This Policewoman Called the Shots

Police officers in America face pressures today like never before. Crime, drugs, gangs and the threat of domestic terrorism keep law enforcement ever-vigilant — and recent tensions in the wake of riots in Baltimore, Maryland, and Ferguson, Missouri, have put police under increased scrutiny as they go about the critical business of keeping America’s streets safe.

Lt. Dan Marcou, who served with the La Crosse, Wisconsin, police department and retired as a highly decorated officer, has made it his mission to compile the stories of heroic cops in the U.S. who have faced extraordinary danger. Through superb training and a call to serve, these officers have taken down dangerous felons who threatened our communities.

Many of these stories that have gone untold — until now. That’s especially true of one that wound up inspiring many other officers.

Marcou, who writes for Police One and was a contributor to the Fox News historical series “Legends and Lies,” is the author of “Law Dogs: Great Cops in American History.”

In his book, he shares the story of Katie Conway, one of the bravest “law dogs” in America. She never gave up.

One Good Officer
Kathleen “Katie” Conway was just 23 years old in 1998 and a new officer who had recently completed police academy training. On the night of February 2, 1998, as she drove her patrol car through one of the roughest neighborhoods in Cincinnati, Ohio, Officer Conway slowed for a traffic light and lowered her driver’s side window to listen to the sounds of the night. This was the mark of a good officer — absorbing as much information as possible about her surroundings.

That patrol car window would be the catalyst for a chain of events that would change the officer’s life forever. As she drove slowly, a man carrying a boom box on his shoulder stepped into her path, causing her to brake. The man moved quickly to Conway’s open window and slammed her in the head with his boom box, knocking her to her right side.

The assailant then produced a .357 magnum and began firing at Conway as she remained hurt inside her own patrol car.

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The assailant was 41-year-old Daniel Williams, who had been arrested 17 times in the past. Earlier in the evening, Williams’ family had called police to report that he was dangerously mentally ill, had stopped taking his medication, and had threatened the life of his 71-year-old mother.

While Williams continuously shot Conway, he screamed, “I’m going to get you!” His bullets connected with the officer. Conway was shot four times in the legs and hip.

Williams opened the squad car door and jumped in the cruiser, pushing Conway, whom he assumed to be dead, to the side. Williams began accelerating dangerously down Cincinnati’s Central Parkway. Officer Conway lay slumped beside him, barely consciousness.

Conway’s training kicked in. “She heard the voice of one of her academy instructors as if he were next to her in that speeding squad,” Marcou writes in his book “Law Dogs.”

“Her instructor shouted, “Get your gun out! Get your gun out! Finish the fight!”

Conway slowly retrieved her 9 mm handgun from its holster, as she lay shot and bleeding in the careening car. Carefully, despite her wounds, she lifted her weapon and silently took aim. She fired her 9 mm twice — and knew as the assailant slumped over that he was dead, and that she was now in a speeding car totally out of control.

Her patrol car jumped a curb and went airborne, slamming into the side of a Sam Adams brewery. The car went from 50 mph to zero in the blink of an eye, and Conway smashed against the lower dashboard of the vehicle.

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Officer Conway somehow survived the initial attack, the subsequent shooting and a violent car accident. “Someone was gonna die that night, and it wasn’t gonna be me,” she said later. But her career, so recently begun, had ended.

“Cops have to go from community policing, wiping a child’s tears away, sometimes, to tackling a guy that’s twice their size and somehow getting them into handcuffs,” says Marcou. “The bad guys out there are really, really bad. Cops patrol the dark alleys of our cities and towns that no one wants to think about.”

Investigators who pieced together what happened inside Conway’s patrol car that night in February were puzzled by one thing: They retrieved two cartridges from the squad car, but the assailant had only one bullet hole in the right side of his head.

“Officer Katie Conway, while lying prone next to a raging lunatic, in a speeding squad car, her life blood spilling out of multiple gunshot wounds, had fired twice,” Marcou writes in “Law Dogs.”

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“The autopsy revealed she had not missed at all,” he writes. “The two bullets entered through the same hole.”

Conway’s story has been used to train other officers. Her fighting spirit inspired the creation of the character Madison “Maddy” Brown in the television show “SWAT: Blue Knights in Black Armor.”

Officer Conway “was a truly amazing cop,” Marcou tells LifeZette. “I like to call cops ‘modern knights.’ They possess the shield of a warrior with their armor and their training, and they know that someday their sword will be drawn.”

He added, “Katie Conway is a warrior and a modern knight that, through her story, has helped other modern knights survive.”

Marcou says she retired for medical reasons and today is a private person who shuns the limelight — but her story remains an inspiration to all those who serve.