Shooting Back

Author Charles Remsburg interviews firearms instructor Dave Spaulding in Remsburg's new book, Blood Lessons: What Cops Learn from Life-or-Death Encounters, available from Calibre Press.

[Police Officer] Katy Conway, in her twenties and still fairly fresh to patrol, had just pulled away from the stationhouse in her marked unit one winter night when a stranger with a boom-box flagged her down. “He ran up to her lowered window, dropped the ’box, pulled a .357 magnum, and shot her point-blank multiple times,” Spaulding says.

“The highest round struck her vest, but others drilled into her pelvic area and thigh, bad wounds. She was momentarily in shock. He yanked her door open, shoved her into the passenger seat, and started to drive off.

“She radioed for help on her lapel mic, her voice exceptionally controlled. He told her, ‘Bitch, shut up or I’ll shoot you more.’ But she was the one who pulled the trigger. She was able to reach her 9mm and she blasted him into oblivion.”

Spaulding says she later told him: ‘I knew someone was going to die that night, and it wasn’t going to be me.’

More here.