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OFFICER DOWN DELAWARE
Georgetown Police Department
Delaware
End of Watch: Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Biographical Info
Age: 29
Tour of Duty: 4 years
Badge Number: Not available
Incident Details
Cause of Death: Gunfire
Date of Incident: Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Weapon Used: Gun; Unknown type
Suspect Info: At large
Patrolman Chad Spicer was shot and killed as he and his partner attempted to stop a vehicle that had been involved in an shooting a short time earlier.
All three suspected exited the vehicle and began to flee on foot. One of the suspects immediately opened fire on the officers, fatally wounding Patrolman Spicer before he was even able to exit the patrol car. His partner was also shot and critically wounded.
Two of the suspects were apprehended, but the suspect who fired the shots remains at large.
Patrolman Spicer had served with the agency for one year and had previously served with the Bridgeville Police Department for three years. He is survived by his wife and daughter.
Agency Contact Information
Georgetown Police Department
335 N Race Street
Georgetown, DE 19947
Phone: (302) 856-6613
Please contact the Georgetown Police Department for funeral arrangements or for survivor benefit fund information.
OFFICER DOWN NEBRASKA
Platte County Sheriff’s Office
Nebraska
End of Watch: Saturday, August 29, 2009
Biographical Info
Age: 34
Tour of Duty: 3 years
Badge Number: Not available
Incident Details
Cause of Death: Automobile accident
Date of Incident: Saturday, August 29, 2009
Weapon Used: Not available
Suspect Info: Not available
Deputy Christopher Johnson was killed in an automobile accident while responding to another accident call on Highway 91.
His patrol car collided with a tractor trailer that was attempting to make a left turn in front of him.
Deputy Johnson had served with the agency for three years.
Agency Contact Information
Platte County Sheriff’s Office
2610 14th Street
Columbus, NE 68601
Phone: (402) 564-3229
Please contact the Platte County Sheriff’s Office for funeral arrangements or for survivor benefit fund information.
OFFICER DOWN VIRGINIA www.privateofficer.com
Southampton County Sheriff’s Office
Virginia
End of Watch: Saturday, August 29, 2009
Biographical Info
Age: 22
Tour of Duty: 3 months
Badge Number: Not available
Incident Details
Cause of Death: Automobile accident
Date of Incident: Saturday, August 29, 2009
Weapon Used: Not available
Suspect Info: Not available
Deputy Christopher Ray was killed in an automobile accident as he and his FTO were responding to a fight call in Newsoms at 5:20 am.
A tree had fallen across General Thomas Highway during an overnight storm. Their patrol car swerved to avoid the fallen tree and went off the road, striking another tree. Deputy Ray, who was the passenger, suffered fatal injuries.
Deputy Ray had served with the agency for only three months.
Agency Contact Information
Southampton County Sheriff’s Office
PO Box 70
Courtland, VA 23837
Phone: (757) 653-2708
Please contact the Southampton County Sheriff’s Office for funeral arrangements or for survivor benefit fund information.
Wife of security guard killed in wreck arrested www.privateofficer.com
A Boulder City woman is being held in the Clark County Detention Center Tuesday on charges of driving under the influence in a crash last week that killed her husband.
Melanie Moses Sisco, 36, is charged with driving under the influence of alcohol resulting in death, reckless driving, involuntary manslaughter and driving on the wrong side of the road, all felonies.
The crash occurred about 4:30 a.m. Aug. 26 while Sisco, who worked at the Hacienda, and her husband Terry Sisco, a Hacienda security guard, were on their way home from the casino. Terry Sisco, 34, died about two hours later at University Medical Center’s Trauma Unit, according to a police report.
Terry Sisco, who was not wearing a seat belt, was thrown from the Dodge truck when it ran off the road and rolled over as they were traveling north on U.S. 93 from the Hacienda, police said. Melanie Sisco, who was wearing a seat belt, was able to climb out of the truck and sustained minor injuries, police said.
She appeared in Boulder City Justice Court this afternoon, where Judge Victor Lee Miller set a cash bail of $23,500 on the charges. She is scheduled to appear again at 1 p.m. Sept. 15.
Melanie Sisco cried softly after Miller set the bail. She had been married to Terry Sisco for five years.
Melanie Sisco told police after the crash that Terry Sisco had come to the Hacienda to pick her up after her shift ended at 10 p.m. Aug. 25, the police report said. They both had a few drinks, she said, and they left the Hacienda in the Dodge truck, the report said.
