Bloomington Police Department
Captain Donald Owens became the
first police officer in the City of Bloomington, Indiana,
to be fatally shot in the line of duty
Friday, August 15, 1975
IN A SINGLE MOMENT, WITHIN THE PROTECTION OF HIS OWN POLICE STATION, Captain Donald Owens was fatally wounded in a scuffle with a man who had just been sentenced to jail. The 27 year veteran of the Bloomington Police Department had planned on retiring when he finished 20 years on the job. He filled out the forms and even turned them in only to ask for them back. The 49 year old chief of detectives was the first police officer in the city’s history to be fatally shot in the line of duty.
Owens was pronounced dead on arrival at the Bloomington Hospital Emergency Room after being shot through the heart as he escorted a prisoner from the city courtroom on the second floor of the police station to the jail downstairs. The prisoner had been escorted to the courtroom for arraignment on several charges. He became visibly upset at the amount of the $500 bond the judge set, crying and pleading for the judge to release him without bail. The judge refused and terminated the conversation.
Captain Owens escorted the still visibly upset prisoner out of the courtroom. As the courtroom door swung shut, sounds of a scuffle could be heard. A single shot rang out, and the prisoner pitched head first through the doors. The officer’s own gun, a .38 caliber snub nosed detective special, landed in front of the judge’s bench. Don Owens, shot in the chest, sprawled backward on the landing outside the courtroom.
As the judge sought shelter in his chambers and as other people in the courtroom scrambled for safety in adjoining offices, a detective arrived on the second floor to find the prisoner’s brother picking up Capt. Owens’ gun. The detective ordered the other man to drop the weapon, which he did.
Capt. Owens was still conscious and was heard to ask for an ambulance as blood stained the front of his shirt. The ambulance crew arrived from the fire station next door in a matter of seconds and administered advanced life support procedures all the way to the hospital but when they arrived there, Capt. Owens was dead. He was survived by his wife Catherine, 2 daughters Donna and Janice, a son Don II, 2 grandchildren, and his parents Harvey and Lottie Owens. An adopted brother was killed in action during World War II.
I WAS BABYSITTING A FRIEND’S 1 YEAR OLD SON that afternoon. Pam, the child’s mother and a police academy classmate, called to tell me the news. “You should be glad you weren’t in court today,” was how she started the phone conversation. I can hear her voice to this day. “Captain Owens was shot. He’s dead.”
We had a routine. I’d meet Pam in the lobby of the police station at shift change and give her her son, and I’d head on to work. It was my day off, but I hung around anyway. Almost everyone got involved in the shooting investigation in some way or another. Later that night, another officer and I were instructed to go to the hospital. Ironically, both Detective Owens and the man who shot him ended up at the same place. The perpetrator was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the abdomen; Don Owens was in the county morgue, which was in the basement of Bloomington Hospital.
A Friday night cloudburst had dumped nearly 3 inches of rain on Bloomington. The heavy rainfall was too much for the city’s storm sewers, and flash floods built up to depths of near 3 feet. The high water turned several streets and intersections into playgrounds for frolicsome people caught on the street during and after the storm. I remember groups of people splashing and laughing in an impromptu swimming hole near the intersection of Dunn and Kirkwood Avenues as we drove slowly through the water trying to get to the hospital.
The other officer and I had been given two tasks. We were to fingerprint Detective Owens because despite nearly 30 years on the job, no one could find any record of his fingerprints. There were two sets of fingerprints on the gun that killed him, and the county prosecutor was being very meticulous: both sets had to be accounted for. One set was the killer’s, and we needed to verify for the record that the other set was the gun’s owner. The autopsy was over by the time we got there. We obtained the fingerprints on a standard fingerprint card.
An officer was guarding the killer in his hospital room. The prisoner had also been placed on suicide watch. We surrendered our weapons to the officer in the room and proceeded to perform a chemical test for the presence of gunpowder residue on the prisoner’s hands. We left, went back to the police station, completed and submitted the necessary paperwork.
EVERYONE KNEW DON OWENS. I remember him as an affable, outgoing man who enjoyed meeting and talking with people. Ironically, he wasn’t even supposed to be in court that day. The city court bailiff was on vacation. The officer assigned to fill the bailiff’s position had been sent home early by Owens to give the man a chance to prepare for a police academy training class that night.
