Dark Thoughts About a Questionable Police Shooting

Whenever a cop shoots and kills someone under questionable circumstances, it seems to me that both the police and the public have the same duty. Both should resist the impulse to jump to conclusions, whether that impulse be to cover up or to condemn. Cover-ups undermine trust in the police, but so do knee-jerk condemnations. Neither is a very smart way for a society to proceed.

With that in mind, I went last week to the small office/warehouse building in Huntington Beach where, in the wee hours of the morning of Sept. 7, a 31-year-old officer shot an unarmed man. As admittedly imperfect as my experiment was, I wanted to imagine what the officer might have thought before firing the shot that killed Ted Franks inside the plant at 4:30 in the morning.

I did it because I was overwhelmingly predisposed to condemn the officer and wanted to resist that impulse. After all, the dead man was never in custody, was not known to be a suspect, was 77 years old, was in his underwear and, superseding all else, was unarmed.

Yet, he wound up dead.

The day of the shooting, a police spokesman said Franks was shot in the leg when confronted in a doorway by an officer. Franks stumbled a few feet back into his room, created a large pool of blood and was taken to UCI Medical Center. He bled to death from his wound.

Since the shooting, now some 10 1/2 weeks old, we’ve heard nothing from either the Huntington Beach Police Department or the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, which is investigating the incident. Through their respective spokesmen, the Police Department said it doesn’t comment on internal investigations, and the Sheriff’s Department said its investigation is continuing.

The sounds of silence.

It was no doubt silent that night when officers arrived at Tolemar Manufacturing, the office where Franks was spending the night in his 15-by-15 room. A widower, he often stayed overnight at the motorcycle parts and accessories firm because he lived in Temecula and didn’t want to make the long commute.

To prove how cruel the fates can be, police were responding to a silent alarm next door when, police said, the officers noticed a back door ajar at Tolemar.

At Tolemar, I tried to get into the officer’s head:

The back door to the plant is open at 4 in the morning. A burglar alarm went off next door. Experience tells me that most commercial alarms prove false, but this one looks real. There’s probably someone inside.

The officer pushed the door open and, in so doing, according to company owner Steve Ramelot, probably knocked over some boards stacked against it from the inside. That noise may have awakened Franks, Ramelot theorizes. The original police statement also noted that the officer and his partner, who went around to the front of the building, shouted for anyone inside to surrender.

Now I’m inside, in a room slightly larger than the typical service bay of an auto repair shop. I’m a sitting duck, because there’s nowhere to hide in here if someone has a bead on me. There’s a narrow corridor across the room and a closed door. No telling if someone is on the other side.

On the other side of that door and just a foot or so to the right was the door to Franks’ sleeping quarters. We can assume that Franks must have gotten up and approached the door from the other side about the same time as the officer got there. The police version of events is that the door opened . . .

There he is! What’s someone doing in a warehouse at 4:30 in the morning?

In that instant, the officer, who hasn’t been identified, fired and Franks fell.

I’m sure my attempt at mind-reading lacks some details, but I’ll bet it’s in the ballpark. Is there any benefit of doubt to the officer? Is there any justification for the shooting?

If there is, I can’t think of it.

Even allowing for the ever-present reality that police work is life-threatening, that every call is a potential death trap, it’s difficult to excuse this shooting. The fear may have been real, but police are trained to handle uncertain situations.

We have only the officers’ word that they announced their presence. I’ll accept that, but I wonder why Franks wouldn’t have yelled something like, “My name is Ted Franks, I work here!” Maybe in his grogginess he didn’t hear them. Did the officer announce himself from his side of the closed door, when Franks would only have been a few feet away, or was it only from the warehouse floor, possibly out of earshot?

The other question is why the investigation is now in its 11th week. Law enforcement agencies and district attorneys are notoriously reluctant to lower the boom on police shootings, but this one will surely tax that reluctance. If being startled is a justification for the police shooting someone, we’re all vulnerable.

Yes, the circumstances logically could have bred fear. Yes, it was a fluke that anyone was in a warehouse at that hour. Yes, officers are trained to shoot before getting shot.

But I can’t get around what seems a pretty unshakable bottom line here: Police shouldn’t shoot unarmed 77-year-old men.

We’ve tried not to jump to conclusions. Eleven weeks later, the public deserves an explanation.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.