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Tim Conley, the first officer on the scene, was still in his car when bullets raked the vehicle, hurting him and shattering the windshield. He slammed his car into reverse and sped away backwards. -- Mpozi Mshale Tolbert / The Star   Related content Special Report: Officer down THE TRAGEDY • IPD officer fatally shot • Gunfire spurred a flurry of 911 calls • Pistol duel ended rampage • Shootings renew area's fears about safety THE OFFICERS AND THE SUSPECT • Slain policeman always wanted to be an officer • About the officers killed or wounded • 'Everyone around here thought he was sick' THE FUNERAL • 2,200 attend funeral for slain IPD patrolman • Family converges to honor a brother • Many had personal reasons for paying respects • Holladay: Those mourning officer shouldn't forget his love of life THE ISSUES • Demand drives sale of assault-style weapons • Violent actions raise concerns for better care • IPD officers shot, killed since 1956 in the line of duty FEEDBACK • Read condolences for the family of the slain officer and offer your own   Reconstructing the scene During a terrifying 16 minutes of violence on the Southside early Wednesday morning, Kenneth C. Anderson sprayed his neighborhood with gunfire, killing one police officer and wounding four more before a SWAT team member fatally shot him. 1:53 a.m. Indianapolis Police Department officers are dispatched after a 911 call. Neighbors report hearing gunfire coming from the garage at 2704 Dietz St. 1:59 a.m. Officer Tim Conley arrives on the scene. Shortly afterward, he tells dispatch that he is under fire. While in his car, Conley is shot in the abdomen. He puts his car in reverse and backs up going north until he hits a fence post. Officers Mark Fagan, Ty Van Wagner and Lt. Richard Proffitt rescue Conley. They are not injured, but their squad cars are riddled with bullets. 2:01 a.m. Officers Timothy Laird and Kim Cissell come under fire as they drive north to the 2800 block of Dietz St. Laird gets out of his squad car to seek cover in Cissell's car. Between the cars, Laird is fatally wounded. Cissell drives Laird to Troy Avenue. 2:01-2:09 a.m. The shooter walks down an alley and through the parking lot of True Word Baptist Church onto Tindall Street. He walks north on Tindall to the corner of Tindall and Gimber streets, brandishing a rifle with a large ammunition clip. Officers Leon Essig, Andrew Troxell and Peter Koe arrive eastbound on Gimber, stopping west of Tindall Street and east of State Street. The suspect takes cover behind a Jeep Cherokee at the southeast corner of Tindall and Gimber. He fires several rounds at the three officers. Essig is hit in the arm. Troxell is hit in the hand. Koe is hit in the knee and his face is cut. Koe, a SWAT team member, retrieves an AR-15 assault rifle from his trunk and fires at the gunman, striking him in the head and chest. The gunman falls and is seen by witnesses on the ground behind the Jeep. Witnesses see Koe limp over to the suspect and hold him at gunpoint until other officers arrive. 2:09 a.m. The incident ends. Source: IPD, eyewitness Joe Wheeler What neighbors saw “They fired at him and put him out of commission.” Elmer Killmon, 68, 1704 E. Gimber St., was awake when the shooting began. He looked out his front door and saw Kenneth C. Anderson firing at police. “The shootout really looked like what you would see in a movie.” Gabriel Harman, 27, 1715 E. Gimber St., was awakened by a shot at 2 a.m. He and his fiancee, Lori Prindle, 28, watched the firefight begin and took cover at the back of the house. “It was unbelievable. When I went back to bed, I thought: ‘I must be dreaming.’” Allen Meadows, 18, 1708 E. Gimber St., heard shots while he was watching the Olympics on television at 2 a.m. He watched Anderson shoot his way up Tindall Street. “Kenny was squeezing off a lot of rounds. If I had to count, there was 100 shots.” Robbie Wheeler, 1745 E. Gimber St., who saw the shooting from her bedroom window, about 30 feet from the gunman. Leaders react “The man exited the house and was just shooting at anything and everything that approached him.” Lt. Paul Ciesielski, Indianapolis police spokesman “Our IPD officers were absolutely heroic in their actions this morning responding to and ultimately neutralizing a dangerous, unstable person who, by his actions, put many, many innocent lives in danger.” Mayor Bart Peterson, who visited the scene of the shooting “He was well-liked, and well-respected, and he had a long history ahead of him. And it was cut short.” Vince Huber, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, speaking of Officer Timothy Laird Sources: Indianapolis Police Department, Star staff reporting

When Indianapolis police returned a confiscated collection of handguns and rifles to a Southside man in March, some in the department worried.

"I have a feeling this guy will be a suspect in a homicide very soon," one IPD officer wrote in an e-mail. "I just hope I don't get dispatched to his house."

Early Wednesday morning, IPD squad cars sped to Kenneth C. Anderson's neighborhood, answering 911 calls from awakened neighbors who peeked through their windows to see Anderson walking up the street indiscriminately firing an assault rifle.

The e-mail proved tragically prophetic.

Anderson, 33, armed with an assault rifle, a .357-caliber pistol and .22-caliber derringer, ambushed police, killing one officer and wounding four others before a SWAT team member gunned him down. Officers would later find Anderson's mother fatally shot in her nearby home.

Only 16 minutes separated the first emergency call from the end of the furious gunfight.

In the aftermath, Mayor Bart Peterson announced an investigation into why weapons taken from the man during a January encounter with police were returned.

At the time, police sent to the scene to help paramedics with a combative patient thought Anderson was delusional and dangerous. He was medically evaluated, diagnosed as schizophrenic, a relative said, but not arrested.

On March 8, despite warnings from officers who knew Anderson, the department returned his guns because it had no legal grounds to keep them.

Peterson said his office will review that decision.

