Los Angeles Police Officer Kristina Ripatti didn't hear the gunfire that changed her life.
She didn't feel the bullet that plunged through her chest, nicked a rib, tore through a lung and severed her spine. And she never saw the gun in the suspect's hand -- the part that bothers her most, she said. Ten years of reflexively watching people's hands for weapons, and she didn't see it.
There was only an odor -- a sudden, overpowering gunpowder smell bursting into her nostrils. Then she was down, dimly thinking that she wanted to go home.
The shooting that left the 33-year-old Ripatti paralyzed from the chest down underscores how suddenly and unpredictably the demands of policing can escalate into supreme sacrifice.
Ripatti, the mother of a 15-month-old daughter, left California Hospital Medical Center downtown Tuesday headed to a rehabilitation center to adapt to using a wheelchair.
"Obviously there is some reason this happened," she said, this week. "And I can't change it, so.... "
Ripatti was among the highest-risk fringe of officers in the LAPD. She was one of the few female gang officers working in South Los Angeles, and sought out the kinds of confrontations that tended to produce felony arrests and gun seizures, even as they put officers at greater risk of personnel complaints and violent encounters. She was known as a stand-out "obs officer" -- adept at observing slight signs of crime.
Her ambition, she said, was to have male colleagues say of her not that "she's good for a female officer," but that she was "just a good officer."
But in the days after the shooting, her goals were more basic: to cough, to clear the bloody phlegm from her sinuses, to sleep through the night.
Ripatti was on patrol with partner Joe Meyer that Saturday night, June 3, near La Salle and Leighton avenues when a jaywalker sprinted in front of their car. He was a short, older man in a dark, hooded sweatshirt. "Basehead," Ripatti thought, a chronic narcotics user. Not likely to be as dangerous as younger gang members in that area. The man appeared furtive and kept glancing back. Ripatti got out of the car. The man broke into a run. Ripatti, fit from 45-minute daily runs, caught him on the pitch-dark porch of a nearby four-plex. She reached to grab him.
Meyer was a few steps behind. He saw a muzzle flash. Ripatti fell. Meyer drew his weapon. The suspect, 52-year-old James Fenton McNeal, was about eight feet from him. Meyer fired. McNeal would be pronounced dead from four gunshot wounds.
