The protests and animosity last year in Ferguson, Mo., made Officer Charles Vill do some serious soul searching.
Is it worth going back out there?
The Cobb County cop had a very specific reason for asking himself that question. At the time, he was still rehabbing his body and mind to return to the force. In February, 2014, he was shot suddenly and repeatedly during a traffic stop.
“It was very difficult for me to come back from a shooting in the wake of Ferguson,” the baby-face cop said this week. “I took five rounds to protect citizens – and they hate me.”
In fact, getting shot caused him to start racial profiling. For a while, each time he saw a couple of scruffy, tatted-up white dirt-bags, his adrenaline would pump. The man who shot him, James A. Phillips, was a meth-dealing ex-con. His passenger, Matthew Merck, was a high-strung, tatted-up dude of nefarious means.
Both belonged to the Ghost Face Gangsters, an Aryan gang Merck joined in prison.
But this story isn’t a sociological study of race or law enforcement tactics or attitudes for or against police. This is simply about good and bad and the split second between life and death.
Shootings involving cops have remained a social inkblot test since Ferguson. In recent weeks, a DeKalb County cop shot a naked and mentally ill man, stirring protests about a shoot-first mentality. In Fulton County, an officer was gunned down by a crazed gunman, bringing about a large ceremonial funeral and highlighting a dangerous, thankless job.
Chuck Vill’s shooting fortunately brought about a short hospital stay, not a long, sad parade.
Vill is 27 but he looks like he should be studying for an engineering final at Southern Polytechnic State, where he did, in fact, graduate. Out of college, he worked as a project engineer for a steel company, estimating construction jobs. It was a good gig. Making $55,000 as a 23-year-old is a damn good career start.
But he was missing something, so on weekends, Vill worked as an emergency medical technician. Back at at his day job, he fantasized about being a cop. So with a baby son and young wife, Vill took the plunge in December 2011 – and took a $15,000 salary hit.
The Cobb native loved the variety, the sense of excitement and the feeling that it all meant something. Answering domestic violence calls, for instance, “makes it feel like you’re helping a specific person.” He ticks down the list of the situations he’s confronted: foot chases, armed robberies, shootings, “even a 14-year-old who wouldn’t listen to his mother.”
He likes making narcotics cases because lots of bad things emanate from coke, meth and heroin.
It was with that in mind that Vill on his overnight shift of Feb. 4, 2014, took note of a squirrely guy shuttling around from car to car out at a gas station on Windy Hill Road near I-75. It was freezing but the man wore a T-shirt. Finally, the man, Matthew Merck, entered a red Ford.
Vill radioed another officer, a buddy, to run the car’s tag. It came back with a prior “narcotics incident.”
The occupants were wary of the cops and pulled away. Vill followed them to a nearby McDonald’s, where he watched the nervous passenger enter another vehicle, a Volvo, and then drive off. Vill followed the Volvo east on Windy Hill, waiting for a traffic infraction to stop the car. A few blocks later, at Powers Ferry Road, the Volvo’s driver made an illegal right turn and Vill flicked on the blue lights.
The driver took about 30 seconds to pull over in the empty road. “I figure he’s hiding his dope or grabbing his gun, but 99 percent of the time it’s dope, so I pushed the gun out of my mind,” Vill said.
Inside the car, the driver, James Phillips, turned to the nervous man in the T-shirt. “This isn’t going to be good,” he said. Phillips already had two felony meth convictions.
He grabbed a .45-caliber Glock, held it to his chest and waited for the cop to approach. In the vehicle, there were at least three other guns, a pound-and-a-half of meth and brass knuckles, which is an exclamation point that this guy is real trouble.
Vill shined his spotlight on the driver’s door mirror and walked toward the vehicle. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a pair of jeans in the back seat. Is it a third person hiding?
Vill stopped, even more suspicious. “You mind rolling … ”
He never finished his sentence. Phillips fired five shots in about a second.
Vill doubled over, scurried behind his squad car and got ready for a gunfight with two or three men. He tried to reach for his shoulder radio with his left hand, but that arm didn’t work; a bullet had passed through his triceps. He then reached with his right hand but the tip of his index finger was gone, the skin flayed, bone sticking out.
The Volvo screeched off, with Vill running after to see which way it was headed. He then called out the direction on his radio.
“I never had time to be scared. It was fight, fight, fight, and then, ‘Lets find these guys.’’
The two men were found relatively quickly. Merck quickly flipped on Phillips, who is now serving a prison sentence that ends in 2119.
Vill was shot through-and-through the lower abdomen, through the left arm and in his right hand – his trigger finger. His vest stopped two shots, although one broke some ribs, which still hurt. It wasn’t until the middle-of-the-night quiet of his hospital room a day later when it all sank in: I could have died.
‘The weird thing is, it never bothered me that someone tried to kill me. But it did bother me that someone tried to take my son’s father away from him.”
Mentally, he moved forward. Deciding to return is a very personal decision. Another Cobb officer shot not long ago has since left the force.
It took months to get physically ready to return and months more to learn how to shoot with his left hand. It’s not unlike a pitcher learning how to throw with the wrong hand. Just figuring where to put his second hand when shooting was a problem. “I kept wanting to put my right hand on top of the gun,” he said. His target skills are almost where they were before the shooting.
“Nowadays it’s unrealistic to go through your career without being in a shooting,” he said. He smiled, adding, “but I didn’t think it’d be a year and a half into my career.”
Phillips’ trial was in October, and Vill returned to duty a month later. He wanted the same overnight shift and same precinct, the county’s south end, the busy side where the new Braves stadium is going up
Vill rode with another cop the first week and drove around aimlessly for hours, still shy when it came to flicking on the blue lights. “Finally, I said, ‘I have to stop somebody.’”
He drove to the intersection of Windy Hill and Powers Ferry, the spot of his fateful last stop. It just seemed like the right place. He can’t recall the infraction, but he pulled over a car, took a breath and walked up to address the driver. He shined the light in the motorist’s face, “And the dude looks like James Phillips.”
Soon, he dropped the training wheels and patrolled alone, although for a while he fretted that each stop would be “my next shooting.’ ”
It’s something that will hang over him for years, if not forever. Traffic stops are the most routine of police duties – and among the most dangerous. Now, he sometimes asks drivers to put both hands out the window. He never did that before.
Asked about Phillips, Vill shrugged. “I’m not mad at him, I pity him. His life is over. He’s in prison waiting to die one day. I have a like a second life, starting over. I guess I won, he lost.”
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