SWAT Officers Recount Siege at Tuffree’s Home After Shooting

Simi Valley Police Officer Michael Clark’s widow fled weeping from the courtroom at the sight of her husband’s bloody, bullet-torn uniform Tuesday, as prosecutors continued wading through testimony in the murder trial of Daniel Allan Tuffree.

The stained blue uniform displayed by a criminalist that sent Jenifer Clark and other relatives of the slain officer into the hallway in tears was just the latest link in the chain of grim evidence trotted out before the jurors in Judge Allan Steele’s courtroom.

On Tuesday, jurors also learned how Tuffree barricaded himself inside his house behind furniture and a sheet of plywood either before or after shooting Clark twice in a gunfight with police last August.

The jury heard a Simi Valley SWAT commander describe how he rammed an armored truck through Tuffree’s fence to block his gunfire while heavily armed Special Weapons and Tactics officers dragged the wounded Clark away from the line of fire.

And jurors were told that police spent two hours trying to coax Tuffree out with phone calls and bullhorns before lobbing in tear gas and stun grenades, then storming the house.

When word reached him that a wounded fellow officer was pinned down by gunfire, SWAT commander Lt. Richard Thomas testified, he quickly summoned a team and drove them to Tuffree’s house in the department’s armored truck.

Thomas let the three officers out the truck’s rear door, then backed up to the far curb, he testified.

“I accelerated across the street, breaking the fence, and hit the west wall of the house,” stopping in the yard between the wounded Clark and the kitchen window Tuffree had fired from, Thomas said.

SWAT officers threw a bulletproof shield over Clark and dragged him to a patch of grass behind the truck, where Thomas began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, he testified. Moments later, Thomas said, they bundled Clark into a black-and-white patrol car that sped off to Simi Valley Hospital.

Meanwhile, jurors learned, Tuffree apparently had fortified his house.

Crisis negotiators phoned Tuffree repeatedly and hailed him with a bullhorn and loudspeaker with no results, testified Det. Steven Delamater, the department’s primary negotiator.

They phoned him three times, letting the line ring about 50 times on each try, but Tuffree never responded, Delamater said.

More than two hours later, officers lobbed deafening “flash-bang” grenades into the house in an attempt to stun Tuffree and make him drop his weapons, SWAT Officer William Lappin testified.

Lappin said he and two colleagues with machine guns and gas masks moved into the smoke-filled house through a bedroom window to find a sheet of plywood blocking the hallway into the living room.

They peered through a gap between the wood and the wall and saw Tuffree prone and bloody on his kitchen floor.

When they kicked the plywood away, Lappin testified, he saw a chair propped against the inside of the front door and an exercise bicycle butted up against the chair.

They found Tuffree lying face down in front of his sink and yelled at him, “Show your hands, show your hands!” because they were uncertain if he was still armed, recalled SWAT Officer Darin Muehler.

“I handcuffed him,” Muehler testified. “I was yelling at him, ‘Where are the guns?’ and ‘Who else is in this house?’

“He stated, ‘I’m hurt, I’m hurt,’ ” Muehler said. “ ‘My right arm is paralyzed and I need a doctor.’ ”

According to Lappin’s testimony, Tuffree appeared to smile as the SWAT officers arrested him.

Testimony is scheduled to continue this morning.