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fired. Mequon PD policy wisely provided
the officer be furnished with a
replacement gun as soon as his duty
weapon was taken, and this of course
was done. History shows without this
step, disarming the officer after a lineof-duty
shooting is perceived as an
unnecessarily punitive act.
Brent Smith phoned his wife Mary at
the first opportunity, to explain what had
happened. When he got home, he was
met with a big hug and comforting support.
The next day, when they brought
their 7- and 9-year-old kids to school,
they sat down with the prinicipal to
make sure the children weren’t harassed
by schoolmates who might have heard
of the shooting on the news. A trip to
church and a conversation with their
pastor proved reassuring, too.
The investigation continued. On
Brent’s end, the detectives from the
Bureau of Criminal Investigation were
very professional, but it was still an identity
crisis for a cop to be interrogated
in the death of a citizen, however much
Brent knew the protocol was necessary.
It produced a nagging sense of “Do they
think we did something wrong?”
On the other end, investigators discovered
Carey had spoken of suicide
by gun, and had once said he was likely
to die in a shootout with police. They
learned in the days before the incident,
he had been “putting his affairs
in order” and looking up old, long-lost
friends. It was classic “departure ritual”
indicative of intent to commit suicide,
but no one in Carey’s circle who noticed
it recognized the syndrome or did anything
about it. Most of the investigators
came to believe Ryan’s death was
“suicide by cop.” Apparently wanting
to have company in death, or hoping to
go out in a blaze of glory, he had fired
deliberately at Officer Rudolph, and
come terribly close to killing her.
Brent found himself slacking off on
activity at work, and becoming irritable
at home. He finally sought counseling,
and was soon back on track in
both environments.
Lessons
Studies show it is more likely than
not that any of us will experience
altered perceptions in an incident such
as this. One of the most common is
auditory exclusion: When he came
under fire from a loud high-powered
rifle, Brent saw the muzzle flashes but
did not hear the gunshot reports after
the first one. Tachypsychia, the sense
of things going into slow motion, happens
more often than not: Brent was
consciously aware of that “slowdown”
from the moment the first shot
was fired, and though he was sprinting
full-speed at points thereafter, he told
American Handgunner he felt as if he
was “moving through molasses.” As
he fired, the shot sequence seemed to
84 WWW.AMERICANHANDGUNNER.COM • MARCH/APRIL 2013