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Why did a Charlotte SWAT team kill a wheelchair-bound man?
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Ehrenburg's acknowledgment that he needed help would have given medics and firefighters permission to treat him. In fact, it would have obligated them to.
Firefighters then forcibly popped the front door open with a hooligan tool and saw Ehrenburg sitting in his wheelchair, pointing a shotgun at them, according to the official police statement and medic tapes of the incident. Firefighers and medics then ran from the residence, and Ehrenburg closed and relocked the door.
The statement says that when contact was later made with Ehrenburg by phone, Ehrenburg told police and medic that he "did not want to be disturbed and desired only to go to sleep." It was explained to Ehrenburg that police and medical personnel were there to check his medical condition, the statement says, but Ehrenburg again said that he wanted to be left alone and hung up the phone.
At that point, SWAT was called in and police contacted a magistrate to have Ehrenburg charged with misdemeanor assault by pointing a gun. Since North Carolina law allows police to forcibly enter the residence of someone resisting a warrant for their arrest, the warrant gave police the ability to break down Ehrenburg's door again if they wanted to. But they didn't at first.
Friends and neighbors gathered outside that night say Ehrenburg kept repeating his desire to be left alone, and never claimed he needed help.
Neighbor Carmen Descalzi says that before law enforcement officials shut the neighborhood down and forced her son to come inside, he heard officers and medic communicating with Ehrenburg through the front door of his condo.
"He heard them yelling and him [Ehrenburg] say 'let me go to sleep, leave me alone, I'm tired I want to go to sleep,'" says Descalzi.
Kathy Wert, a friend of the Ehrenburg's, drove to Ehrenburg's home the night of the shooting after receiving a call from Dr. David DiLoreto's wife, Faythe DiLoreto, asking that she check on Ehrenburg. Around 10:30 p.m., Wert convinced police to let her attempt to call Ehrenburg on her cell phone.
When he answered, she tried to talk to him, she says, but she wasn't sure if he knew it was her and after a few minutes the line went dead. Minutes later, when Wert got through to Ehrenburg again, she told him she knew he wasn't feeling well, and he seemed surprised by that.
"He asked me how I knew that and I told him that Faythe had called me," she says. "I asked him if he could just allow the medical people to come in and make sure that he was alright. He said several times that he was tired and wanted to go to sleep."
An hour passed with no attempt at phone communication between police and Ehrenburg. Then, starting at around 11:30 p.m., police called Ehrenburg six more times. Ehrenburg answered the phone the first five times, remaining on the line with police for 20 to 45 seconds each time.
According to the official police statement, Ehrenburg again informed them that he wanted to be left alone so he could go to sleep, then hung up the phone. It's unclear if Ehrenburg did that once or repeatedly during each of the five calls. He didn't answer the sixth call.
That doesn't surprise friends and family either. It was storming that night, and they say Ehrenburg, an electrical engineer, never talked on the phone during a storm because he feared being electrocuted.
They question whether Ehrenburg fully understood the extent of what was going on that night and whether he realized that police were still there after his final phone conversation with them.
Recordings of radio communications from that night refer to about 30 police, fire and medic vehicles being present at one time in front of Ehrenburg's condo. But Ehrenburg couldn't have seen them, because the condo, a back unit, doesn't have a window that looks out onto the street in front of it.
The condo's front door opens out onto a small side lawn. The way the small front porch is positioned, Ehrenburg's view of either side of the alley would have been blocked. He could only have seen a small portion of the side lawn straight ahead and the side of his neighbor's condo.
According to police communications tapes, which are incomplete, police last saw Ehrenburg peek out between the blinds three times between 11:15 p.m. and 11:20 p.m.
The multiple sightings of Ehrenburg and conversations with him through the window bother Skorska the most.
"How dangerous could he be?" she asks.
Skorska says she doesn't believe that anything was physically wrong with her husband that evening beyond his usual struggle with intermittent pain. Had there been, he would have called an ambulance. That's what he did in 1998 when he had a heart attack, she says.
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