State Trooper Is Killed

[liberty]

Some here might think that it is odd for me to focus on this aspect of the story instead of the killing of the trooper. I am sorry about the death of the officer, but the part I find interesting is that a passing motorist was able to disarm and handcuff the shooter just after he had killed a cop. There has to be more to the story than that. Is there information that is being suppressed?


Louisiana State Trooper Is Killed in Shooting at a Traffic Stop
By ALAN BLINDERAUG. 24, 2015

Louisiana State Police Discuss Shooting
The state police said Monday that a Louisiana trooper, Steven J. Vincent, had died after being shot in the head Sunday night during a traffic stop.
By REUTERS on Publish Date August 24, 2015. Photo by Rick Hickman/Lake Charles American Press, via Associated Press.


A Louisiana state trooper died on Monday after being shot in the head a day earlier during a traffic stop, and the authorities said the man charged in the shooting was being investigated in connection with another fatality.
The state police superintendent, Col. Michael D. Edmonson, described Senior Trooper Steven J. Vincent’s death as “senseless and tragic” and said that the suspected gunman, Kevin D. Daigle, 54, had been charged with first-degree murder.
“Steven was proud to serve as a Louisiana state trooper, and we were proud to count him among our ranks,” Colonel Edmonson said in a statement on the state police Facebook page. “This loss exacts an enormous emotional toll on the State Police family, but we will do what is necessary and proper to honor Steven and support those who knew and loved him.”
The state police said Trooper Vincent, 43, was wounded on Sunday afternoon after he stopped to investigate a pickup truck in a ditch in Calcasieu Parish, which borders Texas; the truck had been reported for possible drunken driving. Colonel Edmonson said that the shooting was recorded on video and that Trooper Vincent had offered to help Mr. Daigle, who eventually opened fire with a sawed-off shotgun. The trooper died Monday at a hospital in Lake Charles.

Senior Trooper Steven J. Vincent Credit Louisiana State Police, via Associated Press
“That shotgun wasn’t to do anything else but hurt somebody, kill somebody,” Colonel Edmonson said at an emotional news conference on Sunday. “That’s what that was, and I watched that shotgun blast in that tape. I saw my trooper go backward and then go back toward his unit, where he was going to try to get some help out there.”
After the shooting, Colonel Edmonson said, Mr. Daigle approached the injured trooper and said: “You’re lucky. You’re going to die soon.”
A passing driver stopped and confronted Mr. Daigle and, with the help of others who also stopped, restrained him with Trooper Vincent’s handcuffs. Colonel Edmonson said Monday that officials believed that Mr. Daigle was intoxicated at the time and that he may have been under the influence of “at least one other type of drug.”
Law enforcement officials also said deputies on Monday went to a house where they believed Mr. Daigle had lived and found a man dead. The Calcasieu Parish sheriff, Tony Mancuso, said that the authorities were investigating the man’s death as a homicide and that officials who had interviewed Mr. Daigle believed there had been “an altercation” at the home.

Kevin D. Daigle Credit Erik Stratton/Louisiana State Police, via Associated Press
Sheriff Mancuso said the authorities went to the house after the man, who was not identified, failed to show up for work.
The sheriff said that the local authorities were familiar with Mr. Daigle and that he had previously been investigated for offenses that included driving while intoxicated and battery on a police officer.
“It’s somebody that we’ve dealt with before,” Sheriff Mancuso said.
Trooper Vincent, who came from a law enforcement family, was the 28th member of the Louisiana State Police to die in the line of duty, and the first since 2011. He had worked for the Lake Charles police for about a decade and was a member of the state police for 13 years. One of his brothers is also a Louisiana trooper, and another is the police chief in Iowa, La., a Calcasieu Parish town of about 3,000. Trooper Vincent, an Army veteran, was married and had a 9-year-old son.
Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered flags at state buildings to be lowered to half-staff until Friday.

[Long Run]

Most of the crime was caught on the police video, and there are several layperson witnesses. The criminal was drunk, obviously not very smart, and was preoccupied with going through the officer's pockets and could not quickly get the officer's gun unholstered. Credit LeDoux with bravery and quick action in taking down this scumball, and trying to help the officer. The cautions by the other men were sensible, so it was remarkable that LeDoux proceeded into danger as he did.

LAKE CHARLES, La. (AP) — It was a scene that probably would have made most people run the other way: a bloodied state police trooper lying on the asphalt by the side of a Louisiana country road, the lights from his police cruiser still flashing as a man with a shotgun stood nearby.

Robert LeDoux was just down the road a bit when three men pulled him over and told him not to go any closer.

