Four law enforcement officers in South Carolina were shot early on Tuesday morning, when what began as a domestic violence call turned into a manhunt for a heavily-armed suspect.
The incident began when officers in York, around 25 miles south of Charlotte, North Carolina, responded to a call that a man was hitting a woman in a home. When they arrived they discovered that the suspect had fled, and a search began, with police dogs drafted in to help.
At around 1am, the suspect fired at a York police officer from the K-9 unit, the Washington Post reported. He was rushed to a nearby medical center in a police vehicle. Then at around 3:30am the suspect opened fire again, striking three York County sheriff’s deputies. According to ABC News, two of the deputies had to be airlifted to hospital in Charlotte. Their condition is not yet certain.
The suspect, who was named as 47-year-old Christian Thomas McCall, was later taken into custody with gunshot wounds. According to WSOC McCall had been charged with assaulting an officer, resisting arrest and assault in 1994, although McCall’s father in law said that violence towards police was ‘uncharacteristic’ for the 47-year-old.
Investigators are leaving the house on Farrier Lane where they were called for the domestic violence case. The suspect’s father-in-law tells me he’s shocked. He says violence toward police is ‘uncharacteristic’ for Christian McCall. @wsoctv pic.twitter.com/s9tqKqbRXU
— Mark Barber (@MBarberWSOC9) January 16, 2018
The shooting has shaken the South Carolina county. “When officers are attacked, the community is attacked,” York Mayor Eddie Lee told the South Carolina Herald. “We are all appalled by this shooting of four courageous people.”
Domestic violence calls are some of the most dangerous for police officers to respond to, according to research from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. Their 2016 report, which chronicles all law enforcement deaths in the line-of-duty between 2010 and 2014, shows that “Domestic Dispute” was the initial 911 call in 22 per cent of cases, more than any other call type. One particularly horrifying example was the case of Richard Poplawski, who ambushed and killed three police officers with an AK-47 in Pittsburgh as they responded to a domestic violence dispute at his house.
A history of violence and abuse against women is also a consistent theme tying together mass shooters and domestic terrorists. As ThinkProgress previously reported, Devin Kelley and Stephen Paddock, the perpetrators of the Sutherland Springs and Las Vegas massacres, and James Alex Fields Jr., who rammed his car into a group of counter-protesters at the Unite the Right rally, all has histories of physical and emotional violence against women.
“It is a very common thread where the [perpetrator of a mass shooting] had a particular history of domestic violence,” Billy Rosen, the deputy legal director for Everytown for Gun Safety, told the New York Times. “A history of this particular kind of conduct may really demonstrate that someone has dangerous propensities and should not be allowed to have guns.”