“Farmington police shoot and kill man after responding to wrong home,” Albuquerque’s NBC affiliate KOB4 Eyewitness News reported Friday on an incident from the previous Wednesday.
Police were responding to a domestic violence call and “mistakenly approached the wrong house.”
Per the New Mexico State Police, which is investigating the shooting, the police knocked on the door and announced themselves. “ When no one answered, officers asked dispatch to call the reporting party back and have them come to the front door.”
Killed was homeowner Robert Dotson, 52, who answered his door with a gun in hand. Since it was the wrong house, he’s not the one who got the call. He was presumptively trying to figure out what was going on and who was out there.
“What followed was a chaotic scene, with officers retreating and opening fire” Farmington Police Chief Steve Hebbe explained in a video posted to the department’s Facebook page. That this is the default reaction on seeing a citizen in his own home holding a gun should be a concern to all, and at this writing, videos are being withheld pending officer statements. Until that happens, the public will not see how Dotson was holding the gun and if he made any attempt to open fire once he saw who was outside his door.
That Dotson’s wife opened fire and received return fire, only stopping and complying after certain she was in fact engaging with police, strongly suggests they had no idea what was going on and the police call was made to the residence where the initial call originated, not to the home of the man they just killed.
That leaves open the question of how police got the address wrong in the first place. What checklist procedures are in place to preclude an armed response and the assumptions that go with one until a positive identification has been established? Were those procedures followed? It also makes it imperative that the investigation be open and complete, especially in light of a prevalence of “wrong house raids,” resulting in headlines like:
- Man Dies in Police Raid on Wrong House
- Texas Cops Realized They Raided the Wrong House. They Kept Searching Anyway.
- Black woman handcuffed naked in raid at wrong home set to get $2.9 million from Chicago
- Cop Who Wrongly Led No-Knock Raid Against 78-Year-Old Grandfather Can’t Be Sued, Court Rules
If you go to the above link you’ll realize you could play this game all day. Yet despite these outrages, it still happens. And forget the wrong house. Sometimes it can be the “right one,” but the arrest warrant affidavit was falsified, resulting in the highly-publicized shooting death of Breonna Taylor by officers executing a “no knock” warrant.
And other times, it can be the result of a disgruntled neighbor calling in police with allegations of gunfire and death threats that she later withdrew—but not before SWAT responders opened fire on Jason Kloepfer, the subject of a series of exclusive AmmoLand reports.
Such stories are not new. Back in 2011, Jose Guereña, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war was slain in a no-knock invasion by the Pima County Sheriff’s Department SWAT Team, controversial not only because no evidence of drugs was found at the scene, but also because he did not open fire on deputies as they had previously claimed. And deputies blocked paramedics from approaching the scene for well over an hour, cutting off any chance of their victim surviving.
It gets even more outrageous. In 2018, a victim was killed by police as the result of a wrong house revenge SWATting call – two morons got into a $1.50 “dispute” over “Call of Duty” and when one threatened to kill the other, he gave him a previous address that had since been occupied by the completely uninvolved victim. The threatener then called a third party who charged to make the 911 call (read the complete story here).
It’s no surprise that police tried to justify their response by claiming the totally innocent man “lowered his hands toward his ‘waist area’.” Never mind that they were at a two-story house and the dispatcher reported it was a one-story house. The reported words of the “prankster” who called himself “SWAuTistic”:
“Bomb threats are more fun and cooler than swats in my opinion and I should have just stuck to that. But I began making $ doing some swat requests.”
And every bit as evil as that, when you consider the influence they have and that they take in donations under the fraudulent pretense of being about “gun safety,” is the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence a group that partners with Giffords and that advises:
Talk about a way to set the stage for even more “gun violence”!
But back to New Mexico…
“What I will tell you as the chief is that this is an extremely traumatic event, that I am just heartbroken by the circumstances surrounding this,” Chief Hebbe continued in his Facebook non-apology. “I am extremely sorry that we are in this position.”
Good grief. The chief thinks he’s heartbroken. What about the wife of the man his men just killed?
And what he’s sorry for is being “in this position”?
This is inexcusable, any way you look at it. But it being New Mexico, with an anti-gun Democrat governor and Democrat-dominated legislature busy imposing every citizen disarmament edict they can get away with, don’t pin too many hopes on the politically-dependent State Police.
Who thinks we won’t see new casualties resulting from “red flag laws,” especially when, using the Giffords/Bloomberg model, where “About a third of gun confiscation orders are wrongly issued against innocent people”?
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.
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