Denver police officer Ranjan Ford Jr. stood outside the closed bedroom door with his Glock semiautomatic in his left hand and his flashlight in his right.
He had one foot on the top of a staircase, while the other was a couple of steps down. To his right were officers Gene Sharla and Joshua Herrick. Sharla had a Taser drawn. Herrick had his gun.
The three were searching for a large, dangerous man. And at that moment, each of the three was contemplating what might be on the other side of that closed door.
“Denver police! Come out with your hands up!” one of the officers shouted.
Silence.
As recounted in Denver Manager of Safety Al LaCabe’s report on the disciplining of Ford, it was a circuitous route that brought the three officers on a hot night in July 2004 to that closed door upstairs at a row house in southwest Denver.
Earlier in the evening, Cathy Sandoval had called police from a McDonald’s, saying her boyfriend, Vincent Martinez, had beaten her and held her captive for the previous 17 hours after a night of drinking.
Numerous police officers, including Ford, went to the house where Martinez, 5 feet 11 inches tall and 290 pounds, was supposed to be. They set up a perimeter. And they banged on the door, ordering anyone inside to open up.
Nothing happened.
Sandoval didn’t have her keys, so officers would have to either break down a locked door or go in another way.
Martinez, officials later determined, slipped out of a rear second-story window in a brief moment when the back of the apartment was left unguarded. The officers, still thinking he was inside, decided to get a ladder from the Fire Department and climb in through an open window – the same window Martinez escaped from – into an upstairs bedroom. That way, the officers could clear the house from the top and not have to worry about being attacked from above.
Sharla went first. Then Herrick. And last, Ford.
They moved out of the empty bedroom to another bedroom and a bathroom. Then they approached the last room upstairs, the only one with a closed door.
Because of his chosen position, when the door finally did open, Ford would have the first look – and probably the best view – of what was in that room. Conversely, if anybody were there, Ford would be the first to be seen.
When officers received no response from their initial shouts, Ford would later tell investigators, he decided either there was no one there or there was someone silently lying in wait to ambush the officers.
Sharla pushed the door open.
“There’s someone in the bed!” Ford recalled yelling to his fellow officers. “Show me your hands!”
Martinez’s uncle Frank Lobato, 63 years old and 5 feet 3 inches tall, raised up in his bed, seemingly confused.
“What the (expletive)?” he said.
In his left hand, Lobato held a comforter that was bunched up over much of his small, naked frame. In his right hand, Ford said, he saw something shiny that Lobato raised as he sat up.
Ford quickly ducked. And as he did, his gun fired.
In the months after the shooting, Herrick and Sharla would say they never heard Ford’s warning about someone in the bed, nor did they hear an expletive or something hitting the floor.
Questions were raised among police as to whether Ford meant to shoot. Ford, on the night of the shooting, told police he thought Lobato had a gun and that he fired to protect himself. But Denver police Lt. Jon Priest, the city’s head homicide detective, would later conclude that Ford fired accidentally, the result of an unintentional finger twitch as he startled at the sight of Lobato and ducked.
What’s more, Ford fired the shot with his left hand, which is not his dominant hand. He had been trained while an officer in Texas to shoot with both.
Either way, the single 9mm bullet was on its way toward Lobato. It shredded through the folds in Lobato’s comforter and hit Lobato in the right side of his chest.
At that moment, Ford said, he heard a clinking sound, as if something had just fallen to the floor.
The three officers entered the room and walked toward the bed with their weapons still drawn. Officers outside the house began kicking in downstairs doors and rushing in.
The three officers upstairs found Lobato in the bed, bleeding, with nothing in his hands.
“I thought he had a gun,” Herrick and Sharla told investigators they heard Ford say.
Two officers carried Lobato downstairs, where they, along with firefighters, began trying to save his life. An ambulance whisked him to a hospital. But 20 minutes after the shooting, a doctor pronounced Lobato dead.
Police taped off the row house. Investigators went upstairs to search the bedroom where Lobato was shot.
They found the comforter, with little round holes and spots of blood on it. They found possible drug paraphernalia – a spoon and a syringe.
And lying on the floor, a few feet away from the bed, they found an empty Big K soda can.
Staff writer John Ingold can be reached at 720-929-0898 or jingold@denverpost.com.
