2019 death of U.S. police officer
Very early on March 5, 2019, Midland, Texas, United States, police officer Nathan Heidelberg (born December 2, 1990) was shot and killed while responding with fellow officers to a residence where a burglar alarm had gone off, the first Midland police officer killed on the job in over 50 years. The homeowner, David Wilson, an oil company executive who had fired the fatal shot in the belief that Heidelberg was an intruder attempting to force his way into his family home, was arrested and charged with manslaughter, later increased to murder by a grand jury. In late 2021, he was acquitted.
There were several communication issues during the incident. The initial silent alarm soon turned out to have been erroneous, but that was not relayed to officers who were already responding to what they believed was a possible burglary in progress. The police assumed the alarm company would inform the Wilsons that they were on the way. Heidelberg may not have adequately made it clear that the police were on the scene. The Wilsons had also spoken with 911 on two separate occasions before learning that the suspects outside were actually the police after a third and final call was made from dispatch.
The largest jury pool in Midland's history was called to hear the trial. With so many people in a confined space, jury selection became a COVID-19 superspreader event, infecting not only prospective jurors but the judge and delaying the trial. Wilson relied on Texas's stand-your-ground law and castle doctrine in his defense. After his acquittal he and his lawyers brought an unsuccessful action to have the Midland County district attorney removed from office over alleged misconduct before the trial. Both he and Heidelberg's family are suing the alarm manufacturer and installer. The road on which Midland police headquarters is located has been renamed in Heidelberg's memory.
Background.
A native of Wichita Falls, David Wilson grew up watching his father work as operations manager for a small independent oil company that drilled 120 wells in Garza County's Dorward Field, after the family moved to Snyder, northeast of Midland. In his later teens he began working for his father's company, both managing investments and in field operations. "I didn't know how, what, where or when, but I knew I wanted to start my own oil company."
In 2002, during Wilson's college years, while he was also working for an oil-services company in Ira, an opportunity arose to buy six stripper wells, each producing 6 barrels a day, in the Dorward Field. He took it even though the price of oil at the time was $25 a barrel, making a marginal profit, and invested in more wells and land until he had the capital to drill wells of his own. Eventually he started Unitex Oil &amp; Gas, which by 2011 owned 150 wells producing 400 barrels a day, specializing in shallow-field plays on the eastern shelf of the Permian Basin. A year later he was named one of "Forbes"' 30 Under 30 in the energy sector. By 2019 Unitex employed 80 and owned 1,500 wells; the year before Wilson and his family had moved into a mansion on a lot off a cul-de-sac in the northern section of Midland. He and his wife taught Sunday school at First Baptist Church where he was also a deacon.
Heidelberg, who went by his middle name Hayden with friends and family, was born and raised in Greenwood, east of Midland. He graduated from Midland High School in 2009. After his 2011 graduation from Midland College, he earned a bachelor's degree in biology from Sul Ross State University. Heidelberg then joined the city's police department, graduating from its police academy in 2014. He played guitar in a local band called Ricky and the Rhinestones and also was part of the congregation at First Baptist Church.
Death of Heidelberg.
At 1:16 a.m. on March 5, 2019, a silent alarm went off at the Wilson home. The alarm company notified Midland police, who in turn dispatched Heidelberg and Victoria Allee, a probationary officer he was training, to the home. Within two minutes of the alarm, the company tested it and found it was no longer reporting an alarm condition, meaning the original signal was likely a false positive. It did not advise the police of this development.
Heidelberg and Allee drove up to the house without turning on their cruiser's lights or sirens, per procedure. Finding it darkened within, they walked around. They checked a back door and found it locked. At the front the door was unlocked; when Allee opened it an alarm chime went off, followed by a voice saying "Door open". The officers immediately closed it and called for backup.
The alarm awakened Wilson's wife, Amy, who in turn roused her husband. The couple went to a nearby closet, where he helped her get his Glock 19 handgun from a top shelf in the closet. Unaware that police were at the house, they saw shadows moving around outside and heard indistinct shouting, which David Wilson thought might be in Spanish. Amy Wilson went to call the police while her husband approached the front door, saying they could hear people outside and their steel front door had been kicked in. The dispatcher told her only that the police were coming.
By this time, outside the house, two additional Midland officers had arrived. While David and Amy had been getting their gun from the closet, leading the officers to report seeing shadows moving around in the house, Heidelberg opened the door again, away and announced once, "Midland police, come to the sound of my voice", shining his flashlight into the house. David Wilson walked up to the front door, fired one shot at the person holding the flashlight, and slammed it shut.
Amy then called 9-1-1, only to learn from the dispatcher that the police had already been at the house for some time. Her husband's bullet had struck Heidelberg in the wrist and chest, just outside the bulletproof vest he was wearing. He told another responding officer that he thought he was alright, then collapsed. Heidelberg's fellow officers administered first aid to him. Believing that the situation was too critical to wait for an ambulance, they took him in a police car to Midland Memorial Hospital, where further efforts to save him were futile. He was pronounced dead at 2:30 a.m.
