# Teen's Terrifying Ride-Along: Officer Kills Suspect



## kwflatbed (Dec 29, 2004)

By Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 7, 2006; Page C05

The evening in Annapolis began as a routine ride-along in a patrol car for an aspiring Maryland State Police cadet.

Within hours, though, the 19-year-old cadet applicant found himself thrust into a wild sequence of events that ended with him taken to a hospital and another man dead.

After coming upon what appeared to be a drug deal, the state trooper taking the teenager on patrol pursued one of the suspects, was dragged across 300 feet of pavement by the suspect's car, and then lost control of his sidearm -- only to be rescued when an Annapolis police officer arrived and fatally shot the suspect.

Last night, police identified the dead man as Roger Alan Trott, 34, of Ridgely, on Maryland's Eastern Shore. He had an extensive criminal record consisting primarily of drug-related charges.

Police were withholding the names of the trooper, the cadet applicant and the city officer who fired the fatal shot.

The Annapolis officer has been placed on routine administrative leave while the shooting is investigated. The trooper and cadet applicant were released from hospitals yesterday after being treated for their injuries. The trooper was flown by helicopter to the Maryland Shock Trauma Center.

City police gave this account of the incident, which began about 10:30 p.m. Friday:

The state trooper and the cadet applicant in an unmarked car saw what the trooper believed to be a hand-to-hand drug deal between Trott and a man on foot in the Annapolis Gardens low-income housing development on Bowman Drive, just off Admiral Drive.

The man on foot fled the scene as the trooper approached the car and ordered Trott to get out. Trott did, and the trooper noticed that he seemed to have something inside his mouth and ordered him to spit it out. Trott refused, and when the trooper tried to arrest him, Trott resisted and got back in his car.

The trooper leaned into the car and tried to wrench the keys out of the ignition, but Trott closed the door on the trooper, trapping his arm, and then started driving down the street, dragging the trooper more than 300 feet down Bowman Drive until the car crashed into a pole. The dragging left the trooper so covered in blood, staining his light-brown shirt a dark red, that when reinforcements arrived, they assumed he had been shot.

When Trott ran away, the trooper returned to his car and drove through the area with the cadet applicant until they spotted him at Admiral Drive and Moreland Parkway, opposite a building-supply store. When the trooper and the cadet applicant got out of their car, Trott tried to get inside it from the passenger side and take the wheel. The trooper tried to pull him back out, using pepper spray to overcome him, to no avail.

Then, the most fateful turn: Trott managed to get his hand on the trooper's gun. The two struggled for the weapon, in the process firing a round that police said might have grazed the cadet applicant, who was trying to assist.

It was at this point that an Annapolis officer arrived, some 10 minutes after the initial confrontation. The officer joined the struggle for the gun but was unable to wrest it away. The city officer then saw that Trott was managing to get his finger near the trigger and trying to raise the gun toward the trooper.
The officer stepped backward, raised his gun, and ordered Trott to drop the trooper's gun. He refused. The officer fired, killing Trott with a single shot.

"He made a split-second decision," said Officer Kevin Freeman, a city police spokesman. "He shoots the suspect or the suspect shoots someone else, and in this instance it would have been the trooper."

Freeman noted that police are trained to not let others get control of their weapons, but added, "Sometimes in struggles like that, things like this occur. This case proves that nothing is 100 percent."

The review of the incident is intended to determine whether anything could have been done differently, but Freeman warned against second-guessing.

"We all sit back and Monday-morning quarterback, but this was one of those situations where no one knows how we'd respond," he said. "The flip side is that if the Annapolis officer hadn't responded as he had, we'd be going to a funeral."

Blue hash marks outlined the site of the shooting in the intersection yesterday. Residents were mostly keeping mum in the housing development, a mix of vinyl-sided duplexes and rowhouses tucked behind the busy shopping strip of West Street.

"I don't want my children to get involved in that," said the woman living in the duplex closest to the scene of the shooting. "I don't like those people."

Police say the housing development, and two others nearby, are rife with crime and the site of most of the shootings in the city. On May 2, a man was shot in the thigh outside the Admiral Oaks development, just down the road from the scene of the Friday night shooting.

Albert Middleton, 47, who works at a liquor store nearby on West Street, said the police characterization of the area was unfair. "They're just putting a bad rap on the neighborhood. It's not that bad," he said.

Freeman, the police spokesman, said he had yet to hear what effect the night's events had on the cadet applicant's intention to enroll in the state police academy, which requires candidates to be 21. "After last night, he'll definitely know whether he wants to pursue law enforcement," he said.


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## PBiddy35 (Aug 27, 2004)

Well it's great to get experience beforehand, but this story calls into question the liability of having an unarmed cadet riding shotgun.


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