January 2000 Volume 81 Number 1
"serving the protectors"
| January 2000 Volume 81 Number 1 "serving the protectors" |
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| By
Brett Williams |
hree Port Augusta police officers stood ready to shoot dead a crazed attacker who repeatedly thrust a 40cm-long machete into a woman’s chest last April.
“Drop the weapon! Stop or we’re going to have to shoot!” they bellowed at Michael Sandell, whose terrified partner lay screaming beneath him on a bedroom floor in their Nestor St home.
The officers - with their hearts thumping and revolvers trained on Sandell - looked for a “clear shot”. They believed that, if they didn’t stop his frenzied attack, Rosemary Humphreys would never survive.
“At that time,” says Constable Marty Davis, “as far as I was concerned, she was either gravely injured and dying, or dead. I made a clear decision to try to shoot him, but the shot wasn’t clear - there was a risk of hitting the victim.”
But Sandell was eerily oblivious to the officers’ presence. Not even their demands for his surrender deterred him. In the space of split seconds, Davis, 28, assessed him as being in “a complete zone”.
“(In) that first instant I thought: ‘I’ve got to shoot him now because he’s just going to kill her’ .”
“There was nothing that could be done,” he says, “and at that point I was going to shoot him (while he was) on top of her, and risk hitting her. If I hit her in the leg, so be it - it’s better than her dying.”
Davis’s then supervisor, Senior Constable Paul Mitchell, 35, felt exactly the same desperation.
“(In) that first instant I thought: ‘I’ve got to shoot him now because he’s just going to kill her’,” he remembers. “But by the same token, you’re thinking: ‘If I get her as well, and perhaps the knife isn’t doing as much damage as it looks, she ends up getting killed from my shooting.
“That’s just running through your mind in split seconds: ‘Should you or shouldn’t you?’ ”
For Davis and his then partner, Constable Stephen Andrews, the terror began only minutes earlier when they responded to a cut-off 000 call around 11:30pm. Only 30 minutes into their night shift, and with little more information than an address - discovered from tracing the call - the pair charged directly to Nestor St.
As soon as they arrived, Davis and Andrews could hear, in the late-night stillness, loud, violent arguing. With a slight view through a bedroom window, they saw Sandell pointing the machete at Humphreys, and threatening: “I’m going to stick you, and when the police get here I’m going to get them to kill me.”
“She was absolutely petrified,” says Davis, “(and) he was tunnel-visioned towards making some assault on her.”
Andrews, 33, remembers her pleading for calm, and urging Sandell not to “go down this road”.
Intensely concerned, the officers concealed their presence and closely monitored this life-and-death struggle until their supervisor, Mitchell, arrived moments later.
Then, realizing the officers were outside the house, Sandell appeared at the locked front security-screen door. Davis tried to reason with him.
“You’ve got your guns,” Sandell responded, “pull them out and shoot me. You’re not going to arrest me.”
But Davis continued the dialogue he’d begun. He felt he was “nearly making headway”, when Humphreys - seemingly unaware of the police presence - emerged with a pen of mace which she sprayed into Sandell’s face.
Says Andrews of her action: “It had no effect apart from pissing him off, and then he pushed her into the bedroom and shut the door. Her all-mighty screams and shrieks of terror (followed).”
The three officers launched into instinctive action. They knew that, to save the woman whom they now saw as a potential murder victim, they could allow nothing to stand in their way.
Davis kicked in a glass panel to the side of the front door, while Andrews yanked the screen completely out of the security door. All three stormed into the house and straight to the bedroom.
But Sandell - a man of 120kgs - had positioned himself and Humphreys against the inside of the bedroom door. The officers couldn’t force it open against the offender and victim’s combined weight.
With relentless force against the door, however, the officers pushed it open just enough for Davis to thrust his arm into the room and squirt capsicum spray in Sandell’s direction.
“Steve and I both had our guns out pointed at the door while Marty was spraying,” says Mitchell. “It covered him (Sandell) on the side of his head but had absolutely no effect.”
And for an action that proved ineffectual, Davis had risked the door being slammed on, and most likely breaking his arm. “When you’re fighting to save a woman’s life,” he says, “that’s not really a concern.”
Meanwhile, the officers still couldn’t force their way into the bedroom, and Humphreys’ nightmarish screaming continued.
So, in desperation, Andrews holstered his revolver, stepped back and leapt at the door. “He kicked it,” says Mitchell, “and the whole door squashed straight down on top of him. (But) that exposed the offender and victim brilliantly.
