Justifying Homicide
By John K. Wilson
On Wednesday, March 27, 2002, a little before midnight, an intoxicated Nathan Ruch was driving his pickup truck on College Avenue when his tire struck the median strip; Normal Police Officer James Merica began to follow Ruch, turning on his flashing lights.
Ruch refused to stop and drove around the area, narrowly missing another car and hitting a curb on Westview Drive before he turned into Doud Court, a cul-de-sac. Unable to go further, Ruch drove between two houses into the backyard. After stopping briefly, Ruch continued through the backyard, and came around to the front, crashing through two fences.
In the meantime, Merica had exited his patrol car, went to the trunk and pulled out a shotgun, and walked to the side yard where Ruch was coming through in the pickup. Merica fired four shots from his shotgun as he moved out of the way. The first two shots hit the truck but missed Ruch. By this time, Merica was well out of harm’s way, to the side of the pickup. Merica’s third shot, the kill shot, went through the passenger side window and hit Ruch in the head. Merica’s fourth shot, which missed, must have been aimed at the back of Ruch’s head.
Merica’s fellow police officers quickly rushed to his defense. Less than 24 hours after shooting, Normal Police Chief Walt Clark told the Pantagraph, "The report I was given—and it is a long way from complete—is they [the Illinois State Police] indicated it looked like it was justified." After a few weeks, the State Police endorsed their initial indication that the shooting was justified.
A coroner’s inquest jury also gave the opinion that the homicide was justified. However, McLean County Coroner Beth Carlson-Kimmerling reports, "At the 11th hour, I had a visit from the state police," indicating that the inquest jury should not be shown all of the evidence because the FBI was investigating the case. Kimmerling believes, "This should have been a case where all the evidence came out at the time of the inquest."
Bloomington Attorney David Dorris, who represents the Ruch family, plans to file a lawsuit soon over the shooting. "It’s not about the money," Dorris says. Town leaders have done "nothing to show us that Normal even recognizes the problem." Dorris says, "There has been no real investigation," and he doesn’t expect a pending federal investigation to provide a serious inquiry.
Anyone who reads the late Nathan Ruch’s arrest record—two convictions for drunk driving, drug possession—might conclude that he certainly wasn’t a boy scout. But he was. An Eagle Scout, in fact. Ruch’s life had those two sides: the highly-regarded and well-liked construction management student at Illinois State, and the often reckless behavior he engaged in.
Ruch’s death had two sides as well: the dangerous driver who led police on a chase through a residential neighborhood in Normal and then tried to run over an officer; or the misguided kid who just didn’t want to get caught making another mistake and never meant to hurt anyone.
Either way, Ruch is still dead, shot by a police officer who says he believed that Ruch was trying to run him over with his truck. Ruch’s parents told the media, "We believe in our son. He would not try to run over a police officer. When all the facts are out, it will prove that."
While some of the details about the Ruch shooting have not been released pending the federal investigation, the evidence given so far raises troubling questions about whether this was truly self-defense or an unnecessary killing.
McLean County State’s Attorney Charles Reynard refused to file criminal charges against Officer Merica, but he did not call the shooting justified. Reynard concluded, "Our review of reports, photographs, video and audio records leads us to conclude there is insufficient evidence to prove a criminal violation beyond a reasonable doubt." However, he was careful to add that the decision "does not respond, either positively or negatively, to any question of civil liability or departmental issues respecting Officer Merica’s conduct."
Police and investigators so far have emphasized the split-second decision-making that caused Merica to continuing shooting at Ruch as his truck passed by.
Reynard declared, "If this were a static ‘freeze-frame’ analysis without reference to the rapid movement of Nathan’s truck, one might speculate that the officer’s use of lethal force was unjustified. However, with a rapidly moving vehicle perceived by the officer to be a threat to his life, the reality is that this force was used in literally a split second…"
But police are paid and trained to make the right split-second decisions. Most decisions by police to fire a weapon are made in a split-second, and an officer who can’t make the right split-second decision is a hazard to himself and others.
