Spoons were weapons, expert says
Friday, May 6, 2005 8:17 AM PDT
By Amy M. E. Fischer
Printable version
E-mail this articleTACOMA --- Even if Kelso police officers had known Daniel Flanary clutched a pair of flattened spoons in his hand, they would have been right to consider them weapons, a police practices expert testified in federal court Thursday.
"It is absolutely acceptable that this type of weapon should be treated as a stabbing weapon definitely, and a cutting weapon possibly," defense witness George Thomas Williams told a federal jury.
Williams, 49, trains law enforcement agents and military personnel nationwide how to use knives and defend themselves against knife-wielding attackers. His testimony was meant to rebut the plaintiffs' argument that police should have known that Flanary was holding common spoons and not a sharp-edged weapon.
Flanary's parents are suing the city of Kelso over the shooting death of their son in West Kelso. On Feb. 19, 2001, the bipolar 19-year-old broke down an elderly woman's door and charged at five officers with a pair of flattened spoons while a sixth officer was outside. One officer shot and killed him.
Williams, who is from Bellingham, testified that, "essentially," any object can be used to injure or kill. Homeless people make homemade weapons out of mundane objects "all the time," he said.
When the city's defense attorney handed Williams the actual spoons Flanary held the night police fatally shot him, Williams examined them and said there was "no way to tell" if they had been sharpened without holding them.
Williams testified that a sharp-edged weapon may or may not have pierced the Kevlar bullet-proof vests the six officers wore the night of the shooting. Also, he said, ballistic vests cover only 22 percent of the body, leaving the throat area vulnerable to a lethal stab wound.
In other testimony heard this week, Kelso police officers Kirk Wiper and Mike Cowan and Sgt. Joe Dieter defended their decisions in dealing with Flanary.
Throughout the three-week trial, the Flanary family's attorneys have repeatedly questioned why police opted to fire a beanbag shotgun six times at someone who appeared out of touch with reality and might not hear or understand police commands. The plaintiffs contend that Kelso police weren't adequately trained in how to bring mentally ill people in crisis under control and that the officers prematurely resorted to using the "pain compliance weapon."
That error in judgment, the family's lawyers say, escalated the situation to its violent and fatal conclusion.
During his testimony Wednesday and Thursday, Officer Wiper said he fired the beanbag shotgun repeatedly at Flanary's legs because the teen wasn't complying with officers.
"We were desperately trying to resolve a very dynamic, dangerous, almost lethal event without having to use lethal force," he said, adding that he knew the risk was the beanbags wouldn't have the desired effect.
Bill Coates, one of the plaintiffs' attorneys, asked what the drawbacks would have been if police had retreated rather than closed in on the teen with guns drawn. Wiper replied that officers couldn't afford to take their eyes off Flanary in his agitated state and that retreating might have given Flanary time to "regroup" and possibly come tearing out of the building, where elderly residents and bystanders waited.
Wiper said he didn't warn Flanary that he would be fatally shot with a police handgun if he rose from the couch.
"I think it was perfectly obvious, or should have been, that aggressing us with those weapons in his hands" would result in police increasing their use of force, Wiper said.
When Coates pointed out that it might not have been obvious to Flanary, who was growling and gibbering on the couch, Wiper replied that police tactics in facing a potentially violent, armed person nevertheless remained the same.
He also disagreed with key testimony by Donald Von Blaricom, an expert witness for the plaintiffs. Blaricom viewed Flanary's sitting down on the couch before charging officers as a "static" situation, a standoff during which police could have carefully weighed how to resolve the confrontation.
Wiper testified that Kelso police aren't specifically trained to diagnose mental illness, and he didn't know what was going on in Flanary's head. Coates asked if perhaps that was why California police officers undergo training to differentiate between criminals and the mentally ill.
Wiper, who had testified earlier that he considered his years of hands-on experience as a police officer to be a 25-year course in de-escalation techniques, did not concede the point.
Monday, the defense will call on a crisis intervention trainer to testify as an expert witness. The trial is expected to wrap up either Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning.
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