"We need to figure out how to make the law comply with common sense," the mayor said.

The review also will look at whether officers who responded to Anderson's mother's home were aware of his possible mental problems and his arsenal.

"We intend to get answers as quickly as possible," Peterson said. "If mistakes were made, we want to admit those and correct them."

The decision to return the guns especially troubled Patrolman Eric Strange, who believed that Anderson irrationally thought others were out to harm him and especially disliked police.

Anderson "has enough firepower to give our SWAT team a long fight" Strange said in a March e-mail to IPD's legal department.

When it came, the fight was brief but deadly.

The fatal moments began with a flurry of calls to the city's 911 center just before 2 a.m. Wednesday.

One caller said Anderson had killed his mother in the 2700 block of Dietz Street.

Others said somebody was roaming the streets with a machine gun.

Police were dispatched to the home of Anderson's mother, 66-year-old Alice Marie Anderson, at 1:53 a.m. An autopsy is pending, but it appeared she had been shot in the abdomen.

The neighborhood of mostly single story, wood-frame homes in the $60,000 range lies between Garfield Park and Keystone Avenue, south of Raymond Street.

Patrolman Tim Conley arrived at the home six minutes after getting the call. He had not even stepped from the car when bullets peppered the vehicle, shattering his windshield and wounding him in the abdomen and leg.

Conley slammed the car into reverse and sped backward down the dark street.

Neighbor Joe Wheeler, 42, said he watched from a window as Anderson, visible in the glare of a streetlight, walked after the police car, blasting it with his rifle.

He disappeared into the darkness and minutes later turned the weapon on the next two police cars to arrive.

Officers Timothy "Jake" Laird, 31, and Kim Cissell turned onto the block and were met by a barrage from Anderson's SKS rifle, similar to a military AK-47.

In the darkness, the men saw muzzle flashes but couldn't tell how many weapons they faced because of the volume of gunfire.

"It reminded me of fighting in the jungles of Vietnam," Chief Jerry Barker said later after talking to his officers. "You're facing an unseen enemy."

Cissell backed up, bullets hammering his car but leaving him uninjured.

Laird arrived in the car behind him. A four-year veteran of the department, he was fatally wounded high in the chest when a round hit above his protective vest.

The shooting wasn't over.

Anderson walked west from his mother's street toward his own house around the corner at 1714 E. Gimber St. Frightened neighbors watched him cut through yards and the parking lot of True Word Baptist Church.

At the corner of Tindall Street and Gimber in the next block, he spotted officers Leon Essig, Andrew Troxell and Peter Koe about 20 feet away, their cars blocking Gimber.

Anderson ducked behind a Jeep Cherokee in a driveway and raised his assault rifle to blast the police cars. He fired so many rounds that in a house across the street, 27-year-old Gabriel Harman and his fiancee, Lori Prindle, 28, ducked for cover and ran for the back of their home.

They headed for a window to climb outside to safety.

Essig was wounded in the arm. Troxell was hit in the hand. Koe, a member of the SWAT team, was on regular duty as a patrol officer but had his equipment, including an AR-15 assault rifle, in the trunk of his cruiser.

Koe went for the gun, Anderson firing at him, and Koe was shot in the right knee.

He grabbed the rifle and returned fire, striking Anderson in the head and chest, finally ending the rampage.

Barker credited his officers with using discipline and relying on their training to hold their fire rather than blindly shoot and endanger the lives of innocent residents.

Like all police shootings in Marion County, Prosecutor Carl Brizzi said evidence will be brought before a grand jury. The police department's rules also require that officers who fire their weapons be placed on administrative duty while supervisors review their actions. The shootings themselves are being investigated by Indianapolis police homicide detectives.

Though the investigation is continuing, Barker said Koe was the only officer known to have fired his weapon.

"It wasn't until that final confrontation, basically face to face with the perpetrator, that firearms were fired by police," Barker said.

In the sudden silence, neighbors watched as Koe limped across the pavement to the back of the Jeep, where Anderson lay.

Koe held his wounded right knee, but kept his rifle trained on the gunman. Other officers soon arrived, rushing to the scene of the city's first line-of-duty shooting death of an officer in 16 years.

Laird's death was the 56th IPD fatality since the department was founded 150 years ago.

Authorities closed off the entire neighborhood as a crime scene. At 5:41 a.m., Barker sent out a message to the entire force of more than 1,200 officers:

"I Chief Barker regrettably inform you Officer Timothy Laird, C421, has been killed in the line of duty."

Sherron Franklin, an IPD patrolwoman and member of the City-County Council, said the incident helped explain why officers "think differently than most people."

"Because we have to confront stuff like that," she said.

"It makes you bitter and it makes you angry, because nobody else is going to go out there and do this."

All the officers wore body armor, but a police union official found the firepower mismatch cause for concern. Ordinary patrol officers, who are issued handguns and shotguns, are "outgunned and out-weaponed by criminals on the street," said Vince Huber, the president of the local Fraternal Order of Police chapter.

He has been critical of the department for not issuing patrol officers heavier weapons following the September 2001 shooting death of Marion County Sheriff's Deputy Jason Baker -- who was killed by the same type of rifle Anderson used Wednesday. In 2002, an assailant also used the same model in a shooting that wounded three IPD officers.

The department has received about 250 AR-15, military-style, rifles but has not distributed them to patrol officers yet, officials say, because the department hasn't found a safe firing range for training.

Public Safety Director Robert Turner said the new rifles would not have mattered in this situation.

"We can't just shoot -- not even a firearm, not even a pistol -- in a neighborhood where we have citizens at home asleep," he said.

"This is not about who has the bigger gun."

Star Reporters Theodore Kim, Fred Kelly and Will Higgins contributed to this story. Call Star reporter John Strauss at (317) 444-6208.

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