Ex-officer feels the hurt behind the badge

Whenever a cop kills someone and controversy erupts, Dan Heredia has a flashback. Not the kind that makes sweat break out and sends him into palpitations, but the kind that takes him back to a time and a place he’d like to forget.

It was November 1984, and he was serving an eviction notice at a house in Lomita. It was routine duty as an officer for the Housing Authority’s police department, even when he saw the young man in the doorway who he knew was wanted on a couple of felony warrants.

What happened next altered the course of Heredia’s life. And, as it always does, it came back in full force a few months ago when two Huntington Beach police officers shot 18-year-old Ashley MacDonald in a city park. Last week, the Orange County district attorney’s office said the shooting of the woman, who was high on drugs and approaching one of the officers with a knife, was justified.

What came back to Heredia wasn’t just the shooting and its aftermath, but perhaps a thing left undone.

As his own thoughts came storming back, Heredia e-mailed me to say he doubts that life will go back to normal anytime soon for the two Huntington Beach cops.

Heredia, 54, was eight years into the job when he found himself in a life-and-death struggle. The young man he’d end up killing in the next few minutes wasn’t known as a violent felon or cop-hater, but when Heredia told him he was arresting him on the drug-related warrants, “the fight was on.”

Heredia thinks it went on for a couple minutes. At one point, the other man grabbed Heredia’s baton and, later, they fought over his revolver. Heredia thought he had the man under control when, one last time, he lunged at him and again tried to get the gun. Heredia shot him twice and killed him.

In that moment, he believes, he unknowingly formed a bond with any police officer who’s shot someone to death. What cops won’t say, Heredia says, is how afraid they are at times like that.

“While I was fighting for control of the gun,” he says, “I wasn’t thinking of overtaking him. You know your life is on the line, but for whatever weird reason, I saw my son flash before me. He was on the right side of my face. He was an infant, and he flashed before me, as clear as a picture.”

That son turns 23 this week.

Some cops are tormented for years by a fatal shooting. Heredia says he is, but not as much by the shooting as the recriminations he felt from others, both in and outside the department. A civil suit filed by relatives of the dead man ended in a settlement that upset Heredia, who felt he’d acted properly.

“When you take a human life, whether in an auto accident or a shooting, it’s a traumatic incident,” he says. “It’s traumatic to the psyche. I’ve met cops who were the John Wayne type, then they got in a shooting and broke down and cried like little babies.”

Heredia went on medical leave in 1987 and left the force in 1989 on medical disability, caused mostly, he says, by the lack of support stemming from the shooting. “I never felt guilty about the shooting,” he says, “but it was, how to say it, it was the system that made me feel like I did something wrong.”

Now the father of four boys, he lives in Southern California and owns a trucking business. He doesn’t want to say where he lives, still somewhat worried that someone might want to track him down and settle old scores.

Despite his unhappy departure from the force, Heredia says his sympathies lie with police officers. He wishes the public understood them better, then recites the names and details of three Police Academy classmates gunned down on the job.

Without specifically trying to, our conversation reminds me that we may never fully understand a cop’s workaday fears and challenges. Unfortunately, too many of them are defensive about why we want answers for the things they do.

That won’t be resolved today.

At home, Heredia still has the inch-and-a-half-thick “yellow book” that lays out the details of the fatal shooting. It’s part of the montage of his life, he says.

And the thing undone?

“I always wanted to tell the mother of the guy I killed,” he says, “that I was sorry I had to, but not sorry I did, if that makes sense. When I brought it up to county counsel that I wanted to give her my condolences, he told me that was not a good idea. It’s a human thing, you know what I mean? You don’t wake up in the morning telling yourself you’re going to go out and shoot someone that day because it’s your job. That’s why any shooting where cops are involved, it does affect me.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.