Cops Shot Up a Car in 1980 and I was a Witness!

So, spring of 1980. I was living on Parker Lane, which I’ve written about earlier.

It was late April, and it was late at night (or early in the morning, depending on how you tell time), and I was doing some schoolwork. Don’t remember what, exactly. That spring I was taking the basic journalism class, a class in Italian Baroque Art, a class in French Film, and a class about the Spanish Civil War. I don’t remember finals in any of the classes—I mostly had to write essays. So I was up late, reading—probably something for the Spanish Civil War class, which had a pretty heavy reading load. And I heard—sirens.

The sirens sounded close.

I got up and looked out the window.

A sedan stopped right below my window. A cop car right behind it. Another cop car went around and stopped in front of the sedan, and a cop got out. Two cops got out of the car behind the sedan.

As the first cop approached the sedan—the sedan tried to pull away!

Bang! Bang! The cop was shooting his pistol into the car!

BOOM! Bang! The cops behind were shooting with shotgun and pistol!

Damn.

The sedan lurched up onto the curb.

I’m standing there in the window like an idiot. My first thought—they’re gonna shoot me! Like, just see me move up here in the window and reflexively shoot me.

I sort of stepped back and peered around the corner of the window.

The three cops went up to the sedan and pulled out the occupants and they beat those guys. Just stomped them.

I went downstairs and out the door to get a closer look. People from the other units were out, too. There was quite a crowd.

More cop cars arrived. An ambulance. Cops tore the car apart—pulled out the seats and tossed everything on the street. Looking for drugs? A weapon? The ambulance took one of the car occupants away. Cop cars took the others away. A tow truck showed up and towed the shot-up car away.

My roommate, TWS, had been across the street at Mother Earth. When the bar closed, he came home and I tried to excitedly tell him what had happened. TWS was unimpressed.

“Lowell, we were witnesses to a murder back in January. Cops shooting a guy is nothing.”

Maybe. Sort of maybe.

When I read the article top left, I called Jim Berry at the American-Statesman to offer my eye-witness account. He didn’t return my call.

Subsequent newspaper stories, below, say the cops got in trouble for shooting up the car. Good.

I wasn’t able to find any resolution on the incident. Nothing more on the guy who got shot, nothing more on the cops.

Probably nothing more happened, and, like most things, the incident was mostly forgotten....