Inquest: Fugitive killed family, self
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Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Inquest: Fugitive killed family, self
A coroner's jury finds an escaped convict is to blame for the deaths of
his wife and his two young daughters.
By Joe Schoenmann
Review-Journal
Moments before an accidental shotgun blast started a chain of
events that ended in the deaths of Timothy Blackburn and his family last
month, FBI agent Henry Schlumpf thought he had reached a turning point.
Testifying at a coroner's inquest Friday, Schlumpf said he had
spent three hours on the phone negotiating with Blackburn and his wife,
Puthea "Sophia" Lim, after the couple and their two preschool daughters
were found Aug. 29 at the Budget Suites, 4625 Boulder Highway.
Schlumpf thought he had gotten Blackburn's wife to agree not to
die.
"We were making headway with (her). She was worried about Tim and
her jail time. By 6 a.m., she was talking about the mechanics of leaving
the apartment," he said. "She was talking on the phone and, in
mid-sentence, she was saying, `If I have to do even one day in jail,
it's going to be ...' when I could hear from outside, far away, what I
thought was a shotgun blast.
"The line was dead, the phone recording came on. I hadn't realized
what happened."
Within 10 seconds, Blackburn, his wife, Tiara, 4, and Tiana, 5,
were dead. Medical examiner Sheldon Green testified that all four died
from gunshot wounds to the head. Ballistics and crime scene analysts
said the bullets that killed them came from Blackburn's .38-special
revolver.
What Schlumpf couldn't see was that SWAT officers, stationed
outside Blackburn's motel room door, blew open the door upon hearing the
shotgun blast. They thought the blast came from inside the room, and
they were under orders to storm the room if they heard a shot.
As the officers swept into the room, they heard shot after shot --
four in all -- coming from the bathroom. When they got there,
Blackburn's children and wife were dead, and Blackburn was falling to
the floor.
That's what an eight-person coroner's inquest jury heard from 13
witnesses over 5 1/2 hours Friday. After 40 minutes, the jury -- which
is empowered to find a police shooting justifiable, excusable or
homicide by criminal means -- came back with a verdict.
They ruled that police hadn't killed the Blackburn family and that
Blackburn had.
After the verdict, Las Vegas attorney Mark LoBello, who has been
retained by the Lim family, said there still might be a case for a
wrongful death lawsuit.
"I don't think this has resolved anything," LoBello said.
A friend of the family said the Lims still don't believe Blackburn
killed his two little girls.
Blackburn made it onto the FBI's Most Wanted list, even showing up
on an episode of TV's "America's Most Wanted" after he broke out of the
North Las Vegas jail with the help of his wife Aug. 11. He had been in
jail since December 1998, when Schlumpf and the FBI arrested him for the
$1 million armed robbery of a bank's ATM repository.
Lt. Roderick Jett, head of the SWAT team, couldn't quite believe
it when he found out that Sunday morning that Blackburn was in Las
Vegas.
"He came back to the one city in America where the entire law
enforcement community was looking for him," Jett said. "That told me he
was not thinking rationally."
Jett also was concerned that Blackburn made no demands and had
said he did not want to go back to jail and would die with his entire
family.
"I heard the conversation that Schlumpf, the FBI agent, had and,
my apologies to the family," Jett said, looking to the Lims. "There's no
pretty way of putting this:
"Tim needed to die."
Jett's feeling, he added, was that if they could kill Blackburn,
"Sophia wouldn't follow through and kill her own children."
With that, Jett brought the SWAT team up to a "Condition Two,"
which meant his SWAT officers had the "green light" to kill Blackburn.
Jett said that if a sniper had an open shot at him, the sniper would
take it. Or, if a shot was heard from inside the apartment, SWAT
officers were ordered to burst in.
That was around 3:30 a.m. By that time, Henderson police officer
Monique Panet-Swanson, a negotiator with the area's Criminal
Apprehension Team, had relinquished the negotiating duties to Schlumpf.
She described Blackburn as very calm, but very resolute.
"He and Sophia said several times, if they were captured, they
agreed they would kill each other and the family, and that they wanted
to go to heaven together," she said. "He talked extensively about that."
In the background of the room, both she and Schlumpf testified
that they could hear Blackburn's two little girls playing and banging
toys, oblivious to the danger. Green said that the little girls had tiny
ballpoint pen drawings on their legs -- a star, a V-shape, a heart with
an arrow through it, two tick-tack-toe patterns.
Their father also had a penned design on his leg -- an "I" with a
line to the three names, Tiana, Tiara and Puthea.
Green's testimony helped establish that the family died from
Blackburn's gun. Though Blackburn was hit five times by SWAT officer
Manuel Rivera, none of the wounds would have immediately killed him,
Green said.
Rivera and officer Gavin Vesp had been among a small cadre of SWAT
officers waiting outside the door to Room 234 with a "water charge"
ready to blow the door in. It was shortly after 6 a.m., both testified,
when they thought they heard a gunshot from inside. In reality, the
gunshot came from the muzzle of the shotgun of patrol officer Nevin
Hansbarger, who was stationed outside the motel room in the parking lot.
Hansbarger, who was an infantry gunner with the Marines for "20
years, seven months" before becoming a police officer 13 months ago,
described how his shotgun went off accidentally. He was swinging it
forward, he said, and figured that its trigger somehow caught on the
holster of his handgun and went off.
"It was not intentional," he said.
Had that gun not gone off, SWAT Sgt. Joe Ojeda was asked how long
his team would have waited.
"For 10 hours, 12 hours, until we were relieved by somebody else.
Days if necessary," he answered.
In 85 cases during 23 years, the inquest system has found only two
officers criminally negligent. But that verdict was later overruled by a
grand jury.