ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Options to Deadly Force

Two sheriff’s deputies break into a motel room occupied by a distraught woman who they believe has a gun. When one of them finds himself staring at a gun barrel, he fires in self-defense. Is this, as the Orange County district attorney’s office said last week after investigating last June’s killing of DeLaura Harrison, “a very cut-and-dry case”?

Maybe. But now that the district attorney has released his findings in the Mission Viejo shooting of the 43-year-old Floridian, one wonders whether the Sheriff Department’s expression of concern for the family was all that’s left to be said. The district attorney has declined to file charges against John Meyers, the deputy who fired after he and a fellow officer obtained a passkey and entered the room. What could have been done to avoid taking a life--to save it?

The department plans what it calls a routine internal review, which is appropriate. The district attorney’s report was said to remove any doubt that the officer fired in self-defense. But it also made clear that there were critical moments when, if things had been handled differently, there might have been a different outcome.

For example, there was no follow-up effort to counsel the suicidal woman after a 911 operator had done her best to engage the distraught caller on the phone. Responding officers should have had the backup of a trained psychologist, who might have helped calm the woman; instead, they improvised a plan to enter the room with a pass key and to tackle the woman--a strategy that, given the strong possibility she was armed, was too big a gamble.

The officers may have had no choice but to use deadly force in this particular set of circumstances. But with a better plan, such tragedies might be avoided.