What a Weird Case

What a Weird Case

The March 28, 2009 Austin (Tex.) American-Statesman has one of those news stories that makes you scratch your head. It would appear that a police officer failed to identify himself under circumstances where there was a plausible basis for the homeowner to believe that he was under criminal attack:

Travis County prosecutors on Friday dismissed the case against David Lozano, who lost his leg in a late-night shootout with an Austin police officer at Lozano's Northeast Austin house in 2007.
"We believe that Mr. Lozano maintained a reasonable belief that on that day and time he was defending himself, his wife and his property," Travis County Assistant District Attorney Steven Brand said.
The dismissal came after a series of expert witnesses for the state and defense cast doubt on whether officer Roger Boudreau told the truth about the confrontation, according to lawyers in the case.
"Had it not been a police officer, this case would have been dismissed a long time ago," said Lozano's lawyer, Ryan Deck. "A police officer changed everything."
Lozano, 48, spent 13 months in jail before he was released on bail last year.

If you are writing a novel, here's a way to set up a tragedy:

Lozano and his wife, Rosemary, were having marital problems leading up to the incident on March 11, 2007, according to Deck and a police affidavit.
That night, a man with whom Rosemary Lozano had had an affair threatened David Lozano in a phone conversation, Deck said. Then that man, Miguel Salazar, called police and reported a domestic disturbance at the Lozano home, Deck said.
Next, according to both Boudreau's account as detailed in the police affidavit and Lozano's account as told by Deck, Boudreau knocked on the door, heard someone chamber a round into a gun through the door and moved off the porch.
Lozano thought it was Salazar knocking and intentionally made the sound with the gun to scare him, Deck said. After Lozano looked through the peephole and saw nobody, he opened the door, Deck said.
Boudreau never identified himself as a police officer during the incident, according to Deck and the affidavit.
What happened after the door opened was in dispute.

In dispute, but the rest of the article explains why all charges were dropped--an audio recording demonstrated that Boudreau was, at best, grossly mistaken about who fired first. Even if Lozano was in the wrong--and it isn't clear that he was--Boudreau's statements about his actions were so at variance with the facts that the prosecutor would never have won the case.

A police officer should always identify himself as a police officer when responding to a domestic dispute.