A sudden flash: the John Skaggs incident

American Handgunner, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Massad Ayoob

The blast of the P .38 Special round rocked the alcove.

The giant collapsed instantly.

It had gone from beginning to end in a heartbeat. The "man-mountain" lay motionless on the floor. Skaggs barked immediately, "Is everyone else alright?" They were.

Other cops rushed toward them. As a female officer ran across the floor of the bar, her Smith & Wesson flew from its holster. The simple strap of her Jordan scabbard had apparently come undone. As she retrieved her weapon, Skaggs thought in the back of his mind that he had made the right decision in buying a security holster out of his own pocket.

Police reached down to retrieve the weapon. All they could find was a camper's waterproof match container. Opening the metal canister, officers discovered that it contained only marijuana.

Skaggs was stunned. The man had gotten himself shot for that?

Emergency medical personnel who had been there for the stabbing victim were already in the alley. They raced in to aid the man Skaggs had shot.

But there was nothing they could do. Autopsy would show that the shot had been fired from a distance of between 3 inches and muzzle contact, and 50 percent of the man's heart had been shredded by the department-issue, serrated jacket Remington 125 grain P hollowpoint. The man had been clinically dead by the time his great bulk crashed to the floor of the alcove.

Aftermath

When the scene investigation was over, John Skaggs drove himself back to police headquarters in his assigned squad car. When he arrived, he was placed in an interview room--"the room where we interview criminals," he thought to himself wryly--and his heavy-barrel four-inch Model 10 was taken as evidence and replaced with another Smith & Wesson .38 Special. Only in the station did Skaggs realize that his uniform shirt was covered with the dead man's blood.

The dead man had been identified by now. He was wanted on an outstanding warrant for felony aggravated assault, a crime in which he had wielded a shotgun against an innocent victim.

His death at the hand of John Skaggs was ruled a justifiable homicide under the circumstances. The dead man's actions had been such that, under the circumstances, any reasonable and prudent person would have perceived himself under lethal assault with the knife the officers had reason to believe he possessed. That reasonable perception warranted the use of deadly force.

A lawsuit was filed by the estate of the deceased. Two years later, it was settled for $2,400, the price of the ambulance bill and the burial.

John came to terms with it. "Knowledge is power," he told me much later. "I knew within 30 seconds of the shot being fired that it was absolutely justified." He'd had some training in officer survival tactics, but not as much as he'd had in the law of deadly force. "That was when I convinced myself that I needed to get to some schools and find some things out," he would say later.

That quest took him to the Chapman Academy of Practical Shooting, where we met. I was a guest instructor there in those days, along with men like Jack Manfre of the Chicago Police firearms training unit, working under the great Ray Chapman, the first world champion of the combat pistol. In Chapman, Skaggs found an instructor who could teach him the fine points of action/reaction in split-second encounters like the one he had experienced in the doorway of the bar. In Skaggs, Chapman found a born instructor who was patient, compassionate, and brilliant, and had a fire in his belly to teach good people to stay alive. A decade or more later, when Chapman retired, John Skaggs was the man he hand picked to succeed him as Director of Chapman Academy.