- Domestic violence calls often present volatile situations for police officers.
- Two Utah officers were shot and killed responding to a domestic dispute.
- Multiple officers dying in a single incident is rare in Utah and the U.S.
Domestic violence is among the most dangerous situations police officers face.
When the call for help comes from someone being threatened by a family member, police face an unpredictable type of danger. Someone who has been abusive, who has hurt their family or lost their family in some way may feel like there’s not much more to lose. Adding in a gun or suicide risk creates a volatile combination of circumstances.
“It’s the thing that keeps us awake in the night, the thing that wakes us up in a cold sweat,” then Bountiful Police Chief Tom Ross told the Deseret News in 2020 after Ogden police officer Nathan Lyday was shot and killed when he and other officers responded to a call for help from a woman who said her husband had threatened to kill her.
“We just hope our officers will be safe and get through (it).”
Police in the small town of Tremonton in northern Utah responded to several hang-up calls from a residence on Sunday night. The first officer on the scene spoke to a resident about an apparent domestic dispute when a man with a gun emerged from the home and shot and killed the officer, according to Brigham City police.
A second officer who arrived to assist was also shot and killed.
Authorities identified the two officers as Tremonton-Garland Police Sgt. Lee Sorensen and officer Eric Estrada.
A Box Elder County sheriff’s deputy also responded. The gunman fired several shots into the deputy’s vehicle, hitting the deputy and a K-9. The deputy was taken to a hospital for treatment and released Monday morning. The dog is also recovering.
Ryan Michael Bate, 32, was booked into the Weber County Jail for investigation of two counts of aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder and assault. Bate allegedly slammed his wife’s head into a door frame before police arrived, according to a booking affidavit.
“The suspect is now in custody, but the loss is immeasurable,” the National Fraternal Order of Police said in a statement. “These officers laid down their lives protecting their community — answering a call for help that turned into unthinkable violence.”
Brigham City Police Chief Chad Reyes said domestic violence calls can be unpredictable. “We don’t know what we’re walking into. They can be one of the most dangerous events we’re dispatched to,” he said.
Lyday was the last Utah police officer killed during a domestic violence call. Never before have two Utah officers died in that situation.
A rare occurrence
Multiple officers dying in the line of duty in any circumstance is rare in Utah and nationwide.
The last time that occurred in Utah was in 1987 when Navajo Division of Public Safety officers Roy Lee Stanley and Andy Begay were shot and killed while investigating an alcohol party. Their bodies were later dumped in a patrol vehicle, driven to a remote location near Lake Powell and set on fire.
Though rare today, two officers being killed in the line of duty during one incident happened several times in Utah more than a hundred years ago, including in 1870, 1895, 1900 and 1924 — all of them shootouts.
In 1913, five officers in Salt Lake County died in two separate gunfights with the same man about week apart.
An argument over a woman in Salt Lake County’s Bingham Canyon mining district led to a miner killing another miner. The man fled to the shores of Utah Lake near present-day Saratoga Springs where a posse tracked him down.
A gun battle ensued, resulting in the deaths of Bingham Police Chief William J. Grant and Salt Lake County deputies George O. Witbeck and Nephi S. Jensen.
Eight days later, officers located the man in a mine where deputy James Hulsey and posse member Vaso Mandarich tried to smoke him out. Both were ambushed and shot to death.
In 2012, Ogden police officer Jared Francom and other members of the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force were attempting to serve a warrant at an Ogden house when a gun battle erupted. Francom died from a gunshot wound and five officers were injured.
Of 135 law enforcement officers who have died in the line of duty in Utah, 80 of the deaths were the result of gunfire, including nine described as “inadvertent,” according to the Officer Down Memorial Page.
Multiple officers killed
- Most recently, the highest number of police officers killed in a single incident was five in Dallas in 2016. Snipers shot and killed five law enforcement officers and injured another seven at the end of a rally in downtown Dallas, where hundreds were protesting police shootings that happened in other parts of the country earlier that week.
- In 2009, a lone gunman killed four officers in a coffee shop in Lakewood, Washington, while they worked on laptops.
- Also in 2009, a convicted felon wanted on a warrant for a parole violation fatally shot two police officers during a traffic stop in Oakland, California. After getting away on foot to his sister’s nearby apartment, he shot and killed two police SWAT team officers attempting to apprehend him.
- In 1995, eight federal law enforcement officers died in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that left a total of 168 people dead.
- Four U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents trying to serve a search warrant at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, were killed in a shootout.
Aside from those incidents, the deadliest day in U.S. law enforcement history was Sept. 11, 2001. Following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, 72 officers from the New York Police Department, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department and other agencies died during rescue and emergency response operations.
Correction: The 1987 fatal shooting of two Navajo officers was not the only time in Utah where multiple officers were killed in a single incident. This story has been updated to include some of those incidents.