Killers in the Family Read online

  Officer Jason Fishburn could see Brian running south of the Kroger’s so he drove his car into the Linwood Square Apartments complex, just south of the shopping center, in an effort to cut Brian off. At the south end of the apartment area, Fishburn jumped out of his police car and started in pursuit on foot, being the person closest to Brian. Fishburn was twenty-nine years old, lean, and in excellent shape, and he soon began to catch up with Brian, who was thirty-six and a heavy drug user, which seldom enhances a person’s health. Several other officers also joined in the foot pursuit but were several seconds behind Fishburn.

  “Stop! Police!” Fishburn shouted as he got closer to Brian, apparently not seeing the revolver he carried.

  While the other officers took off in foot pursuit of Brian, two officers stayed on the scene to arrest Barbara Reese on charges of resisting law enforcement and obstructing justice. An officer said in his arrest report that “she stated her son had told her that he was on the run.” She also told the officer that she had intended to take Brian to her house at 1428 North Bosart Street but changed her mind when she saw several police officers in the neighborhood. She would later be convicted of resisting law enforcement and receive a six-month jail sentence.

  Meanwhile, Fishburn, who saw that Brian didn’t intend to stop and surrender voluntarily, made a quick tactical decision when he was about ten feet or so behind the runner. Rather than using his pistol, Fishburn instead pulled out his Taser and fired it at Brian. But the Taser’s metal prongs missed the man, who leaped over a guardrail at the south edge of the apartment area and went through a gap in a privacy fence just beyond it, then ran south in the 800 block of North Euclid Avenue.

  Later, during all of the debriefings and tactical discussions of the incident, the question would arise of why, since Fishburn knew that he was chasing a murder suspect, he would attempt to use his Taser rather than his pistol, which would have been legal and proper to use since Brian was a dangerous fleeing felon. While some might argue that it’s always best to try to arrest someone in the most humane way possible, a decision like Fishburn’s often has more to do with wanting to avoid the months and months of red tape and hell that follows any officer-involved shooting, even if that shooting is perfectly legal, as it would have been in this case.

  It’s standard procedure in a police shooting for the officers involved to be removed from regular duties and put on desk duty somewhere, often for months. The officers will then have to appear and testify before the firearms review board and a grand jury. They know that they will also often be scrutinized and criticized in the press by various human rights groups, and judged by individuals who will have weeks and months to study the decision that they made in a split second. Individuals who study these events from a quiet, calm distance often don’t realize how frantic and confusing these events can be as they are unfolding, and how quickly these life-or-death decisions have to be made. Therefore, most officers avoid using their guns if at all possible, even though it often puts their own lives at risk.

  Regardless though of why Officer Fishburn decided to attempt using his Taser, it didn’t work, and because of his attempt to deploy it, he found that he had lost ground on Brian and had to race to catch up. Nevertheless, due to his youth and speed, Fishburn still outdistanced the other officers and quickly began to catch up again with Brian Reese, who suddenly disappeared around the corner of a house at 810 North Euclid Avenue.

  When Fishburn turned the corner and ran into the narrow space between 810 and the house to the south, Brian was waiting behind a cutout on the house at 810 and fired at him with the .38 caliber revolver he carried. The first shot struck Fishburn in the lower abdomen, and though painful, was not incapacitating, since he wore a bulletproof vest. Fishburn dropped the Taser he still held in his hand and immediately pulled out his .40 caliber Glock semiautomatic pistol. Before the officer could get a shot off, however, the next shot from Brian struck him in the left side of the head. Fishburn fired a shot in return, but it went uselessly into the dirt in front of him as he dropped to the ground, critically wounded. Brian, seeing the officer down, turned and ran back out onto Euclid Avenue.

