DA: 18-year-old who pointed gun at deputy killed himself

Caleb Douglas, the 18-year-old Goddard man who pointed a handgun at a sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop last September, died as a result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound — not from shots fired by the deputy, officials said Friday.

The deputy, authorities said in September, pulled Caleb Douglas over at 1:10 a.m. on Sept. 1 in the 1100 block of North Tyler Road in west Wichita. Douglas had been driving erratically, crossing the center line several times and straddling lanes.

In an account released Friday that was based on dashboard camera footage and a subsequent interview, the deputy said he smelled marijuana when he walked up to Douglas’ Pontiac. He asked the driver his name and was told “Caleb.”

“Are you under the influence of anything, Caleb?” the deputy asked, drawing an indiscernible response.

“Because I smell marijuana,” the deputy added.

After another response not picked up by the deputy’s dashboard camera, the officer asked Douglas to step out of the car. He stepped back to allow Douglas to exit, but the car rolled forward a few feet.

When the deputy stepped forward to ask the driver to put the car in park, he saw Douglas pull a gun and attempt to rack the slide as he leaned out the window.

“The first time he saw the weapon was when he was staring down the barrel pointed at him,” Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett said Friday.

In an interview given after the incident to investigators with the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, the deputy said he was planning to conduct field sobriety tests to see whether Douglas was under the influence.

“I have no idea where the hell that gun was at, whether he was sitting on it or, but all of a sudden it came up and I’m looking right at it,” the deputy said in the interview.

He saw the driver’s hand come up on the slide, the deputy said, adding that he thought he was a “dead man” because the driver had the gun pointed at him before he even realized the driver was armed.

The deputy uttered an expletive, retreated a few steps, then turned and ran. Video showed Douglas leaning out the window with an object in his hand.

The deputy spun around after running six to eight steps, Bennett said, and fired numerous times at the Pontiac. The car rolled forward a few more feet, came to a complete stop for a second, then raced north on Tyler.

After reporting “Shots fired! Shots fired!” the deputy returned to his patrol car and pursued the Pontiac. A Wichita police officer responding to the call had raced ahead of the deputy, pulling over a car that resembled the Pontiac.

But the deputy alerted the officer that it was the wrong vehicle, and they then noticed a car had crashed into a house in the 1500 block of North Tyler. When they arrived at the scene, they found Douglas unresponsive in the front seat and “a significant fire” in the engine compartment of the car.

Douglas was pulled from the car. He was found to have two gunshot wounds: one to the head and another to the back of his left shoulder. He died later that morning at a Wichita hospital.

After Douglas was removed from the Pontiac, the police officer on the scene noticed and grabbed a handgun from the floorboard of the driver’s side of the front seat. An investigation of the incident showed the deputy fired 16 shots at the Pontiac, Bennett said.

The Sheriff’s Office initially responded as though one of those shots killed Douglas, but an autopsy showed the fatal wound came from the Smith & Wesson .40-caliber handgun Douglas had with him in the car.

The gunshot wound to Douglas’ left shoulder came from a bullet fragment. While the source of the fragment cannot be confirmed forensically, Bennett said, it has to have come from the deputy.

“That’s the only thing left, so it’s got to be,” Bennett said.

The shoulder wound was not life-threatening.

“The coroner has ruled this a suicide,” Bennett said.

Given the circumstances of the incident, he added, there is no basis for criminal charges against the deputy.

“There’s no way to know” when Douglas shot himself in the head, Bennett said, though it’s reasonable to assume it happened after he fled the initial scene and crashed into the house about four blocks away.

Dashboard video of the incident is not being made public, at the Douglas family’s request, Sedgwick County Sheriff Jeff Easter said. They have seen the video, he said.

“This has been a very hard time for the Douglas family,” Easter said Friday.

The deputy involved in the shooting had been with the department for 14 months at the time. Prior to that, he had been a detention deputy for two years and was a law enforcement officer in another jurisdiction for 10 years.

He has since returned to duty, Easter said Friday.

This story was originally published March 3, 2017 at 3:12 PM with the headline "DA: 18-year-old who pointed gun at deputy killed himself."