Officials Admit Shot Fired Point Blank at Gunman on Ground : Department Says Action by SWAT Deputy at End of Escondido Siege Was Legitimate

A San Diego County sheriff’s deputy fired from point-blank range at a gunman as he was held on the ground at the conclusion of a bloody, 12-hour siege in Escondido over the weekend, a department official acknowledged Monday.

The spokesman said there are “legitimate reasons” for the deputy’s action, which came just hours after a Sheriff’s Department Special Weapons and Tactics officer was killed by the gunman, Robert Gary Taschner.

But law enforcement officials declined to say what those reasons were pending conclusion of an investigation into the deadly standoff that gripped an Escondido neighborhood Saturday.

“The department’s position is that each and every shot that was fired there was legitimate and there was a cause and reason for them,” said Lt. Alan Fulmer, the Sheriff’s Department spokesman.

Deputy Lonny Brewer, 29, was hit by a bullet that lodged in his chest during the first of two assaults by SWAT team members on Taschner’s apartment. He died at Palomar Hospital. Two other deputies who were wounded during the daylong encounter have been released from hospitals.

Taschner, 37, suffered an “undetermined number” of shotgun and other gunshot wounds of an unknown caliber to the head, chest, abdomen and extremities, Deputy Coroner David Lodge said.

But Lodge would not say whether coroner’s officials have been able to determine if Taschner was struck by the shot at point-blank range. In addition, Lodge declined to say if an autopsy performed on Taschner had revealed that the gunman was already dead by the time the deputy, who has not been identified by department officials, fired that final shot.

Police suspect that Taschner, a diagnosed schizophrenic, was under the influence of drugs during the siege Saturday, but Lodge said results of toxicology tests performed during the autopsy would not be available for several more days.

The controversy over the shot fired by the deputy was prompted by television footage of the final seconds of the siege. As Taschner, an Army veteran and former Escondido public works employee, ran out the front door of his apartment firing an AK-47 assault rifle, he was struck by several shots fired by the SWAT officers.

San Diego television station KGTV (Channel 10) broadcast a videotape Sunday showing that, as Taschner was lying on the ground--restrained by one officer and a police dog--he was quickly surrounded by other officers. One member of the Sheriff’s SWAT team raised his handgun and fired a shot in the direction of Taschner’s head from only inches away.

Slow-motion replays of the KGTV footage do not make it clear whether that shot struck Taschner, who might have been dead from the other wounds. Nonetheless, the video footage prompted Taschner’s mother to charge that SWAT team members had used excessive force in the incident.

“He was down, not moving, being held down, but they still blew him in the head,” Sally Taschner said.

Although the officer who fired the shot appeared to stumble slightly before his gun discharged, raising doubt over whether the shot was accidental or deliberate, Fulmer said it was not a fluke.

“I can tell you it was not an accident,” Fulmer said. “Everybody keeps referring to it as an execution-type thing, and that’s ridiculous.”

Fulmer said, however, that he is not “at liberty to discuss” the reasons for the final gunshot, saying he could not do so until the investigation is concluded.

“I’m not trying to shroud this thing in a cloak of secrecy,” Fulmer said. “I’m simply attempting to maintain the integrity of this investigation . . . . There are legitimate reasons. We’re not trying to hide anything.”

The deadly siege came just days after Taschner was arrested by Escondido police, who seized numerous weapons from his apartment.

Police were still unsure Monday whether Taschner had bought the high-powered semi-automatic AK-47 that he used Saturday after he was released from jail or if the gun was simply hidden in the apartment or some other place where officers could not find it when they arrested him last Tuesday.

Lt. Earl Callander, a spokesman for the Escondido Police Department, said officers searched the apartment thoroughly, but there is “the possibility that he may have had it in a secret hiding place” in the attic or elsewhere.

In addition, Taschner could have purchased the weapon at a gun store and taken it home the same day because there are no restrictions on the purchase of such firearms, Callander said.

Officers confiscated a similar AK-47 from Taschner in October when he was arrested along with his younger brother, Timothy, for carrying loaded firearms in their car, according to Steve Casey, a spokesman for the San Diego County district attorney. In that October arrest, Gary Taschner was also charged with possession of amphetamines after officers discovered a plastic bag containing drugs in his wallet, Casey said.

Callander said investigators are trying to determine if the AK-47 confiscated during the October arrest is the same weapon Taschner used Saturday.