  Three of the other officers involved in the foot chase of Brian Reese—Detective Jeff Wood, Detective Steve Scott, and Patrol Officer Jerry Piland—reached the 800 block of North Euclid Avenue seconds after Fishburn. They had heard the gunshots but didn’t know what had happened. Sergeant Rick Snyder, Officer Brian Mack, and Officer Greg Crabtree also began closing in on the scene. Suddenly, the officers saw Brian Reese appear from between two houses. When Brian Reese saw the officers, he raised the revolver he carried and pointed it at them. Detectives Wood and Scott fired their own weapons at him, one of the shots striking Brian in the left shoulder. Brian ran around a nearby house but then went down, the fight out of him. When the officers rushed up to Brian to secure his weapon, they found him bleeding profusely, and one of the officers called on his radio for medical help.

  As the officers handcuffed Brian, Sergeant Snyder began counting heads, making sure everyone was accounted for. He found he was short one.

  Just then, one of the officers said, “Where’s Fish? I can’t find Fish.”

  The officers all looked at one another then started off in the direction they had seen Brian Reese come from. The first thing they saw were the soles of Officer Jason Fishburn’s shoes as he lay on the ground. The officers ran up to him but didn’t see his head wound because of the way he was lying. He wasn’t unconscious, but he wasn’t totally alert, either. His breathing, the officers noticed, sounded painful and labored. They immediately began cutting off his shirt when they saw the bullet hole in it. They also took off his bulletproof vest and found a large, dark bruise on his stomach. One of the officers shouted that he’d found the bullet still encased in the bulletproof vest. Everyone relaxed. Fishburn’s funny breathing was just because he’d had the wind knocked out of him.

  Just then, Fishburn turned his head and the officers saw the huge wound to the left side of it. Sergeant Snyder knew that he had to do something quickly. Fortunately, Officer Greg Crabtree had been a medic in the military, and after becoming a police officer he had assembled a gunshot response bag that he equipped with the same medical equipment he had used to treat battlefield gunshot wounds. Crabtree grabbed the bag from his car and began stabilizing and prepping Fishburn for the ride to the hospital.

  Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department sergeant Dennis Fishburn, Jason’s father, would later call Crabtree’s preparedness “the real miracle about that day.”

  “That’s not normal equipment that we carry around,” he said. “We were lucky that they were able to prep him on the scene so that when the ambulance got there he was ready to go.”

  Sergeant Snyder, confident that Fishburn was getting the best medical care possible at the moment, turned his mind to other tactical matters. The ambulance would have to be able to get through to the scene, which was now clogged with police cars. He immediately got the cars moved and made a path for the ambulance. Fortunately, an ambulance had heard about the chase on their radio and had decided to head that way just in case they were needed, but even though Sergeant Snyder had cleared the police cars out of the way, the ambulance still found its path blocked by a civilian car. Knowing that the officer needed help as quickly as possible, the ambulance driver managed to use the ambulance to push the car out of the way. Consequently, they were at the scene within minutes, and luckily, since Officer Crabtree had already stabilized and prepped Fishburn, all the ambulance driver and med tech needed to do was load him into the ambulance.

  Although Sergeant Snyder had intended to stay behind and manage the crime scene, the ambulance driver and med tech requested that he ride in the back with Officers Fishburn and Piland. So Snyder turned the crime scene over to another sergeant and climbed into the back of the ambulance. Throughout the ride, Sergeant Snyder continuously encouraged Fishburn to hang on, telling him ove
r and over that he was going to be okay. He kept telling him, “Not today! Not today!”

  There was reason to be hopeful. Less than three years earlier, Officer Michael Antonelli of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department had also sustained a gunshot to the head, in his case one where the bullet exited out his right eye. Although that incident had appeared grave at the scene, Officer Antonelli not only survived the injury but returned to the police department eight months after the incident. Situations like this, Sergeant Snyder knew, weren’t totally hopeless.

  Along with offering encouragement, Sergeant Snyder also performed another critical task while in the back of the ambulance. Getting on his police radio, he had several police cars that were already accompanying them block all of the major cross streets along the route so that the ambulance could get to Wishard Memorial Hospital as quickly as possible. The police department helicopter, Air One, was up that day, and also able to scout the best route to the hospital and advise the ground units where traffic needed to be stopped. Officer Piland helped by getting the oxygen line working and assisting with other emergency matters. Fishburn seemed to understand the grave condition he was in, and used his left hand to hold his eyes open in an apparent attempt to not lose consciousness.

