# Tape: Deputies Save Gunman's Life



## kwflatbed (Dec 29, 2004)

View Video:
http://www.11alive.com/video/player.aspx?aid=58490&bw=

Web Editor: Jon Shirek

Video released Thursday, from a Cherokee County Deputy Sheriff's dashboard camera, vividly and dramatically shows deputies disarming a distraught man -- who had been waving a gun and threatening to kill himself and them -- by shooting him with non-lethal bean bag rounds.

Cherokee County deputies have been using non-lethal bean-bag rounds from time to time for more than five years, but never in any confrontations that were so clearly videotaped by any of their dashboard cameras.

Sheriff Roger Garrison wanted the public to see the non-lethal "takedown" of the gunman -- straight out of a law-enforcement, crisis intervention textbook.

"The general public doesn't realize, sometimes, what great lengths we go to, to end these situations peacefully," Garrison said Thursday.

And yet, Garrison said, the tape shows that "there were several opportunities there [where] the officers would have been technically justified in the use of deadly force."

Here's what Sheriff Garrison said unfolded early Thursday morning:

At around 1:30 or 2:00 Thursday morning, Garrison said, 27 year old Walter Poor drove to the Cherokee Summit Apartments on Bells Ferry Road near Woodstock, and forced his way into the apartment he shared until a few days ago with his longtime, but now former, fiancee and their three year old son.

Garrison said Poor physically attacked his ex-fiancee, "slapped her around," in Garrison's words, and threatened to kill her and any law officers who showed up to intervene.

Garrison said Poor then drove away from the apartment, his ex-fiancee called 911, and deputies quickly located Poor in his car, along Highway 92 not far from the apartment complex.

They were able to place "stop sticks" in his car's path, puncturing his tires. Poor got out of his disabled car, and the video tape shows him walking down a road through some woods, off of Highway 92, holding a handgun to his right temple.

There is no sound on the tape, but Garrison said Poor was shouting repeatedly, "Kill me," while threatening to kill the deputies who were arriving on the scene.

Garrison said five deputies, trained in crisis intervention, arrived, along with a hostage negotiator. Garrison identified the five as Lt. Sam Rentz, the commander of the Oak Grove Precinct, Cpl. Jeanette Vetter, Deputy Sheriff Joseph Pelletier, Deputy Sheriff Roger Smith and Deputy Sheriff Tommy Thompkins.

They tried to talk Poor into dropping his gun and surrendering, even as he continued to walk and, at one point, stopped and fired a round into the air.

"He fires off a round," Garrison said as he showed the entire videotape to reporters. "Those officers are in jeopardy there, they could have clearly used, justifiably used, deadly force."

But the deputies held their fire, until Poor began approaching a residential subdivision and appeared to be walking toward a house with his loaded gun.

That's when Deputy Joseph Pelletier, just off camera, shot Poor with the first of the non-lethal bean bag rounds. The tape shows Poor collapsing to the asphalt in apparent pain. "I'm assuming he thinks that he has been shot" with penetrating rounds, Garrison said as he viewed the tape. "It's just like getting hit in the kidneys with a baseball bat." The tape shows deputies quickly converging on Poor, disarming him and handcuffing him.

"Through our crisis intervention training," Garrison said, "and just an extreme level of professionalism displayed by all five individuals on the scene, this ended without this man losing his life, and/or anybody else losing their lives."

Walter Poor had moved in with his stepmother, Kris Poor -- at her home near the area where police arrested him Thursday morning -- when he broke up with his fiancée a few days ago.

"He's been quite distraught since his father passed away in January," Kris Poor told 11Alive News on Thursday. "And then he and his fiancée had broken up, and I think that just, it must have just pushed him over the edge. Couldn't deal with it."

When Ms. Poor heard how deputies disarmed Walter with the non-lethal bean bag rounds, she said she wanted to tell them, "Thank you for saving my stepson. It could have so easily gone the other way."

She said he or any of the deputies might have been killed. "A police officer, him, somebody in the area, a lot of people could have been hurt. Everything he did could have gotten him killed if they didn't have this [crisis intervention] program in place&#8230;. And I am very, very grateful that they did what they did."

Walter Poor was being examined at a hospital, and was then going to be transferred to the Cherokee County Adult Detention Center. The initial charges against him are:

Aggravated Assault

Aggravated Assault Against a Police Officer

Obstruction of an Officer

Burglary

False Imprisonment

Battery

Cruelty to Children

Possession of a Firearm During the Commission of a Crime

Discharging a Firearm


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