Off-Duty Officer Felt He Had to Shoot or Die : Crime: Trapped in a motel robbery, the policeman drew a handgun and fired when armed robbers asked what was in his back pocket.

Standing in the middle of a San Diego motel robbery, off-duty Officer Robert Ray Barr decided he would die if he handed over his wallet. It carried his Huntington Beach police badge.

So he lied, claiming it was in his car. Then, as a pair of bandits trained a 12-gauge shotgun on Barr and six other people, Barr managed to toss the wallet unnoticed under a chair.

But as he lay on the floor, face down, the bandits persisted. They wanted to know what was in his back pocket.

He showed them, pulling out a .22-caliber handgun and firing a single round. He missed, police said Monday, and was wounded twice by the return fire.

“He thought they would kill him if they knew he was a cop,” said San Diego Police Lt. Paul Ybarrando, one of several officers investigating the case.

“It’s amazing he wasn’t killed,” Ybarrando added. “The guy was standing over him with a shotgun.”

Barr, an accident reconstruction expert and 13-year Huntington Beach officer who turned 43 today, was reported in fair condition Monday in the intensive care unit of San Diego’s Sharp Memorial Hospital. He suffered leg and arm wounds in the gun battle, which unfolded late Saturday in the lobby of the Hampton Inn on Kearny Mesa Road in northern San Diego.

Although at least half a dozen others lay sprawled near the officer, no one else was injured in the exchange.

It was the second shooting in two weeks involving off-duty Huntington Beach officers. Another officer, who has not been named, is under investigation for his involvement in a shooting incident last Tuesday in San Bernardino, the details of which remain sketchy.

Ybarrando said Barr “was basically forced into reacting. The wise thing he intended to do was to be a heck of a good witness after it was all over. But he had to get involved.”

San Diego detectives are still investigating the shooting, which occurred about 10:30 p.m. Saturday after two masked robbers invaded the motel as Barr was leaving.

Barr, who had spent the day at the San Diego Zoo with his fiancee and two teen-age daughters, left them in the car and inquired about a room. The inn was booked, and as he walked toward the door, two men wearing white masks stormed into the lobby.

One vaulted the front counter; the other trained a shotgun on the victims. The gunman ordered Barr and the others to lie face down on the floor. The robbers seized the motel’s receipts--police refused to disclose the loss--as well as the wallets of the desk clerk and the other half-dozen people in the lobby.

From a half-kneeling position, Ybarrando said, Barr fired one round at the bandit. He thought he had hit him but evidence indicates he had not, Ybarrando said. The gunman fired back at close range, striking Barr once in the leg, severing an artery. Barr fell face down. The gunman fired again, wounding Barr in the left arm.

The bandits, described as about 6 feet tall and wearing dark clothing with white sheets or scarfs cloaking their faces, ran out the front door and jumped the fence of a neighboring hotel. Ybarrando said no vehicle was seen.

One of Barr’s daughters flagged down a passing policeman as Barr’s fiancee, a nurse who police would not identify, applied a tourniquet to his leg.

Barr underwent surgery Saturday night to repair his arm wounds and nerve damage to his leg. His condition was upgraded from critical to fair on Monday.

The gun Barr fired at the robbers was not his service revolver, Huntington Beach Police Lt. Jeff Cope said, because Huntington Beach officers are armed with larger caliber guns. The department’s officers are allowed to carry guns off-duty and, in fact, are expected to perform as officers of the law if necessary, Cope said.

“It’s not required that an officer carry a gun off-duty,” Cope said, but “it’s almost an unwritten rule. You almost have to these days.”

Cope, who has worked with Barr since he joined the department 13 years ago, said that to his knowledge Barr has never been involved in a shooting, on or off duty.

He described Barr as “very well-liked” and mild-mannered, an officer whose job is to reconstruct the scene of a traffic accident in order to learn its cause.

Times staff writer Blake Fontenay contributed to this story from San Diego.