Martinez cop died trying to save 6 captives

Source: SF Gate

(09-07) 21:10 PDT Martinez -- Trying to save three women and three screaming children from an angry gunman, Martinez police officers Paul Starzyk and Ian Leong stood in a narrow hallway leading to a second-floor apartment on Saturday - and prepared to go in.

But before they could, police officials said, gunman Felix Sandoval poked a hand out from behind the door and opened fire, blindly, with a .38-caliber revolver. Starzyk, a 47-year-old sergeant, was wearing a bulletproof vest but was hit twice in the upper body.

Starzyk initially returned fire along with Leong, but he was fatally wounded.

Within minutes, officials said, Sandoval was shot dead by a third officer who responded to the apartment and unleashed a German shepherd. Once inside the apartment, authorities found a 44-year-old woman - the cousin of Sandoval's estranged wife - dead in the kitchen.

snip

Police and witnesses said Sandoval, a 49-year-old retired laborer with three children and a recent arrest for methamphetamine use, intended to attack his estranged wife - who last year filed for divorce and obtained a restraining order against him.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/07/MN0K12PP76.DTL&tsp=1

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the scourge of the planet. meth

EVER done any good?
Virtually every time I hear about a man shooting his ex-wife or ex-girlfriend...it says that she had taken out a restraining order against him.

I didn't see any potential benefit.

So said a (female) police officer I know, many times.

Here in Chicago, a lovely young African-American woman was gunned down as she left Sunday services. She had two restraining orders against the man, who was at first identified as her boyfriend. However, her friends told me he was no boyfriend: she was merely kind to him, just as she was kind to everyone.

A lot of the time, though, it's not.

A restraining order against someone with no restraint is as useful as a gag order against a flock of magpies.

It is good for some situations if for no other reason than it allows police to step in before the violence escalates.

However, a truly obsessed, violent ex isn't even slowed down by one.

crisis prediction? Years ago, one handed me a text book that was not only useless but dangerous in that it minimized how dangerous leaving or even just getting a TRO could be.

The TROs that I've seen work were in my own family but only in one case was the violence potential high and that ex was also not interested in going to jail or dying in a blaze of glory, which is why it worked.

as the closest cop.

It is easier to get police help if you have one but the police can't babysit you 24/7. I think there are more effective ways to stay safe than to hope irrationally that the PD will be available to you after the order is violated but before you get hurt or dead.

I'm sure that there are some cases that it's helpful - but I don't think I'd even bother taking one out on a meth addict, they're not in their right minds, with or without a piece of paper.

To a fellow brother in blue (Heroes are never Forgotten) Thank You for your sacrifice.

I keep my kitchen knives, power tools, household chemicals and car under lock and key for exactly that reason. You never know when the Devil is going to possess them and use them to murder some innocent. :sarcasm:

Your argument would be more persuasive if you strayed over to this side of sanity. Teh crazy isn't convincing.

That's the bottom line.

then rocks and sticks. What's left, but to cut off everyones hands so they can't strangle? What lengths should we go to to end murder?

People are dangerous, mad animals that do, occasionally kill. Despite the propaganda, we are not experiencing sudden epidemic of murder, but an awareness campaign. The current murder rate is nearly as low as it was in the early 1960's. Without the Internet and MSM scrutiny, these "high-profile" stories would be unknown outside their local news markets.

Now if you have an idea of how to dispossess criminals of firearms, I'd be more than happy to hear it, but don't try to tell me that making handguns illegal is going to prevent assaults and murders. They've been illegal here in DC for a long time, but there's no shortage of teens and young adults running around with guns stuck down their pants or hidden in their cars. They wouldn't be *criminals* if they obeyed the law and, if they can't buy guns easily, they'll get them in the newly energized black market created by prohibition.

Further, it wouldn't take much of an investment to set up a machine shop to manufacture simple guns. Creating a scarcity through outright prohibition would ensure a wildly profitable enterprise. The potential for large-scale international smuggling along the same, established routes that cocaine, meth and heroin reach the U.S. is wide open and the drug cartels would fill any void in a heartbeat. Back-alley gun smithies would spring up all over Mexico, Central and South America within days.

I would instead propose that we attack poverty, social inequality, drug use, education and disenfranchisement as the roots of crime. But the hard answers make railing against handguns as the sole cause of all evil irresistible to the incurious and intellectually lazy.

conventional, facile, and unsupportable

...usually while patting themselves on the back for their high ethics and thoughtfulness.

:sarcasm:

RIP Officer Starzyk.

Still, we have a huge problem with police brutality and lack of accountability in this country.

Living near it, Martinez can be a scary place. If the refineries don't kill you, the crime and meth will...

for planning to shoot Obama, and seemed to have been taken up by the corproate media as confirmation of what the judge was to pronounce - that they could never have constituted a serious threat, even with their sniper's rifle(s). Heck they were just druggies, too spaced out to know their backside from their elbow.

There are many necessary occupations for which the mortality is much higher and the pay and power much less.

Very few of those other occupations involve protecting the lives of innocents.

But enjoy metaphorically shitting on this fellow who gave his life in the defense of others.

Unreflective coplove is one of the reasons we're living in a police state.

Unreflective "coplove" is no more, nor no less an example of lack of critical thought than is "unreflective cophate".

As for me, I see nothing wrong with allowing accolades for an LEO who did his job and saved lives, and then leaving it at that-- as the OP appeared to be specifying one and only one member of the LEO community.

But then again, I imagine there are many people who will extrapolate the worst from any given situation and use that extrapolation to both validate and advertise their own biased perceptions.

of the more than 3/4 MILLION cops in the US, fewer than 200 will die at the hands of a criminal this year.

As far as danger goes, they're nowhere *near* the top ten, yet their job is extremely well-rewarded, with good money every day, a fat pension that they collect 25 years earlier than anyone else collects social security, and an extremely generous, tax-paid life insurance policy.

Now, what sort of person would object to the simple truth?

"Now, what sort of person would object to the simple truth?"

I think that one should ask themselves if that particualr truth is contextually relevant to the ongoing discussion, or is that person merely attempting to advertise a bias and in doing so, subverting the intent of the original conversation.

In what context other than an emotional, biased orgy would plain truth be unwelcome?

"...would plain truth be unwelcome?"

When it's irrelevant and designed merely to usurp.

A few more will be killed by their trigger happy comrades.

Being an electrician, a roofer, a cab driver or a convenience store third shift worker is much more dangerous than being a cop.