Shooting

My current client is located at 19th Blake in LoDo, Denver Colorado. This morning as I was coming in, the whole block in front of the building was taped off because of an overnight shooting. A guy pulled a gun on a cop and another cop shot the guy. Apparently, the injuries are non-life threatening.

I did not realize any of this went down last night until I got to work.

Since the front of the building was blocked off, I was not sure I would be able to get into the building this morning (why does everything always happen to me?), but one of the employees must have recognized me and let me in the garage door, which as a contractor I don't have access to. It is certainly an eerie feeling up here on the 5th floor at CHFA. It is early, but I have only seen 3 other guys up here so far, and they are all contractors. I wonder if employees got voice mail messages to warn them about the situation.

The internet news stories do not say much, but from what I can gather, two guys drove up to a parked police car outside one of the bars down here. One of the guys pulled a gun and another cop who was watching shot him.

So, this guy in the hospital is an idiot. His friend is an idiot. I do not know if these two thought it would be funny to pull a gun on the police or if they thought they wanted to kill one or both, but I have no sympathy for either of the idiots who tried to attack the police officers. I hope "they" lock them away and throw away the key.

Can you imagine being the cops in the car? I cannot imagine being a cop at all. Obviously we don't know what would have happened, but guns kill and if their friend had not been alert, one or both of the cops easily could have been shot and killed. Thank God that did not happen. The suddenness of the situation is downright scary. One minute you are sitting in the car monitoring a club at the end of the night, and the next second there is a gun in your face. And, now, every time a car drives up to either of these guys, I am sure they are thinking that a life-threatening situation could occur. It probably only makes matters worse that most of the time when a car drives up by your car, nothing is going to happen. How do you go back to work after such a close call? Forget how emotionally jumpy and scared you would have to be all the time, I can only imagine how my wife would react. I would probably not be a very good cop. My wife would be a worse cop's wife, especially if something like this happened to me.

This is part of the reason that whenever I get a call from the Fraternal Order of Denver police asking me for money, I always give it to them.

And, I just sling-boxed onto my t.v. The story barely took up 30 seconds on the news (if that). The online stories are very sparse as well. I imagine (thank God I only have to imagine) that had I been in the situation where I could have been killed I would be annoyed that it was not a bigger news story. Unfortunately, I guess, this is a common enough occurrence in this country that it just is not big news for a police officer to be almost shot. I am sure there probably is not much more information to share, but still... shouldn't it be a bigger deal?


Here are some of the news stories:
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/17738127/detail.html

DENVER -- A Denver police officer shot and wounded a man outside a LoDo nightclub early Friday morning.

The police officer said he saw the man point a gun at another police officer, prompting him to fire at the man, who was in a car.

The incident happened just after 2 a.m., near 19th and Blake streets.

The man was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. He and another man in the same car were arrested.

http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=102004&catid=339

http://www.myfoxcolorado.com/myfox/pages/News/Detail?contentId=7665985&version=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=3.2.1


.....................................
Later....

I looked out the window at about 9 AM and saw cars driving past the front of the building, so apparently they lifted the blockade soon after the initial posting.