It was not yet 2 a.m. on Aug. 18, 2004 when the 911 calls started coming in from the Southside. First, Indianapolis police were dispatched to a home on Dietz Street where they found 66-year-old Alice Marie Anderson shot to death. Then callers said a man was stalking the neighborhood with a machine gun, firing indiscriminately. It was Alice Anderson's son Kenneth, who had history of mental problems and owned a lot of guns.
StarFiles: The shooting
As the squad cars began to arrive, he met them with a barrage of automatic weapons fire, shattering windshields. In the darkness, the officers saw muzzle flashes but couldn't tell how many weapons they faced because of the volume of gunfire.
Patrolman Tim Conley was shot in the stomach and leg as he slammed his car into reverse. In another cruiser, Officer Timothy "Jake" Laird was fatally wounded when a round hit him high in the chest just above his protective vest.
Anderson was moving through the neighborhood on foot. At the corner of Tindall Street and Gimber he spotted two more squad cars, took a position behind a jeep and began firing. One of the officers, Peter Koe, was a SWAT team member but had been working a regular shift, so his assault rifle was in the trunk of his cruiser. Already bleeding from the head from the flying glass, Koe managed to get to his gun and was loading it when he was shot in the leg. Koe took cover, then advanced on Anderson's position, both men firing. And both ran out of ammunition at about that point.
Koe was well-trained and knew he had a one-second opportunity. He rushed at Anderson, striking him with the empty rifle as the gunman tried to go for his pistol. Koe had a handgun also, and he was quicker. He fired and Anderson went down, dead, 16 minutes after it all began.
