The Trauma After the Smoke Clears : Experts Are Beginning to Help Cushion the Blow, Assist Police to Deal with Post-Shooting Despair

In the dream, Richard McMillen sees the teen-age boy standing in his bedroom. He is alive, this child with the familiar face, and he is staring at the man who killed him.

It happened on the railroad tracks near George Bellis Park in Buena Park, too quickly to really think about, but with just enough time to react.

McMillen, a Buena Park police officer, saw what he thought was a man running toward him with a rifle. He fired, felling the distant figure with a bullet to the chest and another to the leg. But as McMillen walked toward the bloodied body that lay crumpled on the railroad tracks, he realized that the man he had just shot, his rifle tossed nearby, was only in his mid-teens.

“My God,” he recalled thinking, “this kid is just a little older than my own daughter.”

Manuel Cabral Diaz was 15 years old when McMillen killed him in 1980. And now Cabral haunts the dreams of Richard McMillen.

The boy was one of 459 “justifiable homicides” recorded across the country that year, cases in which police officers were found to have killed in the line of duty. In fact, the FBI reports that in the last decade, on the average, police nationally shot and killed one person a day.

In Orange County alone, 14 people have been shot by police since the first of the year, six fatally. At this rate, the number of people killed or wounded by police in Orange County will top the 20 officer-involved shootings recorded last year.

In the latest such incident, a 29-year-old man with a history of bizarre behavior was shot and killed in Orange on Friday after he allegedly threatened two police officers with a butcher knife.

Like all the others before it, this case is being investigated by the district attorney’s office, which will decide if the officers were justified in taking a life in the line of duty. Statistics show that in Orange County, at least, it is rare for the district attorney’s office to take action against a police officer involved in a killing.

Police officials are not surprised that almost half of those shot by police in Orange County die, in part because of the way law-enforcement officers are trained to react once they decide to pull the trigger.

Police academies call it “center mass” firing--that is aiming at the absolute center of the target, usually the chest--coupled with the firing of multiple rounds, known as “double tapping.”

“The law-enforcement officer shoots to end the aggression against himself,” said Roy Fish, a supervisor at Laser Village, a training facility operated by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. “We want big holes that go deep into the body cavity that hit vital organs. If you are justified to shoot somebody you are justified to kill, and that is how you want to shoot.”

Shootings invariably spark controversy, with detailed news accounts of the incident, its aftermath and, sometimes, the public outcry. Yet the officer’s side of the story is often never told. Officers are told not to talk to the press, in part because their statements could jeopardize potential civil lawsuits, and in many cases the police department refuses to even disclose the names of the officers involved.

So while the agony of the victims and their families--whose loss is permanent--usually is well documented, what is left unreported is how the officers react. Many find themselves haunted for years to come, unable to come to grips with the single, unforgiving fact that they were forced to take another life. Some turn to alcohol or other drugs, some experience sleep and eating disorders, families break up, and others become so traumatized that they leave police work.

These same men and women who undergo such rigorous training in how to shoot to kill are often woefully unprepared for the anguish they endure after the shooting.

“It is impossible to train someone to accept the reality of taking another life,” said Dr. Gerald L. Fishkin, a Long Beach psychologist and a leading expert on police stress and shootings. “Simply put, there is no preparation for this kind of trauma.”

Richard McMillen was a 21-year-old Marine from the streets of East Los Angeles when he went to Vietnam in 1967. He manned a machine gun in the side door of a helicopter over the jungles of Southeast Asia, and he can still remember sobbing like a child the first time he went up to ferry troops into battle.

He must have killed people, firing all those rounds into the anonymous jungle canopy below, but it was so different over there.

“In Vietnam, you quickly divorce yourself from the real world,” he said. “You’ve got 10,000 guys dressed like you killing 10,000 people not dressed like you. All you want to do is survive.”

Survival was the last thing on McMillen’s mind the day he drew his service revolver and aimed it at Manuel Cabral Diaz. It was the Fourth of July in 1980, a pleasant day when George Bellis Park was packed with families waiting for an evening fireworks show. McMillen was thinking how nice it would have been with his wife and daughter, out there in the park, away from the daily and repetitious grind of street patrol.

The call came over the police radio that two armed men were spotted on nearby railroad tracks. McMillen arrived to see one suspect wrestling with another officer and a second running down the tracks toward him, carrying a rifle.

He remembers everything as if it happened in slow motion, a freeze-frame recall so common among officers who are called on to fire their weapon in the line of duty.

“I yelled for him to stop,” McMillen said. “I was aiming at him, yelling at him to stop and drop the rifle. He pointed the rifle at me. At one point I heard the hammer hit the primer. I distinctly remember that. I was waiting to see the muzzle flash and feel the pain.”

I couldn’t shoot at first because the other officer was in my line of fire. (Then) I shot and he fell.”

Although McMillen was cleared of any wrongdoing by the district attorney’s office, his problems were only beginning. McMillen, decorated combat veteran and doting father, would see his world crumble.

