linky
The kid deserved it, first of all... this link is to an incomplete part of this story and details are still coming out. Apparently this kid got pulled over a day or two ago for having no front license plate and decided to shoot a state trooper with a shotgun. The guy had a vest on so he lived. This kid must have been [censored] up on PCP or something, he had no history of violent crimes, just some low-level stuff. A bigtime manhunt ensued, the cops find this kid holed up in a house in Margaretville in western NY... so they storm the house, a firefight ensues and he gets shot in the face. Oh well. But the house ends up burning down, they recover his "badly charred body" ... a trooped was killed in the firefight due to a headshot and it now appears that it was friendly fire... this is just an awful mess for the NYS police.
I am no right-wing honcho, I'm not pro-death-penalty and I've had my run-ins with the police, but shooting a cop is one of the most profoundly stupid things you can do and IMO after you blast a cop you shouldn't expect to be taken alive really. But WTF were the state police doing here? They end up burning this house to the ground somehow, 7 armed and armored cops storm a house with one drug addict with a rifle and 2 of them end up being hit, 1 fatally? They burn the house down?
Has anyone else been following this? My girlfriend interns at the local news station so she's been filling me in on this... very weird, looks like the NYS police may need to revise procedure on this, and now a poor guy leaves behind his 7 month old daughter, the cop who died was just 29. Awful stuff.