“Steve crawled back so quickly, and this guy’s just leaning over the woman ramming his knife into her.”
With guns drawn, all three officers stormed the room shrieking demands: “Get off her! Come out of the bedroom!”
“She was still screaming as well,” says Andrews, “so at least we knew she was still alive.”
But the officers’ shrieked demands and imposing armed presence didn’t halt Sandell’s fury - until suddenly, he stopped and turned toward his victim’s rescuers. Humphreys’ screaming stopped.
Still armed with the machete, Sandell started walking toward the officers but focussed entirely on Davis.
All three officers slowly backed away, and at the same time continued to shout demands that Sandell surrender.
But the scene became almost a stand-off between Davis and Sandell. Mitchell and Andrews - with guns pointed directly at Sandell - paced backward with them, through the living room and into the dining room.
“I was stumbling over chairs and the kitchen table,” says Davis. “I was screaming: ‘Put it down or I’ll be forced to fire!’ He replied: ‘Just shoot me; I won’t stop until you shoot me’. I was basically pleading (for his surrender) at that stage, because I thought I was going to have to shoot him.
“I made two clear decisions to pull the trigger and shoot him dead, and both times something stopped me.”
Davis would later say that, although legally entitled to shoot, the justification he’d needed was more moral than legal.
Meanwhile, to shield himself momentarily against Sandell’s continuing rage, Davis positioned himself behind the meagre protection of the kitchen table. From there, he made one last attempt to subdue Sandell with capsicum spray. But Davis didn’t realize he’d emptied his entire can into the bedroom moments earlier.
“I dropped the can,” he says, “pointed my gun right up at him, and said: ‘Put it down or I’m going to fire!’ ”
Then, inexplicably, Sandell seemed to emerge from what Davis described as a trance. All three officers were bewildered.
Says Mitchell of Sandell’s curious transformation: “It was as if somebody turned a switch off. He just said: ‘Right, that’s it fellas. I give up’. He threw the machete across the room and walked out of the kitchen - just like that.”
And miraculously, Humphreys had survived. She would later write in a letter to the officers that, without their help, she would have been killed.
y now, the discharged capsicum spray hung cloud-like throughout the house. The officers coughed and spluttered as they eventually took control and led Sandell outside. He too began to suffer the effects which, to the officers’ intense frustration, he’d earlier avoided.
“We secured him and put him into a cage car,” says Davis, “and then I just collapsed onto the ground. I thought: ‘Oh, my God - I nearly shot and killed this guy’. And he’d nearly killed me.”
Davis remembers his adrenaline rush being so high that he “struggled to control my muscles”. And, as he sat contemplating the near loss of life, his body spent minutes literally shaking.
He regained his composure, however, and, with his colleagues, drove Sandell to Port Augusta police station. Davis charged him with the attempted murder of Humphreys and threaten life (Davis’s).
But as the only cops on the streets that night, none of the three officers could stop to properly unwind or simply reflect. They responded to other calls and continued to ensure their community’s safety until after dawn. Their debriefing, Mitchell says, consisted only of the drinks they shared at the end of the shift.
For Andrews, the incident was the most dramatic in which he’d ever been involved. “I had visions of Saving Private Ryan, where you see bullets go into people and blood spurting out,” he says.
“I was thinking: ‘If I shoot this guy, it’s going to be bloody horrific’. I just couldn’t imagine doing it, (but) if it needed to be done, you’d do it.”
Mitchell, who during the incident had feared not for himself but for Davis, “couldn’t believe how it ended”. And like his colleagues, he had never come so close to shooting an offender.
Police Association president, Peter Alexander, says the officers’ actions reflected great credit on them. “You can’t always have a strategic plan when you’re dealing with desperate or mentally ill offenders,” he says.
“People have to work together, and on this occasion the teamwork has been excellent. They’ve worked together to get the result.”
Although the officers insist their actions amounted to neither bravery nor heroism, each was awarded a certificate of merit by SAPOL. But for jobs well done, Davis says he and his colleagues are just as happy to receive simple, “quiet praise”.
“If you’re not prepared to put your life on the line for other people,” he asks, “what sort of effective copper can you be? Policing is about protecting life and property, and dealing with violent disturbances. People forget that.”
The charges against Sandell were reduced to assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm (Humphreys) and assault to avoid lawful apprehension (Davis). He pleaded guilty in the District Court, received a three-year suspended sentence and entered into a three-year good behaviour bond.
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