She told police she could not remember who was driving or what happened during the crash, the report said, but she did recall undoing the seat belt in order to get out. Police allege that only the driver’s side seat belt had been used.
Services for Terry Sisco were scheduled for 6 p.m. Sept. 3 at Palm Mortuary, 800 S. Boulder Highway, Henderson. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his mother and stepfather, Linda and Charles McNeil of Henderson, and two stepchildren, Leola Moses and Frank Gammel.
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N.C. court rules state unfairly prevented felon from gun ownership www.privateofficer.com
The opinion applied only to Barney Britt, who was convicted of a drug crime in 1979, and it didn’t have an immediate effect on the thousands of other felons in the state. Criminal defense lawyers who practice in federal courts said they don’t know what effect, if any, the opinion will have on federal rules, which prevent felons from buying and owning weapons except when a state has restored that right.
The ruling authored by Justice Edward Thomas Brady held that Britt should be able to own guns and that the state unfairly took away his right to own a firearm with a 2004 law that barred felons from owning firearms. Britt was convicted in 1979 of selling Quaalude pills, but he didn’t have any further tangles with the law.
Though the opinion focused just on Britt’s case, both sides of the gun control issue saw the ruling as significant because the state’s highest court found that Britt had a right to bear arms that trumped the state’s ability to restrict him from owning any weapons.
Advocates spent Monday poring over the 5-2 decision in Britt v. State of North Carolina. The decision was seen as a victory for those who view government restrictions as too strict, while those in favor of tighter gun control described it as an alarming blow.
“This has implications beyond just North Carolina,” said Robert Levy of the Cato Institute, a Washington-based Libertarian think tank that opposes gun control. “North Carolina has now decided that some felonies are not so serious to result in deprivations of the right to defend oneself.”
Roxane Kolar, director of North Carolinians against Gun Violence, said the decision was troubling.
“I’ve never heard of this before, of a felon having an inalienable right to own a weapon,” she said. “It’s putting a lot of our state gun laws at risk.”
The decision could spark a rush to local courthouses as felons try to have their rights to own and store firearms in their homes restored. Those with the best chance would likely be those with cases similar to Britt’s; people convicted of nonviolent crimes who had their right to own a gun restored and then taken away with a 2004 law, said Jeanette Doran, a senior staff attorney with the N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law.
Legal e-mail message boards lit up over the weekend, with lawyers swapping tales of clients convicted of felony littering charges then barred from hunting deer for the rest of their lives.
The state legislature may address the issue with a bill introduced for the 2009-2010 session by Rep. Phil Haire, a Democrat from Western North Carolina, that would give limited hunting privileges to nonviolent felons.
Ready to hunt again
Britt said he’s excited about hunting this fall and relieved that his four-year legal battle is over.
“It’s not a privilege; it’s a right,” Britt said about gun ownership. “It’s a constitutional right.”
The office of N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper, who defended the state law in the case, declined to comment on the ruling.
A passionate hunter who never had any subsequent arrests, Britt had his right to own guns restored from 1987 until 2004, when the new law went into effect.
Brady wrote that the law was too broad in including nonviolent felons like Britt, who had otherwise been law-abiding and had owned guns for 17 years after he successfully petitioned in 1987 to have his civil rights restored, including owning a gun.
“He is not among the class of citizens who pose a threat to public peace and safety,” Brady wrote.
Troubled by the ruling
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Patricia Timmons-Goodson said she was alarmed that her fellow justices ignored state law by giving Britt an exemption. She said the ruling made North Carolina the first jurisdiction to uphold a convicted felon’s right to own firearms over a state’s power to regulate gun ownership.
“Today’s decision opens the floodgates wide before an inevitable wave of individual challenges to not only the Felony Firearms Act, but our statutory provisions prohibiting firearm possession by incompetents and the mentally insane,” Timmons-Goodson wrote.
Her fears were shared by those seeking tighter gun-control laws.
Kolar of North Carolinians against Gun Violence expressed concern that judges would be the ones to decide whether felons could own guns, something she says gives too much discretion to the courts.
Jim Woodall, the district attorney for Orange and Chatham counties, said he found the opinion worrisome and hoped it wouldn’t be applied broadly to others.
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Man charged with kidnapping girl he met on MySpace www.privateofficer.com
Boise Police received a report of a runaway teen on June 4, 2009. Juvenile and special victims unit detectives worked with school resource officers to find the girl.
