MONROE – For a few frantic minutes last year, fate and felonies brought Monroe police together with fugitive Harold McCord.
When the smoke cleared on June 24, 2003, the escaped convict was dying from multiple gunshot wounds. A member of the Monroe Police Department’s Special Emergency Response Team, or SERT, had been injured by bullets fired from a colleague’s assault rifle.
Then a legal mess landed with a thud on the community’s doorstep.
Attorney fees and other expenses related to the shooting already have cost Monroe more than $250,000, according to police spokeswoman Jan O’Neil.
Those costs are expected to climb as McCord’s family pursues a wrongful-death lawsuit.
Lawyers for McCord’s relatives have $7 million in pending damage claims. They are preparing to sue not only Monroe police, but also Bothell officers, who participated in the SWAT-style raid at the Monroe apartment.
The Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office has been named in the claims, even though deputies apparently had no role except to help direct traffic.
McCord died the day after he escaped from a Pierce County courtroom by bluffing his way out with a fake gun. He had been convicted of kidnapping – his third strike – and was facing a mandatory life sentence.
An investigation by a special team of detectives from Snohomish County determined that McCord had been shot as he threatened police with a gun-shaped object fashioned from paper. An inquest jury reached the same conclusion. Prosecutors determined that his slaying was legally justified.
At the request of McCord’s family, the FBI office in Seattle is gathering police reports and other documents to send to the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil rights unit, FBI spokeswoman Robbie Burroughs said last week. No decision has been made on whether a federal inquiry will be conducted.
Sheriff Rick Bart said he is convinced that the county needs to study whether it has too many SWAT teams.
In addition to the teams in Monroe and Bothell, SWAT units are operated by the sheriff’s office and Everett police. A fifth multiagency team handles SWAT duties in Lynnwood, Edmonds and Mountlake Terrace.
“I’ve been a proponent of having fewer SWAT teams in the county for a long time,” Bart said. “I believe we need to look very long and hard and seriously” at the number of teams, the cost of training those teams and the risks involved.
“The liability is extremely high, and I’m not sure it is a wise choice,” Bart said, adding that it may be smarter to have fewer teams and provide more training.
Shared capabilities
Monroe’s emergency response team sometimes operates outside the city.
Twice since McCord’s death, Monroe’s SERT has conducted raids and surveillance at homes in unincorporated Snohomish County, records show. The operations, conducted in February and May, were connected to a drug case and occurred with the permission of the sheriff’s office.
Monroe Police Chief Tim Quenzer said he supports forming some sort of a shared SWAT team, particularly if there is an opportunity for all departments to contribute members. It is expensive to train and equip SWAT teams, he said.
Quenzer and others in Monroe staunchly defend the department’s actions in the McCord case.
Much of the cost associated with the shooting has been legal fees incurred in representing the city and officers in the inquest.
The courtroom inquiry was ordered by King County because McCord died at a Seattle hospital. The inquest cost the city thousands of dollars, and was an unnecessary expense, said lawyer Mark Bucklin, who represented Monroe and Bothell officers.
“The answers were clear from the report done” by detectives, Bucklin said. “The fact that somebody says something but has no facts to back it up does not make it a real question.”
Bradley Marshall, attorney for McCord’s family, said he doubts Monroe police learned from the case. He remains critical of the department’s training and tactics.
At the time of the shooting, the Monroe team trained together an average of eight hours a month. That’s half as much training as is recommended by a national association of SWAT team officers.
“I don’t think they’ve learned a lot,” Marshall said last week. “I hope they will.”
Quenzer said his department has begun more carefully documenting officer training. He’s also outfitted SERT members with devices that create an audio record of everything that happens in a raid.
Officers said they repeatedly told McCord to surrender. They said he repeatedly shouted threats that he would kill them. But only a few snatches of what he said wound up being documented as background noise during police radio transmissions, Quenzer said.
Bart declined to discuss the McCord shooting, saying the decisions Quenzer made were his own, “and I can’t criticize him. I think (Monroe) is a very professional police department, and they have great leadership.”
1992 case ‘shook us’
Still, he said the sheriff’s office operates its SWAT team differently, in part because of hard experience from a 1992 raid that ended the life of Robin Marie Pratt. The innocent, unarmed woman was shot during a raid on her Everett apartment that involved tactics similar to those used in the McCord case.
“It shook us right down to the foundation.” Bart said. “We had to re-evaluate what we do, how we do it and why we do it as far as SWAT tactics and high-risk situations. How we do things now is a direct result of what we learned from the past, including Pratt.”
Rushing into an apartment to confront an armed suspect is not the first option for the sheriff’s office, Bart said. In most cases, the SWAT team tries to talk suspects into surrendering before confronting them with force.
“Unless there’s a life in danger, we’re going to sit and talk and talk and talk and talk. A dynamic entry is going to be made only if there’s a life in danger,” Bart said.
That’s what happened in March, when the sheriff’s SWAT team killed Cory Edmon, who responded to negotiation attempts by starting to strangle his 1-year-old hostage at a Marysville home. County prosecutors ruled that the Edmon shooting was legally justified.
“We looked at it, we critiqued it and looked at what else we might have done. Could we have done something different to change the outcome? In that case, no,” Bart said.
It is important that the questions are asked, the sheriff said.
“There’s something to be learned from every one of these. There were lessons in Marysville, lessons in Pratt, and I’m sure there will be lessons from McCord,” Bart said.
Herald writer Yoshi Nohara contributed to this report.
Reporter Scott North: 425-339-3431 or north@heraldnet.com.
Reporter Katherine Schiffner: 425-339-3436 or schiffner@ heraldnet.com.
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