The nightmares began almost immediately, a ghastly vision of Cabral standing in his bedroom, and McMillen’s wife of 15 years, a “born-again” Christian, would find herself unable to cope with the trauma. They would divorce a year later.

“She said she couldn’t forgive me because God would never forgive me,” he recalled. “It took me to my knees, let me tell you.”

The stress intensified when local newspapers carried stories, later discredited, quoting the other suspect as saying that McMillen had handcuffed Cabral and then shot him execution-style. It was little consolation that Cabral was found to have been a gang member, the rifle he was carrying had been stolen and that he had tried to fire at McMillen first but the weapon had misfired.

“The shooting made me feel like a crook,” said McMillen, who remains with the Buena Park police as a public information officer. “Like a rape victim. I felt dirty and ashamed when in reality I had no control over the situation.”

McMillen said it took him two years to overcome the trauma of the Cabral shooting, and though he feels the worst is over--he has since remarried a fellow Buena Park police officer--it will always remain with him.

“Once in a great while I’ll have the nightmare,” he said. “‘In the dream, I get up to turn on the light, thinking that will make him go away. But he always turns it off. There is a struggle there. You want him to go away but he won’t.

“It’s not something that you talk about. I’m not real comfortable talking about it now. Look, it’s not like the guy on TV who kills someone and has a cup of coffee and then goes back to work. A lot of people say cops have no heart. It’s just not true.”

One of the problems with cops, psychologists say, is that the very qualities that make for good officers--the ability to maintain control and to suppress their emotions--also make it difficult for them to deal with stress and post-shooting trauma.

Add to that the machismo inherent in police work, and it is not difficult to understand how so many officers have trouble dealing with the pressures that come with a shooting.

“Cops tend not to want to talk about their inner feelings,” explained Jerry Pierson, president of the Assn. of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs. “They see it as a sign of weakness. They are supposed to solve people’s problems, not have them.”

Although no national statistics are available, Fishkin and other psychologists estimate that only 1% to 5% of all police officers nationwide will ever be involved in a shooting. Of that number, roughly one-third show no signs of severe trauma, another third are traumatized but effectively work through their problems, while the rest are so severely affected that they take disability leave, seek new work or in extreme cases, kill themselves.

“In law enforcement we have a group of men who don’t deal with their emotions very well,” said Fishkin, who has dealt with more than 200 officers involved in shootings, most of them in Southern California. “They tend to mask their feelings through a false sense of bravado. This just magnifies the trauma. The fires of misery continue to burn.”

And even when a cop is vindicated and the incident is termed a “good shooting,” Fishkin said the officer may begin to see himself as the ultimate loser because of the self-questioning and stress that calls into question his ability to control the situation.

Some officers, like McMillen, have trouble dealing with the kind of role reversal that takes place in which the officer begins to see himself as the criminal, Fishkin said. Immediately after the shooting, the officer is put in a series of threatening and foreign situations: He is questioned by district attorney’s investigators, placed on administrative leave and ordered to see a mental-health counselor.

It is a strange and unfamiliar role for a person who is accustomed to enforcing the law, and if the innermost fears are not properly confronted and dealt with, Fishkin said it often leads to destructive behavior.

“They become stuck in their own despair,” he said. “Their anguish is compounded by alcohol. The ones who have been involved in a shooting and have not worked through the trauma turn it into a suppressed anger and resentment. In some cases they become the heavy-handed cop.”

Since civil lawsuits usually follow, it may be years before the officer is able to defend himself in a public forum.

Many years ago, long before people like Fishkin were studying post-shooting trauma, Fountain Valley Police Lt. Bob Mosley was involved in an incident that led to the death of 18-year-old Miguel Angel Ronquillo in Fountain Valley.

Mosley didn’t even pull the trigger--he was involved in a scuffle with Ronquillo and another officer whose gun went off, killing Ronquillo--but he suffered from the same self-questioning and feelings of isolation and doubt.

It was April 13, 1973, and Mosley and Westminster Officer Timothy Miller had responded to a call of two armed suspects running from an area of apartment houses.

Ronquillo had tried to escape by climbing a fence but was caught by Miller. When Mosley arrived, Ronquillo was arguing with Miller and refusing to place his hands on the fence to be searched.

“Finally, this guy puts his hands on the fence, with his back to Miller,” Mosley said. “Then, really quickly, he pushes off the fence and charges back into us with his elbows out. Miller’s gun discharges and the guy is killed. He dies right there.”

Ronquillo, investigators later learned, had been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon and had been sentenced to serve time in jail, but had failed to surrender to authorities to begin serving his sentence.

The case quickly became a focal point for anger from the Latino community toward the police.

“People wanted to see us hang,” said Mosley. “This was a major event in the county. I was getting death threats. I had to send my wife and daughter out of town for fear of their lives. My house was put under surveillance.”

