Monday, Jan. 17, 2005 | 8:20 a.m.
Metro Police Officer Raul Rodriguez told a Clark County coroner's inquest jury Friday that when a 48-year-old man armed with a Rambo-style knife backed him into a small bathroom last month, he had no other choice but to shoot him.
The inquest jury agreed and found Rodriguez justified in the Dec. 17 killing David Higgins.
Three days earlier, police were called to the 4600 block of Calderwood Street, near Rainbow Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue, by Marsha Dean Mindlin, Higgins' roommate. Higgins was drunk, roughed her up and threatened to kill her, but when an officer arrived Higgins had already fled from the house, she said.
Higgins sometimes talked about getting police to shoot him, according to Mindlin. He told her he would grab his large decorative sword that was kept in a display case and two smaller Rambo-type knife and threaten the officers with them, she said.
That was what ended up happening later that week, witnesses said.
Higgins, who went by the nickname "Wolf," was intoxicated that day, said Frances Baker, owner of the home where he and Mindlin lived. She said he began trashing the house. Fearing for her safety, she went to a neighbor's house.
He piled mattresses, furniture, books, cookware and whatever else he could find up against the doors and windows of the house, police said.
They made their way inside, looked down the narrow hallway and saw "a huge Rambo tactical knife" being shoved two to four feet through the door, Metro Sgt. Walter Pinjuv said.
"He called us Nazis and said for us to get out," Pinjuv said. Higgins taunted them, telling them to put their eye to the hole in the door so he could poke them in the eye, Pinjuv said.
Higgins had set up a video camera and taped himself talking to a woman named Jane while police tried to get him to come out of his bedroom. Part of it was shown in court. He rambled nonsensically about love and loss, then blurted, "Hey, I'm sitting here with barricaded windows!" and burst out in a high-pitched hyena-like laugh.
"I have a SWAT team in my driveway and I'm going to kill whoever comes in this house," Higgins says on the tape. "Those (expletives) are going down with me."
Rodriguez, who is a trained crisis intervention officer, tried talking to Higgins through the door for about 25 minutes, telling him he could help him work through his problems if he came out.
The officers heard glass breaking and went outside to look at the windows. Higgins had broken a window completely out, and when he wasn't looking, Pinjuv and another officer fired their Taser guns through the window at him.
One of the prongs appeared to hit Higgins' torso and he fell to the ground, Pinjuv said. He shouted for the officers inside to go in and apprehend Higgins.
Rodriguez, who was closest to the door, kicked it in.
But Higgins wasn't on the floor anymore; he was facing him with a large knife in his left hand, holding it above his head, Pinjuv said.
"I saw a silhouette of him and this big blade," he said. "I thought he was going to be on the ground. I was in disbelief."
Rodriguez said he tried to shoot Higgins with his Taser gun but the prongs missed him. Higgins came at Rodriguez with the knife, and Rodriguez backed up into a small bathroom across the hall. He threw his Taser on the floor and grabbed his pistol.
Rodriguez said he ended up on top of the toilet tank, literally pressed against the wall, as Higgins continued to come at him with the knife. Rodriguez fired three shots, hitting him twice -- once in the right arm and, as his body twisted and crumpled to the ground, a second time in the upper back.
"I feel bad about it, it was unfortunate, but it was my last resort, my last option," he told the jury.
Dr. Gary Telgenhoff, medical examiner for the coroner's office, testified that Higgins' blood alcohol level at the time of his death was 0.28, more than three times the 0.08 level for proving drunken driving.
archive
