Wrong place, wrong time... (Part 2)

So, I've been trying to wrap my head around this for a few days. I'm still floored at the waste and tragedy here.

I hate gang violence.

Last week I posted about the senseless shooting and death of a young man in Centennial Park. I closed the post by saying that I hoped they caught the kid's murderer. The good news is that they did.

Unfortunately, though, the story gets worse.

Convinced that FPD wouldn't devote much time to the murder investigation of their family member, the kid's uncle and cousin (the uncle's son) decide to do some investigation of their own. While I can certainly understand their impatience and desire for a swift resolution to the case, FPD's Detective Division is top-notch. While they may get overwhelmed, their investigators work tirelessly to make this city a better place to live.

I wish they could have been a little more patient and allowed Fairview's Finest the chance to close the case.

Uncle and cousin had a pretty good idea who the suspect was, and they told other family members about their plan to locate the suspect, notify FPD of his whereabouts and (if necessary) detain him until the cops arrived.

Take note, folks: This plan wasn't remotely safe, even on paper. But planning on detaining a known gang member that carries a handgun AND has killed already this week? Cooler heads should have prevailed.

Uncle and cousin locate the suspect's vehicle about a mile and a half from where the first shooting occurred. Uncle pulls out his cell phone and calls the victim's mom (his sister) to tell her they found the suspect. He says they're going to follow the suspect and call FPD, and hangs up the phone.

At the same time and less than 1/10 mile away, I'm sitting in the station watching a movie. We hear two distinct pops, a brief pause, another pop, another pause, and then one final pop. We pause the movie and turn up the FPD radio.

Sure enough, FPD sends three units to a location right down the street from our station for multiple 911 calls of shots fired with two victims down.

Crap.

I happen to be working in a bigger station with two assigned ambulances, and we advise our dispatch that we copy PD's traffic and will be staging in place inside the relative safety of our station. The four of us walk out to the apparatus bay and fire up the ambulances and standby until PD clears us into the scene.

About two minutes later the cops advise that we're clear to enter. The bay doors go up, we pull out of the station, and advise that we're on scene. We park a whopping 500 feet from the day room where we'd been watching a movie just a few moments before. Yikes.

The story we get later is this: Apparently uncle and cousin pulled up beside the suspect's vehicle at a red light. Suspect realized what was going on and fired two rounds into the uncle's head from a range of less than 10 feet. Cousin watches his dad die, and flees the car. The suspect fires a round into the cousin's back to bring the kid down, gets out of his car, walks up to the injured teen and fires one more round into the kid's head, executing him.

The suspect apparently knew or at least assumed that the police had already been notified, and just waited for the police to arrive and arrest him.

So that's how we pull up on a very marginally secured scene with a suspect at gunpoint but not in custody. Lovely.

By unspoken agreement the other crew goes to the uncle and we go to the cousin. Both men have injuries that are incompatible with life, but each of them has pulses still. As we begin working our patient, PD gets the suspect into custody.

I'm not a fan of contaminating crime scenes or transporting traumatic cardiac arrests, but it looks like both scenarios are gonna play out here.

Despite the certainty that both men are going to succumb to their wounds, our protocols demand that we transport unless obvious signs of death are present.

So we package the patients for transport and take off for U-Med. By the time we arrive at the trauma center, both patients have arrested. The trauma team calls both patients shortly after arrival, and the poor family has lost 3 members in just under 48 hours.

The suspect knew it was only a matter of time before he got caught, and he knew that the gang is just as strong inside prison as it is on the outside, so he just gave up. Unfortunately, his poor choices devastated an entire family. And all because of an innocent smile at a pretty girl.