When duty calls

POST FALLS — Early in his career as an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, John Preston was shot in the line of duty.

It happened in the early 1970s, when he was working a mid-watch uniform patrol at 2:30 a.m.

“The call comes out, and we’re right by it,” Preston said Thursday while seated at the kitchen table in his Post Falls home.

He and his partner responded. They parked their police cruiser three-quarters of the way down the block.

“Because it’s a man-with-a-gun call, I take the shotgun out of the rack and we approach,” Preston said.

A woman wearing nothing but a short fur coat answered the door.

“She’s hysterical and she’s saying, ‘He’s got a shotgun in the bedroom and he’s going to kill me,’” Preston said.

By this time, a unit with plainclothes officers had arrived. Preston and the other officers grabbed the woman by the coat, removed her from the house and threw her to safety in a grassy area.

“Just about that time, as I turn around and go back up to the front door … he comes around the corner with a double-barrel shotgun and he shoots us,” Preston said. “As I see him raise the shotgun, I know what’s happening.”

The man fired. Preston deflected with his shotgun.

“The pellets hit me in the forehead and the hand. The gun takes part of the round coming through, and the rest of it goes through and hits the guy behind me,” he said.

The officer next to Preston took a knee and fired three times at the suspect.

“I immediately dropped my shotgun and I shoot him once and he turns around and runs to the back,” Preston said. “He’s hit two or three times, is what I’ve been told, and he passes out in the back room.”

The situation was still fluid at this time. The officer next to Preston saw he was bleeding and told him to put out a help call.

“We don’t have radios back in the day. There’s no radios. The only communication we have is in the police car,” Preston said.

With the cruiser so far away, he raced to a neighbor’s house and pounded on the door to call for help. Once the cavalry was en route, he went back to the scene, where the suspect was taken into custody. Then Preston was taken to the hospital.

“It was like out of a movie,” he said, beginning to chuckle. “There was this crotchety old nurse, and she’s going, ‘Yeah you’ve been shot, so what?’ She’s got tweezers and she’s picking pellets out of my forehead, picking pellets out of my hand and she’s dropping them into a little metal deal that’s going, ‘dink, dink, dink.’ I don’t know why I remember that, but I do.”

Still in bandages three days later, Preston returned to light duty. Even his injuries couldn’t keep him from the job he loved.

“I had no negative real emotional feelings behind this at the time,” he said. “I was trained a certain way. I did what was right. I responded to the situation and I was proud of my actions, because I saved somebody and I protected myself and my partner.”

Later, when Preston was interviewed to be moved to the elite city unit, Metropolitan Division, the sergeant said, “You got shot and you were off three days and you went back to work?”

“He said, ‘OK.’ So I got the job,” Preston said. “Not just because of that, because of my experience and stuff. But it was what we did at the time.”

The incident took place Oct. 30, 1973. Preston, now 76, went on to have an exciting 31-year career with the LAPD.

Preston became a training officer, a SWAT responder, a shooting instructor, a hostage negotiator, a patrol sergeant and a sergeant of a bureau that dealt with gangs. He went undercover to try to catch the Skid Row Slasher, who murdered 11 people in L.A.’s Skid Row neighborhood. He worked motorcade detail with the Secret Service and shook hands with a few presidents, including Ronald Reagan. He worked with Judge Lance Ito during the O.J. Simspon trial. Preston worked in the Office of Criminal Investigations Narcotics Enforcement Detail and then became a sergeant and pilot in the Air Support Division. He was involved in several other shooting incidents, but was never again struck by a bad guy’s bullet.

He and his family moved to North Idaho after he retired from the force in 2002, but Preston wasn’t done yet. He consulted with the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office when it obtained a military helicopter and helped to start a regional helicopter unit, similar to the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office’s helicopter unit that launched earlier this year.

“After a few months, I saw that I wouldn’t be able to consult, I would have to be in charge,” he said with a grin. “I trained the deputies up to be tactical flight officers, taught the pilots how to fly a law enforcement mission as opposed to the kind of stuff that they were flying. I was blown away at the depth of their piloting experience.”

“They call him the Godfather of Air One,” said his daughter, Kate Moore, who, along with Preston’s wife of 42 years Joyce Preston and grandson Cooper Moore, was present for the interview.

Even to this day, Preston keeps a watchful eye on his surroundings and runs security detail at his church.

“One of my training officers said there was a spirit of law and the letter of the law,” Preston said. “If you followed the spirit of law, you’re going to have a good career … I always landed on the spirit of law.”

This courageous career all began when Preston was working in the private sector, making explosive devices, especially military contracts, and he read a book called “The New Centurions” by police detective-turned-writer Joseph Wambaugh. The book is about the work of LAPD officers. He then saw “Adam 12,” a TV police drama, and he knew police work was what he wanted to do.

“A big part of it was to try to help other people,” he said. “I never realized the depth of the need for that position.”

He simply felt compelled to answer the call and to do it right.

Fifty years after being shot and wounded on the job as a new officer, Preston is in line to receive a Law Enforcement Purple Heart, based on the Purple Heart Medal issued by the U.S. Armed Forces. He was nominated by a fellow LAPD officer who caught wind of Preston’s story. The prestigious award is only bestowed to those officers who are injured or killed while in the line of duty. He is expected to attend a ceremony in Los Angeles in September when he and the other officers shot that day will be honored.

“Back in the day, you just did your job,” he said. “That’s the way it was. You’re not looking for any commendations or any of that kind of stuff. You just did the job and you moved on.”