Ricky Lindsey cut his ankle monitor, ran, and came back to the motel with a gun he put in his own mouth. It was an air pistol. The officers had no way to know that.
Start with who this was.
Ricky Lindsey, 56, was wanted for failing to register as a sex offender. Back in May he cut off his ankle monitor and disappeared. A private investigator ran him down at the M&M Inn and Suites in south Fort Worth and called it in. That’s how officers ended up in that parking lot on a Saturday night in late July.
They set up on him. Lindsey got in a vehicle and ran — an eight-minute pursuit that looped the area and came right back to the motel where it started. He parked. Officers gave him commands. Get out of the vehicle. Hands up.
He didn’t.
What he did instead is the whole case. He pulled out a gun and put it in his mouth.
Then he took it back out.
Watch the sequence, because it matters. Gun to the mouth. Gun comes down. Seatbelt off. Window going up. Every one of those is a man getting ready to come out of that car — and he’s coming out with a gun in his hand.
Here’s what the officers were working with in real time. They had a wanted sex offender who ran from them, refused every command, and produced a firearm. They did not have the one piece of information the internet has now: that the gun was a Beretta APX air pistol that couldn’t have killed anybody.
So let’s deal with the argument that’s coming. “It was a fake. He was suicidal. They should have waited him out.”
No.
Put yourself in that seat. A man points a gun at his own head and it doesn’t end the way he wanted. Now the gun comes down and he’s unbuckling to get out. You cannot read that as a man in crisis you’re going to talk down. You have to read it as the next step — a man about to exit a vehicle, armed, after refusing every order you gave him. Suicide-by-cop is not a rare theory. It happens across this country constantly, and plenty of the men who choose it are willing to take an officer with them on the way out. An officer who assumes the gun is fake, or assumes the suicidal man won’t fire on him, is betting his life on a stranger’s mercy.
Then add the window. As Lindsey rolled it up, the officers’ view into that car got worse, not better. Now the gun they know he’s holding is somewhere they can’t clearly see, and the door’s about to open. You’ve given the commands. You don’t have to wait to be shot to be justified. Two officers fired. Lindsey was killed at the scene.
That’s a good shooting. I’ll say it plainly.
But I’m not going to pretend it was clean tactics from every angle, because it wasn’t — and this is where the badge holds itself to a standard instead of clapping for itself.
The lesson. Watch the positioning at the end. A responding officer ends up in a spot behind the primary, and there’s a rifle round that goes off in a way that made my skin crawl watching it. That’s a crossfire setup. If a suspect starts firing and dives, or an officer shifts, you’ve got rounds crossing lanes with cops in them. My move there is not to sit in that position. I’m peeling off, repositioning behind the suspect’s vehicle or stacking on the far side — anywhere that isn’t downrange of my own partner. And I’m telling the primary where I am before I ever put a rifle up. “I’m behind you, left side.” Communication. That didn’t happen the way it should have.
None of that makes the shooting wrong. Lindsey authored the outcome the moment he cut that monitor and chose to turn a parking lot into a standoff. But a good shooting and clean tactics are two different grades, and the men who do this work are owed the honest version of both.