  A look at the communications log for July 10, 2008, shows that, amazingly, only twenty-three minutes passed between the start of the incident, when Detective Wood requested assistance in stopping Barbara Reese’s van at 7:17 P.M., to the arrival of Officer Jason Fishburn at Wishard Memorial Hospital at 7:40 P.M., a trip of over five miles to the west of Euclid Avenue. The doctors there credited the speed of arrival—from the time Fishburn was loaded into the ambulance to the time he arrived was eleven minutes—and the care he had received on the scene as being responsible for Fishburn’s condition when he reached the hospital. Most people with similar head wounds didn’t arrive alive.

  Fortunately for Officer Jason Fishburn, despite his arrival during shift change at the hospital, the staff there had heard that a police officer had been shot and was en route. Most of the staff had stayed on in order to give the officer the best care possible. Sergeant Snyder said that as they wheeled Fishburn into the hospital, he saw the hallway lined with doctors and nurses, already masked and gloved, and ready to go.

  —

  Meanwhile, as all of this was occurring, Detective Sergeant Jeff Breedlove of the Homicide Branch sat in an interrogation room at police headquarters conducting an interview in a case unrelated to the Fishburn shooting. But he was the detective next in rotation, which meant he received the shooting of Officer Jason Fishburn as his investigation.

  Crimes like this one are naturally extremely emotional for other officers, and as a consequence, dozens of police officers will often respond to the scene. Detective Sergeant Breedlove knew this could result in serious contamination of the crime scene, so he left the Homicide Office immediately, even before Officer Fishburn made it to the hospital. In fact, Breedlove recalled seeing the ambulance with Fishburn en route to Wishard Memorial Hospital fly by him as he drove to the crime scene, about four miles east of police headquarters.

  Breedlove knew that homicide detectives on another shift had been looking at Brian Reese for at least one and possibly three murders. But that was all he knew about Brian Reese at the time, who was at that same moment also in an ambulance en route to Wishard Memorial Hospital.

  The crime scene, Detective Sergeant Breedlove discovered upon his arrival, was huge, extending from 1400 North Bosart Avenue down to 810 North Euclid Avenue, over a half mile long and a quarter mile wide. Unfortunately, as often happens with crime scenes like this, there had been a lot of traffic in and out of it.

  “The crime scene wasn’t the way we like it because there were too many people trampling around in it,” Detective Sergeant Breedlove recalled. “A crime scene is never as perfect as we’d like it to be, but [in this case] there was a lot of evidence lying around, shell casings and all, and people were walking on them. It was pretty chaotic because the crime scene went all the way from Bosart Street down to where the shooting took place. That was a lot of area to try to cover.”

  Detective Sergeant Breedlove did the best he could with the crime scene he had. Even so, there were several shell casings that should have been there that he couldn’t find.

  “We took a metal detector out there to try and find the shell casings, but we didn’t have much luck,” he said. “The yards in that neighborhood have so much metal, trash, and stuff that’s been thrown around there that the metal detector just went off constantly. It really didn’t do us any good.”

  However, Detective Sergeant Breedlove was able to retrieve the .38 caliber revolver Brian Reese had used to shoot Officer Fishburn, and found that it contained five spent rounds and one live one in the cylinder. He also recovered Officer Fishburn’s .40 caliber Glock, his Taser, and other important evidence. But at any shooting scene where there are unaccounted-for shots fired, the homicide detective always tries to find out where these shots went to.

  “We looked everywhere for bullet holes at the crime scene where Fishburn had been shot,” said Breedlove. “I went back several times looking for bullet holes in the houses and all, but we never found any.” This would eventually become a crucial point undermining the defense attorney’s later claim that his client hadn’t meant to kill Officer Fishburn when he fired the revolver at him, but had just shot blindly in his direction. If that had been the case, they ought to have found bullets other than only those two that had hit Officer Fishburn.