It is inconceivable that at the time of the third shot Merica could have been unaware that the danger had passed. By the time Merica fired the fourth shot, he was trying to shoot Ruch in the back of the head. As the Pantagraph noted, "Merica’s decision to fire at the truck—not once, but twice—after he escaped its path should be questioned extensively."
Chief Clark has declared: "We believe the federal review will come to the same conclusion as the State Police and state’s attorney review: Officer Merica acted in self defense when the Ruch vehicle accelerated directly towards him, placing him in a position of extreme danger."
However, Dorris argues that Ruch "could never have seen the officer" in the dark. Dorris goes further in questioning Merica’s self-defense claim. "The police officer was never in the path of the vehicle," Dorris contends. "It’s pretty simple geometry."
Even the Pantagraph observed in a May 16 editorial, "Although what Merica did may have met the letter of the law, there should be some serious questions about his decision-making as a police officer."
Other doubts have been raised about the case. ISU criminal justice professor David Falcone has criticized the police for using powerful shotgun slugs rather than less deadly force in a residential area. Falcone also questions why police engaged in a chase around Normal for someone guilty of nothing more than a minor traffic infraction. States Attorney Reynard seemed to agree with this critique: "We know that these events could have been prevented if the police officer had not followed him."
According to the Normal Police Department’s website, police will backup a fellow officer because "we do operate under the philosophy of ‘Better Safe than Sorry.’" However, in the Ruch case, the police were neither safe nor sorry.
Officer Merica left his car and went towards the backyard before any backup arrived. And the police department hasn’t changed any policies or training since the killing of Nathan Ruch, according to Chief Clark: "There have been no changes in our policies since March. We do review our policies annually and those related to pursuits and use of force are no exception."
Dorris says, "They will not discuss or let us see the procedures." The lack of openness and failure to re-examine police policies particularly bothers the Ruch family, Dorris says, and the goal is to determine "what can be done to make sure this doesn’t happen."
As the Pantagraph editorialized in May, "Officials should be asking not only whether Merica followed proper procedures, but whether the department’s policies and procedures are adequate to protect the safety of the public as well as police." Since then, nothing has changed, and Officer Merica has returned to active duty.
The police may be reluctant to change policies with regard to firing weapons, but the parents of their victims are not. A new advocacy group, Parents against Unjustified Police Shootings (PUPS), was launched last month by the family of Shannon Smith, who was shot to death in his car on July 24, 2000 by a police officer after he drove off from a Chenoa gas station without paying.
When Smith, who was mentally disabled, tried to drive past a police truck blocking his way on Interstate 55, Hudson police officer Jeffrey Gabor Jr. shot Smith four times in the back, killing him. Gabor was actually charged with murder, which is extremely rare for a police shooting by an officer on duty, although he was acquitted by a jury. Gabor still faces a civil lawsuit and a U.S. Justice Department investigation, but he has returned to duty with the Hudson Police Department.
In another recent police killing in the area, Cindy DeLane McCure of Chatworth was killed by a sheriff’s deputy while holding a small pistol during a confrontation at her home. Her family has also joined PUPS along with Nathan Ruch’s parents.
On Jan. 5, 2000, a Bloomington police officer, who was part of a drug task force in Pontiac, shot and killed a suspected cocaine dealer who had put his car into reverse and hit a police van. The shooting was ruled justified.
On Nov. 18, 1998, Normal police shot a man to death who had a history of mental problems. The armed man was parked in his car in a school parking lot and police fired after the man seemed to point his pistol at a day-care van. Merica was one of the officers who fired his weapon that day, although he did not hit the suspect. The shooting was ruled to be justified.
While Normal is not alone in having a police shooting at an unarmed driver, other cities have taken simple steps to reduce the propensity for police killings.
The Washington Post noted in 1998, "Like their counterparts in cities across the United States, D.C. police are instructed to shoot at unarmed people in cars only in extremely rare cases, to protect their lives or the lives of others. Yet since mid-1993, D.C. police officers have fired their weapons at cars 54 times in response to alleged vehicular attacks, killing nine people and wounding 19."
In response to the Washington Post series, the D.C. police announced a new policy on shooting at unarmed drivers in cars: "When confronted with an oncoming vehicle, [the] officer should move out of its path."