The case eventually went to the grand jury, and both Mosley and Miller were cleared of wrongdoing. Miller eventually left police work, while Mosley has remained with Fountain Valley as a watch commander.

While the case was under investigation, Mosley said his greatest frustration was dealing with the inability to tell his side of the story.

“I wanted to talk to the press to say ‘Hey listen, this is what happened.’ I had a real problem with so many people feeling that I was the villain.”

Police departments have come a long way in the past 10 years in dealing with post-shooting trauma. Most now have a standing policy that the officer undergo counseling within several days after the incident, if for no other reason than to provide an outlet for the officer to express anger and frustration.

Many departments also have staff psychologists or mental-health counselors, and in some cases the local police union or association will have its own psychologist who is called in after a shooting.

When the officer’s weapon is taken as evidence, it is replaced by another so the officer will not feel stripped of his authority. In Laguna Beach, the Police Department has a standing policy that even the officer’s uniform is taken and replaced.

“We cleanse our officers of everything associated with the shooting,” said Laguna’s deputy chief Jim Spreine. “We take all the equipment and replace it. The officials shouldn’t have to deal with it at all. It’s just another way to relieve any potential stress, and remove any reminder of the incident.”

Some cities encourage “peer counseling” in which another officer is assigned to provide support for the officer being questioned and debriefed.

“You have to remain cognizant that the officer is undergoing a very stressful situation,” said Loren DuChesne, chief of investigations for the Orange County district attorney’s office, which routinely looks into all police shootings in the county.

“These are stressful interviews because perhaps for the first time, the cop is on the other side. They are apprehensive. They are very uncomfortable.”

Tony Sperl understands the stress.

In March, 1983, Sperl was a young cop in Stanton, a clean-cut kid everyone said was going places, when he walked into the apartment of Patricia Ridge to check a report that Ridge and her young son had not been seen in recent days.

He found the bedroom door tied shut, kicked it open and was confronted by a shadowy figure in the room. The room was lit only by a flickering television, and it appeared that the figure was pointing a gun at him.

In the split seconds that passed, Sperl fired at the figure, hitting it in the neck. He had shot 5-year-old Patrick Andrew Mason, Ridge’s son. Patrick was holding a toy gun.

The Sperl case is the most infamous officer-involved shooting in Orange County. It has been replayed over and again in the press, been the subject of a “60 Minutes” report, re-created as an episode in the police drama “Hill Street Blues” and used by psychologists as a case study in post-shooting stress.

And now six years and hundreds of hours of therapy later, he still can’t let it go.

Sperl will talk about the incident today, but only reluctantly. His eyes well with tears recalling the shooting and how he was forced to wear his blood-soaked uniform for five hours during his interrogation.

“When it happens, the brain is moving so quickly that everything else seems like it’s in slow motion,” he said. “I didn’t even know I had pulled the trigger. I opened the door and saw a suspect and the next thing I know, I am standing in the doorway watching smoke rising and my ears are ringing. I thought I had been shot.”

“My heartfelt tears have fallen for Patrick Mason,” he said. “I’d bring him back if I could. But there is nothing I can do about it.”

In the months and years after the shooting, the Orange County Grand Jury decided not to indict either Sperl for negligence or Ridge for endangering her child by leaving him alone when she had gone to work. Multiple lawsuits followed, Sperl was unable to handle the stress, and he eventually retired on medical disability.

Sperl would like to return to law enforcement, but he has found the road back difficult. He has applied to no less than six other departments and is waiting for word on an application to join the U.S. Border Patrol. But he fears the worst.

“This is a side to this story that no one wants to print,” he said. “You go out and try to find employment. You go out and say, ‘I’m a smart young man and I can do this and do that’ and they say, ‘Oh, you’re Tony Sperl.’

“You have a lawsuit and all this media attention and it hinders you from moving on. Does IBM want me as a marketing representative when I’m still being interviewed by the L.A. Times?”

Sperl has worked a variety of odd jobs on the fringes of law enforcement to make ends meet--as a bodyguard for publisher Larry Flynt, shuttling bundles of cash from one check-cashing company to another.

“They (the departments) tell you to do one thing, but when you do it they turn on you,” he said. “Cops are being second-guessed for everything they do. The courts and the attorneys have five or six years to second-guess what an officer had to do in one or two seconds in an emergency situation.”

Psychologist Fishkin, who knows Sperl, said Sperl’s trauma was aggravated because in his case, the victim was a child. Sperl, said Fishkin, is every cop’s nightmare.

“Tony will probably never recover from that situation,” Fishkin said. “He is a very sensitive guy and he plays that scenario over in his brain every single day. More than that, is a real sense Tony is the abandoned child. He got his disability and now no one wants anything to do with him.

“The most horrible thing that can happen to a police officer happened to him. To other cops, Tony is the ever-present reminder that it can happen to you.”

* THE AFTERMATH

Deadly force often leads to years of second-guessing. Page 5