"'Don't go down there. That guy's got a gun,'" LeDoux told The Associated Press as he recounted how it was that he ended up tackling and capturing the gunman on Sunday.

Instead LeDoux, who had been out for a weekend drive in his Jeep, charged toward the danger. When he pulled up, he found a man with "pure evil in his eyes" rifling through the trooper's pockets. The man was trying to unclasp the trooper's handgun.

"He told me, 'Everything's all right. Mind your own business. You need to go,'" LeDoux recalled.

Instead, LeDoux attacked: "I took off running. I tackled him. We hit the ground. I was on top of him and I called 911."

The man whom LeDoux is credited with apprehending is now charged in the death of Senior Trooper Steven Vincent.

* * *
LeDoux said he was out for a drive Sunday when he saw flashing police lights about a quarter-mile in front of him. Three men stopped him and urged him to turn around. They said they were calling 911, but that he shouldn't approach the patrol car because they had seen a man brandishing a gun by the trooper.

After LeDoux tackled the gunman, the other men ran over to help. They handcuffed the shooter and two of them held him down while LeDoux went to help Vincent, using the trooper's radio to call for assistance.

LeDoux said it wasn't until he saw the trooper's name tag that he realized he knew the officer because he was good friends with the officer's brother, also in law enforcement.

http://news.yahoo.com/police-man-shot-t ... 4307.html#

[liberty]

Most of the crime was caught on the police video, and there are several layperson witnesses. The criminal was drunk, obviously not very smart, and was preoccupied with going through the officer's pockets and could not quickly get the officer's gun unholstered. Credit LeDoux with bravery and quick action in taking down this scumball, and trying to help the officer. The cautions by the other men were sensible, so it was remarkable that LeDoux proceeded into danger as he did.

]

Well, Long Run you are a better man than me or at least better on the web; I couldn’t find it, but then I don’t all always have a lot of time to search.

I can’t decide if the citizen is brave or just crazy. It take a lot of courage to charge a shotgun unarmed unless one does not care about what might happen. I am assuming he was unarmed.

[rubato]

First posted elsewhere but relevant here as well.

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-ne ... ds-n409356

More Police Are Killed in States With More Guns, Study Finds

by Maggie Fox
Image: Elmer Buddy Christian


Police officers are most likely to be killed in states where the most people own guns, a new study finds.

The report is sure to be controversial, but it adds a new dimension to a conversation that's recently been focused more on police shootings of unarmed Americans.

This study looks at who's killing the cops, and it's overwhelmingly people with private guns, David Swedler of the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health found.
""Officers are three times more likely to be murdered on the job in high gun ownership states in comparison with low gun ownership states. That was the big wow for me.""

"If we're interested in protecting police officers, we need to look at what's killing them, and what's killing them is guns," says Swedler.

Swedler's team used the FBI's Uniformed Crime Reporting database to check on all homicides of law enforcement officers between 1996 and 2010. They used a giant survey called the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to get data on gun ownership.

Their findings: The No. 1 cause of on-the-job death for police is motor vehicle accidents. But gun deaths came second, they reported in the American Journal of Public Health.

"We were not surprised to find that firearm ownership is associated with homicide rates," Swedler told NBC news.

"The big surprise finding to me was the differences in homicide rates among officers in states with the lowest gun ownership compared to states with highest gun ownership," he added.

Obama still pushing for gun reform at fundraiser 0:34

"Officers are three times more likely to be murdered on the job in high gun ownership states in comparison with low gun ownership states. That was the big wow for me."

Police and sheriffs' organizations disagree on gun laws, gun control and gun ownership and whether limits would help reduce crime.

Swerdler's one of a group of researchers who want to see what the data shows, and who consider gun ownership and gun laws matters that can legitimately be studied and debated as public and occupational health issues.

"To me, an officer is a worker just like any worker in America. Workers have the right to come home from work at the end of the day," Swedler said.

"We in occupational health and safety look to protect the lives of workers."

His team found 782 homicides of police officers over the 15 years they looked. Of those, 716 were committed using guns and 515 of those with handguns.

On average, 38 percent of U.S. households have at least one gun, ranging from 4.8 percent of homes Washington, D.C. to 62 percent in Wyoming, the researchers found. This fits in with other studies.

Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Mississippi and Montana were the states with the highest rates of both gun ownership and for law enforcement killings. Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island had the lowest per-capita rate for both.

It's important to calculate the rates by per capita, said Swedler, because large states have more killings and more guns simply because they have more people.

Swedler said his team also made sure that police killings were not related to violent crime in general. ... "




yrs,
rubato

[dales]

guns to the right of me guns to the left of me...stuck in the middle with you

With Apologies to "Steelers Wheel"