troopers, rightfully fearing for their lives and safety, opened fire, striking Sykes three time out of four shots fired.

8. The troopers fell back and Sykes contacted 911 to advise he'd been shot.

Everything outside the above eight points was learned after the fact, and cannot be used in passing judgment on the troopers, a fact you refuse to accept. As I alluded to before, the fact you refuse to put aside your biases says more about you than it does the situation. Maybe you should be slightly more introspective on this matter, rather than trying to blame the officers on scene.

And finally, as I said before, simply because you refuse to accept that it's a really crappy "**** happens" situation, does not mean any one person is to blame, not Sykes, not the troopers, not the phone company, the programmer of the dispatch software, etc. Sometimes, bad things just happen, based on a terrible set of circumstances. I would have thought being in your 60s you would have come to accept that reality, but obviously not.

As I said before, I sincerely hope you don't end up on any jury, as you seem determined not to apply the appropriate burden of proof, simply based on your own biases.
 
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#76 ·
Once again, you refuse to find any blame except that you decide should be laid at the feet of the officers involved.
er, no, I was not trying to convey that.

If anything, I'd think that those two officers were also victims of a buggy/faulty process.

Humor me as I try to unclearly express myself again:

I'm sorta drawing a dividing line so that the homeowners are on one side and on the other side is everything else (cops, dispatch centers, the software being used by the dispatch centers, etc.). I look at how the homeowners behaved, and I cannot find any fault in their actions -- for I'm putting myself in their shoes and I can see myself doing what they did.

Now I look at the other side. What do I see? I see that the cops somehow got dispatched to an address that should never have been visible at the top user level as a possible target residence address.

Now why do I say that that address should not have been visible as the residence address?

First, let me give some addresses that I could see being given out mistakenly as the target residence address in a general case:
  • A permutation of the correct target residence address, where the numbers were switched about or "street" got replaced with "blvd" or "north" got replaced with "south" or etc.
  • The caller's address (or a permutation of it) got passed on as the target residence address.
  • A police station's address (or a permutation of it) got passed on as the target residence address.
  • A dispatcher's center's address (or a permutation of it) got passed on as the target residence address.
  • The address of a nearby Dunkin' Donuts' shop (or a permutation of it) got passed on as the target residence address -- maybe because it was on a stickie and somehow that stickie got mixed up with the stickie that had the correct target residence address on it.
  • etc.
But the address of a cell tower somehow percolating up to be interpreted as the target residence address? That shouldn't happen, imo.

If a cell tower location's address is given out, then it should be clear to the participants (actors) that that address is the location of a cell tower.
 
#28 ·
After two weeks in the hospital the geezer returned home AND MOWED THE LAWN.
I read that in one of the articles too! :D

(What kind of powder puff bullets does the NJSP use?) The 3rd bullet fragmented and they haven't take it out yet.
I think I read 9mm, but still ... yeah, I wonder too. Wonder if they were FMJ -- because it's NJ? I'm not sure on this.

The man is suing everybody.
In one article I read that he was contemplating suing. Has it been official? Has Sykes actually filed, and if so, against whom?

I know if this had happened to me, I'd be really really really hopping mad. Suing might be one of the options.
 
#29 ·
I found this odd:

"Both troopers ran to a patrol car and drove away to wait for backup."

I can understand retreating back to car and waiting, but driving away? WTF. What if someone was really in danger?
And WTF is this:

"One of the troopers also shined a flashlight on the other trooper’s uniform to show they were state police, authorities said."

What kind of tactic is that? I would beat the phucker silly for lighting me up as a target.
Do you guys know where you are??? You're on GT...and on GT cops are always the most tactically sound and can do no wrong...
 
#34 · (Edited)
Here's a tidbit from the news article http://www.philly.com/philly/news/n...ys_he_still_supports_police__100_percent.html

The state Attorney General's Office, which is investigating the incident, has not said where the disconnected 911 call came from or who made it, or why authorities thought it originated in Sykes' home.