As investigators combed the street in front of Taschner’s apartment Monday, piecing together the complex series of events that unfolded Saturday, Sheriff’s Department officials mourned the loss of Brewer, a seven-year veteran who had been a member of the elite SWAT team for two years. Funeral services for the slain deputy will be Wednesday.

Meanwhile, residents of the neighborhood surrounding Taschner’s apartment began putting their lives back together.

The trim brown row of apartment units on Mission Avenue in Escondido stood silent and apparently deserted Monday. But the survivors were there, hesitant to open their doors to strangers, unsure of what happened.

Apartment No. 3, a burned-out hulk, stood open to the sun, its windows shattered, its interior blackened from flames and scarred with innumerable bullet holes.

Two amateur oil paintings stood propped up and apparently unharmed in the middle of the devastated front room where the 37-year-old Taschner had lived for about six months. According to neighbors, he was a quiet, polite man who always said “hello” when he met them, who sometimes played with their children and seemed to enjoy it.

Next door, apartment No. 4 was also a nightmare of a mess. It had been the home of Soledad Hernandez, her three young children, her husband and two relatives. Then, sometime after 10 p.m. Friday, shots rang out as plaster shattered on one wall of the living room. The shots had come from Taschner’s apartment.

Soledad Hernandez, speaking through an interpreter--her friend, Maria Lopez--recounted the terror that ensued after a relative called the police.

The silence was broken again about 3 a.m. Saturday with more shots, this time in the upstairs bedroom abutting Taschner’s apartment. A piece of plaster struck her 8-month-old son on the eyelid, drawing blood. The family fled.

Later Saturday, sheriff’s SWAT officers attached percussion charges to the common wall between the two apartments in an attempt to surprise and overcome Taschner. The resulting fire virtually destroyed both apartments.

Hernandez, sitting on the couch of a neighbor and nursing her son, Leonel, could voice only a few words about the disaster that had befallen her family. “It was horrible. I was very afraid,” she said through her interpreter.

Lopez, who lives in a neighboring apartment complex, had more than a few words to say about the way law enforcement officers treated her friend: “Why didn’t they help her? Why don’t they help her now? I found them sleeping on the floor, cold and with everything they have destroyed. Where is she supposed to go, with a sick baby and all of her things gone?”

For Mary, a neighbor who would not give her last name, it began at 7:30 a.m. Saturday when she poked her head out of her apartment door to find out what the ruckus was about.

“There was a police car there in the drive and I thought it was just a minor disturbance,” she said. “We had just moved in the day before (Friday) and I didn’t know anything about any of this.”

The couple had moved from the San Francisco Bay area to manage the Fairwinds apartment building. Now, Mary said, “we just don’t know whether we’ll stay or not. Everybody tells us that this is a nice quiet town. But I just don’t know.”

Around 10 a.m. Saturday, when SWAT team members made their first assault on Taschner’s apartment, Mary had a front-row seat through her hall window.

“I watched them give CPR (cardio-pulmonary resuscitation) to the one officer who died. Right outside here,” she said. “This is where they tended to the wounded. One officer yelled at me and told me to close my blinds and get away from the window or he’d arrest me. I don’t know why he said that unless he didn’t want me to see the wounded man. They let him lie there for the longest time.”

Anna Madriga, who has returned with her family to apartment No. 2, next to Taschner’s, can only shake her head over incident. She didn’t know the dead man but her youngsters did. She said that until recently he had been very friendly with them all.

In apartment No. 1, two doors from Taschner’s burnt-out flat, Julie Espinoza pointed out the bullet holes in the living room wall and described the upstairs damage.

“It was while we were gone, I guess, after they told us to leave (Saturday) about 4 or 5 in the afternoon,” Espinoza said. “I went to the store, the 7-Eleven, for a while and then when I came back, they said I couldn’t come back in until Sunday about 5.”

“The first we knew anything was happening was when we heard the police outside telling him to come out with his hands up. That was about 10 o’clock, I guess,” Espinoza said.

She said that her boyfriend, Daniel Trinidad, knew Taschner and had told her he was a nice guy, friendly and talkative, but Espinoza said she had never talked with her neighbor.

Espinoza said she didn’t think she would move from the apartment where she had lived for only a month, although, she said with a shudder, “it feels like death here now.”