Aftermath.
Following Heidelberg's death, police returned to the Wilson home and arrested him on a charge of second-degree manslaughter. He was released the next afternoon after posting $75,000 bond. In May he was indicted on the charge by a grand jury.
Heidelberg was the first Midland officer to die in the line of duty since 1966. Flags throughout the city were flown at half-staff. His police cruiser was parked outside police headquarters for a week while mourners left flowers. Chief Seth Herman praised him as "courageous, selfless, ethical and professional"; at Heidelberg's funeral, held at First Baptist, ending with the traditional last radio call to the fallen officer, he tearfully added "As much as I try, I will never be as good a man as Hayden." Burial was at Greenwood Cemetery.
Heidelberg was posthumously awarded the Medal of Valor by the department. Later, Governor Greg Abbott presented his family with a posthumous Star of Texas, an award given to every Texas police officer shot in the line of duty, in a ceremony at the state capitol. The section of Farm-to-Market Road 307 on which Midland police headquarters is located was named the Officer Hayden Heidelberg Memorial Highway since it connects Midland and Greenwood. At a ceremony dedicating the road and erecting signs, the department also gifted Heidelberg's now-decommissioned police cruiser to his family.
Trial.
In late September, Wilson's legal team filed a brief in support of its motion to get the indictment dismissed. It disclosed publicly that the alarm system had been malfunctioning on the night of the shooting. Not only had there been no ongoing alarm condition, the alarm had been reported at the Wilsons' pool house, which was wired with a system separate from their main house.
The motion was denied and trial preparations continued. The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, a little over a year after Heidelberg's killing, delayed the trial after Abbott suspended jury trials in the state. In late October 2021, district attorney Laura Nodolf announced that she had presented the case to the grand jury a second time and secured a new indictment charging Wilson with murder, on the theory that he "was very much intentional" rather than simply reckless when he fired. "He knew he would harm or kill the person behind the flashlight", she said. When jury selection began in November 2021, with 700 people, the largest jury pool in the county's history, gathered in a courtroom to be considered for service, the pandemic again caused a two-week delay in the trial when the occasion became a superspreader event, with the judge (who had to be hospitalized) and several prospective jurors coming down with the disease.
At the end of November, the trial finally began with nine women and five men seated as jurors and alternates. Witnesses who testified to the facts of the case were primarily law enforcement personnel who had been present that night or later investigated the case, the medical personnel who treated Heidelberg, staff from the alarm monitoring company and the Wilsons themselves. Both sides also presented expert witnesses in law enforcement training and the burglar alarm system. Their testimony was augmented by an evidentiary record that included police bodycam video and footage from the security cameras inside and outside the Wilsons' house.
In opening statements, the prosecution laid out its theory that Wilson had gone to the door intent on firing and fully aware there was a person just outside. His defense lawyers countered that he reasonably believed there were intruders outside who might have meant to bring harm to his family and he meant only to protect them. They pointed to Texas's stand-your-ground law, which permits the use of deadly force in self-defense in any place the actor is lawfully present, and castle doctrine, permitting the use of deadly force to defend one's residence, both where the actor reasonably believes a threat exists.
Prosecution.
After opening arguments, the state began its case-in-chief, putting Allee on the stand to recount the events that had led to the shooting. The next day, Nodolf showed the video of Wilson's interview by two Texas Rangers the day after the shooting, in which he said he had not heard Heidelberg call out that he was police, after which one of the Rangers, Cody Allen, testified about much of the documentary evidence collected at that time, including photographs of the gun and Heidelberg's uniform, as well as video montages of footage from the bodycams and the Wilson's security cameras. Heidelberg's cousin testified as to having identified the body and the county's deputy medical examiner about the cause of death.
On the third day the defense began making its arguments through cross-examination as Allen testified about the functioning of the alarm system. After he said that it had been 33 seconds between the door alarm going off and the shot firing, Wilson's lawyers asked if that was enough time for their client to have pulled up his security cameras and seen who was outside. They also emphasized the phrase "enter and die" as used in police training regarding the castle doctrine, after Allen mentioned it on the third day.
In response to a prosecution theory that Wilson could have just gathered his daughters along with his wife and hidden elsewhere in the house, the defense raised two points on cross. The first was legal: the castle doctrine abrogates the duty to retreat in one's own house. To support the second, they introduced diagrams of the house's floor plans, showing that as Wilson's daughters slept on the other side, he would have had to cross the center hallway with a clear line of sight from the front door, an action he may have judged too risky with intruders possibly already entering the house or preparing to do so.
The defense also pointed out that Allee was not interviewed until a week after the shooting, contrasting that with the relative promptness of Wilson's interview. Allen responded that it was standard practice to wait a day or two