Kaser said Thursday he believed the original call bounced off a cellphone tower next to Sykes' home before disconnecting. Kaser said the call was made from within Cumberland County, but more than a mile from Sykes' house.​

Hmm, it looks like I had misinterpreted it. Maybe the cell tower is physically right next to Sykes home (not over a mile away)?!

And then what was "more than a mile from Sykes' house"? The original 911 call? The other dispatch center? ... now I'm getting confused again ...

----------
ADDED: Okay, so was it that the "original 911 call" incident was only one mile away from Sykes' house?

If so, then it seems that the problem was that the cell tower's location was somehow misused as the actual location of the so-called "dropped 911 call". That is, if I'm getting this now -- but it's too late in the night for me to actually try to think, I guess.
 
#37 ·
Here's a tidbit from the news article http://www.philly.com/philly/news/n...ys_he_still_supports_police__100_percent.html

The state Attorney General's Office, which is investigating the incident, has not said where the disconnected 911 call came from or who made it, or why authorities thought it originated in Sykes' home.

Kaser said Thursday he believed the original call bounced off a cellphone tower next to Sykes' home before disconnecting. Kaser said the call was made from within Cumberland County, but more than a mile from Sykes' house.​

Hmm, maybe I had misinterpreted it. Maybe the cell tower is physically right next to Sykes home (not over a mile away)?!

And then what was "more than a mile from Sykes' house? The original 911 call? The other dispatch center? ... now I'm getting confused again ...

Yes the correct phone call address was a mile away. But it pinged off of that tower for what ever reason.
 
#39 ·
I wonder how he will fare in the civil trial?

wp
There will not be one. If they happen to have just the right state law and they filed a lawsuit in state court, there may be a settlement. If their lawyer made the wrong choices, there will be a dismissal.

How often does a truly injured party get their case against the police dismissed because their own lawyer screws it up? Right around 100% of the time in my 15 years defending the police. I've had cases where an officer was fired, arrested and convicted of a crime and I still won the civil suit - going to get one of those dismissed tomorrow.
 
#42 ·
There will not be one. If they happen to have just the right state law and they filed a lawsuit in state court, there may be a settlement. If their lawyer made the wrong choices, there will be a dismissal.

How often does a truly injured party get their case against the police dismissed because their own lawyer screws it up? Right around 100% of the time in my 15 years defending the police. I've had cases where an officer was fired, arrested and convicted of a crime and I still won the civil suit - going to get one of those dismissed tomorrow.
Any liability on the whole system; not just the police?

wp
 
#40 ·
What's always works for me to deconflict these situations is have the person inside dial 911 and let radio know to tell them we are outside and that we had a call to the house.
 
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#43 ·
I would like to know the facts (not necessarily what the newspaper said) on how clearly the police announced themselves before passing judgement.
Thanks to the Army my hearing has been trashed since I was 19. If there is any serious back round noise I might not understand what people are saying. I don't want any conflict with police because I really might not know what they are saying to me.
 
#48 ·
Okay, here is a link to an article which shows photos and maps of the area.

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/...cle_a262eba0-f7c7-59c6-920b-5abf79ae4f7d.html

Note the antenna is only a few hundred feet from the house and is on Mr. Sykes' property.

Everybody in the family, lawyers included, are talking to the media so there are 100 different stories as to what happened.

A notice of intent was filed to sue the city, county and state.

They have a dog which barked and woke up the wife.

Could it be that the troopers were shining their flashlights into the eyes of Mr. Sykes and that he could not see beyond 'the wall of light' to identify their uniforms?
 
#52 ·
Seems to me if he had called 911 first, maybe after he armed himself but before he left the bedroom, it would have been safer for him, both if they had been actual prowlers and of course in this case when the prowlers were actually state troopers. Had it been the former it might be nice to know help was on the way should the encounter with the prowlers go less than spectacularly for him as sometimes happens in confrontations. And of course in this case most likely the 911 operator would have let him know it was actually the police there.
 
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