Detectives learned the teen had been communicating with Misael Juarez, 18, on MySpace.com. The two then met.
Boise Police contacted deputies with the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office. And on June 17, they found the girl at Juarez’s home in Oceano, Calif.
Juarez was arrested a the second degree kidnapping warrant out of Ada County.
He was extradited back to Idaho and arrived at the Ada County Jail early this morning.
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Student armed with gun tackled by football player www.privateofficer.com
Yazoo County Sheriff Tommy Vaughan knew how it ended, but he said there still was plenty of drama in watching the Mississippi school bus security tape.
At 6:53 a.m. Tuesday, a 14-year-old girl boarded the bus and walked better than halfway toward the back. She reached into a flower-print bag and pulled out a chrome-plated .380-caliber semi-automatic handgun and began shouting and threatening the other students.
“She was using some hard words,” Vaughan said. “She was saying somebody on the bus was either messing with her or picking on her.”
Then, Yazoo County High School football player Kaleb Eulls approached the girl, Vaughan said.
“He kept telling her, ‘Put the gun down; put the gun down.’ “
Then Eulls, 18, did what made him highly recruited as a defensive end — he tackled her. Vaughan said the students both went down, and a second later, Eulls’ right hand shot back into view holding the weapon.
“If it hadn’t been for this star football player, things could have been different,” Vaughan said. “He didn’t go overboard, but he did exactly what it took to get her on the ground.”
Eulls, a 6-foot 4-inch, 255-pound senior, has committed to Mississippi State University.
Eulls said he was asleep when the girl boarded the bus. When she pulled out the gun, one of Eulls’ three younger sisters, who were among the 22 people on the bus, shook him awake, he said.
Meanwhile, the girl demanded that the driver pull the bus over.
Eulls said he tried to get the girl’s attention.
“I kept my distance for a second, she kind of glanced away or blinked and I got to her,” he said.
“I just basically thought about all the lives that were in danger,” Eulls said. “It all happened in about five minutes. I’m thankful that it turned out the way it did.”
Yazoo County High Principal Billy Ray Harber would not comment on the specifics of the incident but praised Eulls and the bus driver. “They did a great job,” he said.
Ora Eulls, Kaleb’s mother, still had not talked to her son early Tuesday evening. Even heroes have to go to football practice. She said she first heard about the incident from her daughter.
Kaleb Eulls said his mother was relieved when he finally got home Tuesday night. “She said, ‘You’re everybody’s hero.’ “
Vaughan said the incident occurred in the Linwood Road area, a rural part of the county that is miles from help. Many of the students were elementary age.
The sheriff said Eulls showed admirable selflessness in a dangerous situation.
“He made the statement to one of my deputies that if she was going to shoot anyone, he would rather she shoot him,” Vaughan said. “Watching him do that and him doing such a heroic act and not even caring about his own safety, that’s something you don’t see every day.”
Vaughan said the girl was arrested on 22 counts of attempted aggravated assault, 22 counts of kidnapping and one count of possession of a firearm on school property. She was transported to the county juvenile detention facility, he said.
Vaughan described the girl’s alleged actions as “stupid” and said he wanted to know more about the gun, which he described as an inexpensive model prone to firing accidentally.
“I’m interested in talking to her parents to find out where did she get this gun. If she got it from home, why was it not secured?” he said.
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Al teacher arrested for DUI on the way to school www.privateofficer.com
An officer spotted physical education teacher Suzanne Morrison, 42, weaving in traffic about 8 a.m. in the eastbound lanes of Interstate 10 near the Theodore exit, according to Mobile police spokesman Cpl. Charles Bagsby.
As the officer approached Morrison’s silver Pontiac Grand Prix, he noticed her drinking from a cup, police said. And the officer found a cup with alcohol inside her car, Bagsby said.
Morrison was given a field sobriety test, which she failed, Bagsby. She was later given a breath test for alcohol, but Bagsby declined to release the results.
Morrison was booked into the Mobile County Metro Jail on a charge of driving under the influence.
Bagsby said she asked police officers to notify her boss that she would not be working Tuesday.
She remained in jail in lieu of $1,000 bail as of Tuesday evening.
The physical education teacher was placed on paid administrative leave until Tuesday, said Mobile County Public School System spokeswoman Nancy Pierce.
Schools Superintendent Roy Nichols said system administrators were trying to find out just what happened.
“I assume she was on her way to work this morning when she was arrested, but I’m not certain,” Nichols said. “Was she in fact under the influence or was there a mistake made?
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