This change in policy, and better training for police, had a dramatic impact on police killings. In 1998, Washington, D.C. police shot 32 people, 12 of whom died. After the Washington Post reported in November, 1998 that this was the highest rate of police killings in the country, the D.C. police immediately established new rules restricting shooting at cars and began to improve training programs. As a result, in 1999, there were 11 shootings, four fatal. In 2000, just one person was killed by D.C. police.
The policy of shooting at cars is not only deadly for the victims and traumatic for the officers, but expensive for cities that allow it. In 1998, Washington, D.C. agreed to pay $775,000 to settle lawsuits brought by the families of three unarmed teenagers shot in their cars by police in separate cases.
The Washington Post noted, "Police in Washington and throughout the country are restricted in shooting at cars for both common-sense and legal reasons. Bullets tend to ricochet off car bodies. And if an officer hits a criminal driving a car, the officer may only succeed in turning the vehicle into a 2,000-pound unguided missile."
That’s precisely what happened in the shooting of Nathan Ruch: after being hit in the head by the bullet, Ruch’s foot stuck on the accelerator and the car raced across the street, hitting a garage. If Ruch’s car was headed toward him, Officer Merica was saved by his quick feet, not his shotgun. Indeed, to the extent that firing the gun delayed him slightly in moving out of the way, Merica probably endangered himself while he was trying to kill Ruch.
Merica also endangered the residents in the neighborhood where he fired the shotgun. If the residents of one house had happened to glance out a window at the commotion, they could easily been hit by one bullet that went through a second-floor window. And Merica would have endangered any unseen (and innocent) passenger in the car. For all Merica could have known, Ruch might have had a small child sitting unseen in the vehicle, who would certainly have been harmed by the shooting or the ensuing crash.
A Washington, D.C. police training manual notes, "To successfully fire at a vehicle, let alone a moving one, is something that only seems to work well in the movies. In real life your odds of ‘killing’ a car are about as good as becoming the next chief of police."
Nicholas Pastore, a former New Haven police chief, stated after several killings by police in Hartford, Connecticut: "The use of deadly force is happening too often, and it’s eroding the credibility of all police." Pastore noted that in one case where an officer shot an unarmed driver, the police would be better served by getting out of harm’s way than firing at cars.
"Our policy is you never fire at a vehicle," Detective Walter Burnes, a New York City Police Department spokesman, told the Washington Post. "The contention here is if a vehicle is coming at you, you have the option to get out of the way." In 1997, New York City’s 40,000 police officers fired at cars engaged in "vehicle attacks" only twice.
"Most departments have moved to prohibit these kinds of shootings, unless somebody in the cars was armed and shooting at the officers," noted Michael Cosgrove, a former Miami assistant chief and an expert on police shooting cases.
There’s no doubt that Nathan Ruch was dumb to go drinking and driving on a suspended license, and dumb to try to run from the police. Ruch may have been a victim of his own stupidity, but stupidity should not be a capital crime. Most police work deals with acts of stupidity, but that doesn’t justify killing a suspect.
Ruch was a victim of bad judgment by a police officer and bad policies by the Normal Police Department. The consensus in the law enforcement community is that shooting at unarmed drivers in vehicles is a bad idea because it doesn’t make police any safer, endangers innocent people nearby, and usually kills the driver.
Yet the Normal Police Department apparently has no policies or training that advise officers against shooting at unarmed drivers in vehicles, even after the tragic murder two years ago of Shannon Smith by a Hudson police officer.
According to the consensus among criminologists about proper police behavior, Merica never should have approached the vehicle alone on foot, never should have fired his weapon, and never should have continued shooting as Ruch’s truck went past him.
The fact that Merica continues to be an officer in good standing, of a police department that hasn’t changed any of its policies, indicates that the problem goes far deeper than one officer’s poor judgment. A police department that is seemingly oblivious to such common procedures to protect its officers and the public poses a serious danger.
It’s not clear how many people in central Illinois will need to be shot to death before the area police change their policies and training to match the prevailing national standards about firing at unarmed drivers. For the friends and families of Shannon Smith and Nathan Ruch, there have already been too many funerals.
