Monday, Feb. 21, 2005 | 10:54 a.m.
Tiffany Dailey needed only to look at a calendar to know what prompted her ex-husband to take his mother and brother hostage last Monday in a prolonged standoff that ended with 33-year-old Daniel Kloskowski dead at the hands of Metro Police.
The Valentine's Day shooting came two days before the five-year anniversary of her ex-husband's arrest in a standoff at her Henderson home, Dailey said.
When he died, Kloskowski was on parole for a conviction on home invasion charges stemming from the February 2000 incident, Dailey said. He was released from prison in August, Capt. James Dillon of Metro's robbery-homicide section said.
Unlike the more than seven-hour standoff that led to his death last week, Kloskowski's previous altercation with Henderson Police ended in less than an hour. He was arrested on domestic abuse and child endangerment charges for that incident, Dailey said.
Metro officers tracked Dailey to her Orange County, Calif., home on Feb. 14. They questioned her minutes before a SWAT team stormed the apartment in the 900 block of East Twain Avenue, she said. Kloskowski was shot once in the head by 39-year-old Officer Mark Fowler, a member of the police force since 1989, Metro Police said.
The call Dailey received about the standoff was one she had dreaded since Kloskowski was released from prison.
"I knew he would do it, just not when," Dailey, a waitress and nursing student, said. "There was something that was building."
Kloskowski's ex-wife said she believed his death was a "suicide by cop," where a person wants to be killed and does things like threatening other people to provoke police to do the act.
There's little doubt in her mind that's why he died.
"There was no way he was coming out alive," she said. "I feel bad for the police officer (who shot him). He was doing what he had to do, but he's going to live with this all his life."
Dillon said detectives on Friday were working to determine whether Kloskowski's death fit the profile for such a death. "There were indications it was," Dillon said.
Inside the apartment where Kloskowski held his mother and brother hostage, detectives found evidence he had been treated for mental illness, Dillon told the Sun on Tuesday. They also found at least one knife and a hammer, which officers believe Kloskowski planned to use to beat his 70-year-old mother, Frances Kloskowski.
She was taken to Sunrise Hospital last Monday in serious condition before being released late that night, a hospital spokeswoman said. Calls to Daniel Kloskowski's brother, Michael Kloskowski, the only person by that last name in multiple Clark County directories, were not answered last week and this morning.
Dailey said she met Daniel Kloskowski when she was 14 and he was 19. The brother of her father's then-girlfriend, Kloskowski was a talented athlete who worked from a young age and was "good at everything he did," Dailey said.
The couple married in 1992, when Dailey was 16.
Dailey, now 28, said Kloskowski was a mentally ill man whose possessiveness over his wife rapidly descended into a pattern of physical and emotional abuse as he rarely took medications prescribed to keep a bipolar condition in check.
Yet, despite the abuse that she says has caused her to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, an affliction commonly associated with war-time military veterans, Dailey said she does not remember her husband abusing alcohol or illegal drugs.
"It's not someone who just cracked or was on drugs," she said. "I want people to understand and to know that there was a whole time leading up to this that gets ignored. It's not like he just had a bad day."
Her most recent brush with her ex-husband came in late January after Kloskowski had reportedly traveled to Escondido, Calif., to visit his sister, breaking his parole, she said.
"He knew we were down there," she said. "There's no doubt in my mind that he was probably checking out to see if he could see us."
The couple had a son, who lives in California with his mother. Dailey and their son attended a memorial service for Kloskowski on Friday, she said.
Dailey and her brother, Shane Dailey, told the boy, now 10, on Wednesday about his father's death.
"He's been through a lot," Dailey said of her son. "But he took it very, very well. He said, 'Mom, you don't have to worry anymore.' "
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