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DGU Of The Day: Loss Prevention Injection Edition

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Image courtesy Roseville, MI Police

An armed customer wasn’t quick enough to prevent alleged transient junkie Joshua Silva, above, from sticking a Home Depot loss prevention employee in the hand with a dirty needle, but the un-named Samaritan didn’t even have to fire a shot to stop the attack. 

From the Detroit Free Press:

Roseville Police Chief James Berlin said that Silva claimed he is addicted to heroin, but it is not believed he was on the drug at the time of the assault.

Berlin said Silva began to fight with store loss prevention officers in the parking lot when they tried to apprehend him for stuffing a $179 battery-powered drill under his coat. Silva pulled a concealed syringe from his jacket and used it as a weapon, swinging it around in a slashing motion, police said.

They said he stabbed one of the officers several times with the contaminated needle. Berlin said the victim had more than five puncture wounds on the top of his hand.

A customer with a concealed pistol license saw the fight, pulled out his handgun and told Silva to drop the syringe and get on the ground. Silva stopped fighting and sat down in the parking lot, police said, but jumped up and ran when he heard approaching police sirens. The loss prevention officers allowed him to run and police officers arrested him without further incident.

Silva is being held on $25,000 bail, and faces 10 years in prison for retail fraud and Assault With Intent To Do Great Bodily Harm.

It’s too bad he wasn’t a few seconds quicker, but drawing your gun too quickly in a DGU can buy you just as many regrets as drawing it too late. Particularly if you’re intervening on behalf of a stranger.

LEOs have learned to be exceptionally careful when dealing with ‘sharps’ such as hypodermics. Knife wounds can certainly cause nasty infections, but syringes are purpose-built to deliver their cargo of drugs (or bacteria, or viruses) deep beneath the skin. Some infections are curable; others are not.

So lets add ‘junkies with syringes’ to the list of reasons to remember the 21-foot rule.

0 thoughts on “DGU Of The Day: Loss Prevention Injection Edition”

  1. I guess (430 ILCS 66/) Firearm Concealed Carry Act will also be known as the “Top 20 Places in IL to Shoot/Attack Someone With Minimal Risk of Being Shot At” list.

    Reply
  2. Actually, as a left leaning gun supporter, I’m usually slightly annoyed at back-handed Obamacare/welfare/tax-what-have-you comments that just tend to crop up as tangents because of the political leanings of the gun crowd.

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  3. What I don’t understand is if DC has such strict gun laws why does the White House have snipers on the roof? Should be the safest city in the country.

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  4. They’ll both good rifles. But at a certain point, one must conclude it’s more about the person behind the trigger than the tool. Wouldn’t you say that being a part of Team FNH lended the benefit of being a part of a group of highly competitive shooters who passed along both technique and mindset?

    I guess we can look forward to future 3-gun videos of you running a PWS. Good luck!

    Reply
  5. While I home carry, I’ll concede my caliber is not appropriate for mountain lions. We actually have coyotes, don’t think we have lions yet. An appropriate caliber, to me, may require a sling.

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  6. What exactly does the ATF do with form 4s that can’t be accomplished with a NICS check? The wait should be the same time as a NICS check because it should just be a NICS check

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  7. There’s no excuse for a poor website that does nothing more than dumb data entry. If the web application and DB were designed decently, you could even run both on a single ho-hum, 10-year-old Dell server and still handle on the order of dozens of entries per minute.

    Reply
  8. I realize I am late to the party so it is entirely possible that nobody will read this. And I only skimmed through the previous 236 comments so I may have missed this already being addressed. Regardless, here’s my $0.02 contribution.

    My wife recently ran afoul of one of her co-workers for supporting a local property owner’s decision not to let pit bulls into their store anymore. My wife’s co-worker was all up in arms and trying to get support to boycott that establishment (she has two rescued pit bulls) which I support as her right to do. My only problem with her boycott is a trend that is prevalent in not only the pit bull crowd and anti-gun crowd. It has become something of a social norm that most sane thinking people have learned to tolerate because you cant argue or debate with people who are incapable of accepting facts. In this case it is acknowledging the source of the problem and acting to correct it.

    To her the problem was the ban of pit bulls in the store, so she was taking action!!! She wanted nothing to do with a conversation full of facts because some of them were inconvenient to her and (more importantly) the true problem is too difficult to address. The facts relevant here include 1) different dog breeds have different instinctive behaviors. Humans have bread them for thousands of years to nurture those instinctive behaviors. 2) Pit bulls have been bread to be instinctively aggressive and fight. 3) If not properly trained, socialized and cared for dogs will instinctively entertain themselves. 4) Currently there is a disproportionately large percentage and total number of pit bull owners who keep pit bulls because of their instinct/potential and then either do not care for/train them properly or worse.

    This woman’s answer to all of that was to simply insist that, “Pit bulls are wonderful loving dogs!” Yes, they certainly can be. So can golden retrievers, but if you don’t exercise them and introduce them to strangers they will chew up your sofa and growl at every person they meet. She was completely unwilling that there might exist a difference between the instinctive behavior of a retriever or demographic of ownership. The only problem as she saw it was a business boycotting her favorite breed. She wouldn’t even go so far as to renounce the conduct of dog owners who have given pit bulls their current reputation.

    This sort of intentional blindness has been displayed by religious leaders being unwilling to renounce the actions of extremists after various terrorist attacks, anti-gunners in the face of overwhelming statistical and logical evidence, and in the current example dog owners. All groups like this may have a legitimate gripe about one condition or another but unless they are willing to address the root cause (no matter how difficult a target it is) instead of targeting loosely related soft targets around the periphery of the problem. It is strange that they consider it “fighting for” a cause when in reality they are actually perpetuating and exacerbating the very thing that they stand against. With the anti’s it is targeting honest law abiding citizens to stop criminals, thus making criminal enterprise more appealing. With pit bull owners it is targeting people and businesses who have had trouble with pit bulls (because of their owners) instead of acknowledging that the culture that surrounds their breed of choice is the problem. In the we have the same problem that has existed for thousands of years . . . shitty people do shitty things. And, after thousands of years punishing bystanders is still not the solution. It’s just easier to do. Which raises the question, if you support the punishment of the bystanders what does that make you?

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  9. Ok I’ll be the first one to legally take a hack saw to a 500 or 88 as soon as the NFA gets the boot. I know, it’ll never happen but a guy can dream can’t he!!!

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