Blown away 

Page 2 of 7

If they knew he had a gun and that he'd already pointed one at firefighters, why ram down his door again and confront Ehrenburg with a gun just to offer him medical help he said he didn't want? Why not wait longer than three hours before doing it? Was this consistent with SWAT policy on forced entry into a home? And what was SWAT policy regarding forced entry?

After multiple e-mail exchanges with police, there are still no clear answers to these questions.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department Major Dale Greene says that the department has no specific policy governing when SWAT makes entry. Instead, officers try to follow state and federal law and their training, which teaches them different tactics for dealing with someone who is barricaded. The department wouldn't elaborate on what these tactics were.

Officers also follow the department's rules on the use of force, which say that when confronted with deadly force, they are justified in using deadly force in return.

Greene initially sent Creative Loafing a memo stating that while there was no specific SWAT policies on entering a home, officers try to follow four "goals." The memo said entry into a building occupied by an armed person should only be done "as a last resort."

"The factors that determine a forced entry depend on the circumstances confronting us," Greene wrote. "For example, a barricaded subject who is threatening to injure or kill a hostage may force us to make entry unlike someone who is alone and intoxicated and has made a vague reference to suicide."

But in a second memo Greene wrote to CL, he said that SWAT broke down Ehrenburg's door to "attempt communication with Mr. Ehrenburg through delivery of a throw phone" after Ehrenburg took his phone off the hook.

Risking the lives of everyone involved in order to toss Ehrenburg a throw phone seems to violate the goals Greene stated for making entry as a last resort.

"I would have to say that the aggressive entry by a SWAT team under those circumstances looks highly dubious," says Davidson College Professor Lance Stell, who teaches bioethics, law and philosophy. "On what possible basis would they be storming the place unless he had a hostage or some innocent person was being threatened by him? They didn't have a reason to think there was innocent life in jeopardy, so it is hard for me to say that that was an exercise of good judgment on their part."

Other questions remain. Why not disable Ehrenburg with tear gas or some other less lethal option, as SWAT has done recently in other situations involving a gunman who was suspected of taking hostages?

Here's what Greene had to say about that: "We did not 'use a gun first,'" Greene wrote. "Officers were constantly asking Mr. Ehrenburg to come out and talk to them. It was only after Mr. Ehrenburg decided to point a firearm at officers that the need to use any force become [sic] reasonably apparent. Up until the moment Mr. Ehrenburg raised and pointed his firearm at officers, there was no objective reason to use tear gas or any other less lethal force."

Greene's answer didn't address the fact that SWAT officers knew Ehrenburg had a gun because he had already pointed it at firefighters a few hours earlier.

Kraska, who studies SWAT tactics across the country, says SWAT teams usually don't burst through doors and confront armed suspects directly unless they pose a danger to others.

"That not only violates most SWAT policies that I'm aware of, it would be highly dangerous knowing there is an armed person in the room and you are going to batter the door down," says Kraska. "That's not smart for the officer himself. That's not a smart use of a SWAT team."

It also wasn't a smart use of a throw phone. It would have been impossible for Ehrenburg, whose legs were amputated at the hip, to bend over and pick up the phone because he would have fallen out of his wheelchair, his wife and friends say.

It's at this point that the two versions of the story -- the one in the official police department statement of relevant facts and another unofficial one on the radio communication tapes obtained by CL -- begin to diverge.

According to the official police statement, once the door was knocked down and the phone was thrown into the darkened living room, police with flashlights talked with Ehrenburg and told him they were trying to assist with his medical condition and weren't there to harm him. Police say Ehrenburg then asked who they were and told them he didn't want to talk to them.

The conversation continued as Ehrenburg moved around the bedroom, police claim, in and out of sight of officers at the front door about 25 feet away. Officers kept asking Ehrenburg to show his hands as Ehrenburg came out of the bedroom into the living room using his wheelchair, the statement reads, narrowing the space between himself and officers at the door to about 18 feet.