  The upside to having so many detectives respond to the crime scene and offer their assistance was that Detective Sergeant Breedlove had plenty of officers available to canvass the neighborhood around the crime scene. He hoped to find someone in the neighborhood who might have seen what happened between Officer Fishburn and Brian Reese. At that moment, no one felt certain that Fishburn would survive his wounds, and Breedlove figured that Reese would probably lawyer up and not talk. It would be great to have an outside witness to the incident. Unfortunately, though, while a lot of people had witnessed the chase, no one saw the actual shooting of Officer Fishburn.

  “From the canvass we had an eight-year-old girl who said she saw the shooting through a window,” said Breedlove. “I went and spoke with her and found out that what she had witnessed was the shooting of Brian Reese by the police officers, rather than Officer Fishburn’s shooting. I took some photographs from where she said she saw the shooting just to be certain of what she could have seen.”

  Despite Brian Reese’s own shooting at the crime scene, he wasn’t gravely injured himself, and the hospital released him later that night. The police brought him down to the Homicide Office for questioning. Detective Sergeant Breedlove went into an interrogation room to question him and had him sign a Miranda rights waiver. But the interview didn’t get very far.

  “Reese kept closing his eyes and saying he wanted to take a nap,” said Breedlove. “I was kind of worried about how much medicine he was on and how much it affected him.” Consequently, he stopped the interview before it even started.

  Breedlove finally left the Homicide Office at around 4:00 A.M. His pregnant wife had an appointment for an ultrasound at 8:00 A.M., so he took her to it and then returned to the Homicide Office at around 10:00 A.M.

  “When I walked in the Homicide Office I saw that the mayor and the chief of police were there,” said Breedlove. “The captain asked me to go in and see if Brian wanted to talk.”

  Surprisingly, Detective Sergeant Breedlove found that Brian was still in the interview room and was now fully aware of what was going on. “I went back to talk to Brian Reese and he said that he’d talk if we got him some cigarettes and food,” said Breedlove. “I didn’t want to do that because I knew it would have caused all kinds of problems with the case, and I really didn’t need to talk to him anyway. So I just ordered a wagon and had him taken over to the jail.” />
  Months later in the investigation, Detective Sergeant Breedlove would receive a letter sent by a prison inmate named Gary Rees, who claimed that he had befriended Brian while in a holding cell waiting for court and that Brian had told him the real story about what happened with Officer Fishburn. Detectives get many of these types of offers to help, but many turn out to be simply individuals willing to say anything if they think it will help to reduce their sentence. Breedlove knew that he would have to notify the Prosecutor’s Office about this and then check out Gary Rees’s story thoroughly.

  —

  Meanwhile, the previous evening at Wishard Memorial Hospital, dozens of fellow police officers, including high-ranking ones, had rushed to the hospital to show their concern and support for Jason Fishburn. Chief of police Michael Spears told the news media, “Officer Fishburn is our hero. [He] was out there doing everything the citizens of this city want from its police department. He was out there fighting for a victim who couldn’t fight for himself, for a sixty-nine-year-old man [Clifford Haddix] who was brutally and savagely and cowardly murdered within his own home.”

  Upon Officer Fishburn’s arrival at Wishard Memorial Hospital, the staff had immediately wheeled him into one of the shock rooms. The doctors at the hospital went right to work, but after examining Fishburn’s injuries, they didn’t see much chance for his survival. The bullet wound was deep and massive. “The majority of people who have a gunshot wound to the brain do not survive,” Dr. Richard Rogers, one of the treating physicians at Wishard Memorial Hospital, told the news media. He said that he didn’t hold out much hope for Fishburn’s survival.

  After the doctors had examined Fishburn in the shock room, though, they realized that the fact he was still alive at all with such a massive head wound meant that he had an incredible will to live, and that just maybe they could save him. But they also realized that his only chance of survival lay in immediate surgery. The surgery required would be very risky, and the hospital needed an okay from his wife before they could start.