Police Defend Slaying of Man Bearing Knife

San Diego police administrators said Wednesday that pursuing officers had little choice but to shoot and kill a fleeing, knife-wielding man on Tuesday--even though the department recently outfitted itself with large nets designed to restrain violent suspects.

Administrators said that the 20 nets, carried since March in supervisors’ patrol cars, would have proven too unwieldy to attempt to use against Wayne Douglas Holden, 21. Witnesses said Holden slashed at officers and led them on a wild foot chase through a quiet San Carlos neighborhood before he was finally shot after crashing through the window of a house.

Officers tried twice to hit Holden with a non-fatal, electric dart-firing “Taser” stun gun, but missed. It was then that they resorted to gunfire.

“I don’t know whether there was a net available at the scene, but . . . they are not at all good in open areas such as in this situation,” said Deputy Police Chief Kenneth O’Brien. “You really want your suspect stabilized and in one place when using the net, and this didn’t happen in this particular situation.”

Nor, said O’Brien, could the officers have attempted to simply wound Holden as he ran from them after entering the house.

“The officers’ decision to shoot was because they believed that an occupant of the house was in danger,” O’Brien said. “The officers weren’t there to try to wound, they were there to ‘incapacitate’ the individual . . . If we luck out, and we can bring somebody down with a wound, that’s great.”

San Diego police cadets, who receive 56 hours of firearms instruction at the police academy and fire 2,500 pistol and shotgun rounds during initial training, are never taught to aim for a particular part of the body, O’Brien said. But he conceded that at the department’s pistol range, where officers shoot at black, torso-shaped paper targets, the highest scores go to bullets that hit the center of the torso’s chest or head.

“We don’t tell our officers to aim for any specific portion of the body; we tell them to incapacitate and that appropriate judgment must prevail in any shooting situation,” O’Brien added.

Meanwhile, the director of the San Diego chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday that her organization intends to monitor the case to insure “that the grand jury and district attorney’s office take a very close look” at whether shooting Holden was justified.

“From what has been reported, it appears to have been overreaction” on the part of the police, said Linda Hills of the ACLU. “I find it hard to believe that (Holden) couldn’t have been disarmed. Deadly force should only be used in the most extreme of situations. I’m not at all convinced that this was that kind of situation.”

The district attorney’s office is awaiting the Police Department’s final report on the incident. Steve Casey, a spokesman for the district attorney, said he knew neither when the report would be forwarded nor how long it would take to review.

Holden, a UC San Diego student, reportedly was depressed over an argument he had had with his girlfriend. His father, with whom Holden was residing, said Holden got a 12-inch knife from the kitchen and threatened to commit suicide. Several hours later, after attempting to calm his son, the elder Holden telephoned the county mental health hospital. Mental health officials then notified the Police Department.

According to police who went to the home, Holden held officers at bay with the knife and threatened to kill himself. He then fled when Sgt. Robert Stinson attempted to get near enough to stun Holden with the Taser. The device has an effective range of 6 to 10 feet.

After officers chased him for several blocks, Holden jumped through a closed glass window of a house on Golfcrest Drive, tripped over furniture and became entangled in a set of Venetian blinds, police homicide Lt. Paul Ybarrondo said. As Holden tried to free himself from the blinds, Stinson fired the Taser, apparently missing. Holden then rose, raised the knife over his head in a threatening manner, and moved toward the home’s owner, who was standing nearby in a hallway, Ybarrondo said.

Fearing that Holden might stab the owner, Stinson fired one shot from his service revolver at Holden. Another officer, Carl Smith, simultaneously fired five times. Bullets struck Holden in the back, chest, thigh, arm and buttocks, Ybarrondo said.

“Maybe when (the officers) were talking to him at first, maybe if they got it set up and ready to go, they could have used the net, but they would have had to surround him and they never were able to do that,” Ybarrondo said. “They could never contain his movements.”

Use of the 20-by-20-foot nets was recommended by a police-civilian task force that studied alternative methods of restraint after the April, 1983, death of PCP suspect Barry A. Preston Jr. Preston died after he was restrained in the back of a patrol car by an officer using a carotid restraint, commonly called a choke hold.

The nets, which cost $500 apiece, were put into the field in March and all officers from lieutenants to patrolmen were taught how to use them, said Lt. Dennis Gibson, the department’s in-training supervisor.

Five officers are generally needed to operate each net, Gibson said. One officer sprays a fire extinguisher at the suspect to divert his attention from the loose-mesh net. Two officers control the suspect’s movements with 8- to 10-foot-long aluminium poles while two other officers throw the net over the suspect. The net is then closed with drawstrings, Gibson said.

Since they were issued, none of the nets has been used in an actual confrontation, Gibson said.

Capt. Ray Morris, a training supervisor with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, said his agency has used nets in the past to restrain knife-wielding suspects. However, Morris said, a suspect must be in a “fairly well-contained area” before a net can be used effectively.

“He can’t be running around,” Morris said.