AN armed police officer has revealed she shot a gunman dead with two rounds from her weapon — then braced herself for the nightmare months she knew would follow.
Her weapon was still smoking as she looked down at the suspect — and the fear of the legal backlash set in.
Lucy and a male colleague had been forced to shoot when a suspect opened the door of his home and pointed a firearm at them.
She recalled: “I was thinking ‘What on earth has just happened?’ It was like an out of body experience. Instinctively, I thought there was nothing else I could have done.”
But her shock and sorrow immediately after the shooting of 43-year-old James Fox soon turned to concerns about the potential consequences for herself.
Married mum Lucy said: “I knew what was coming — a lot of questions and an inquest.”
Lucy recalled the shooting and its gruelling aftermath during an interview with The Sun at the East London base of the Met’s MO19 specialist firearms command.
She and a colleague involved in another fatal shooting gave a rare insight into the torment endured by armed officers called upon to kill in order to protect the public.
They spoke solemnly of their sorrow and the legal gauntlet they were forced to run following the shootings, which were both ruled lawful killings at inquests.
Each concurs with Met Police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley’s assertion that firearms officers would rather face a terrorist with a gun than a gangster as the law will treat them more fairly.
The officers, granted anonymity by law, were working on armed response vehicles (ARVs) at the time of the shootings.
Veteran firearms officer Lucy, in her 40s, was on a night shift in August 2015 when Mr Fox’s stepmother called police to say he had put a gun to a child’s head and threatened his father.
Mr Fox, who had mental health issues, also threatened to burn down their house before leaving with the gun and going back to his own flat in Enfield, North London.
When Lucy arrived, she and four other armed colleagues surrounded Mr Fox’s front door.
She said: “At this point I was screaming ‘armed police’. That’s when he opened the front door and pointed a gun at me and my colleague.
“It felt like he was standing there for a lifetime pointing his gun at us. He was shot five times in all. Two by me, three by the other officer.
“I remember thinking, one of my first thoughts was, ‘Thank God, he is not a black man’. It was a selfish point of view based around the media attention but one I felt with my family in mind.”
Lucy immediately searched the flat, where an air pistol was found, then returned to Mr Fox to perform CPR before being relieved by colleagues. She said: “Once I was in the police car I burst into tears.”
The shooting was the first in the UK to be recorded by a Body Worn Video (BWV) camera being worn by Lucy’s colleague.
She said: “I remember thinking ‘Thank God the camera is there because it has seen what I have seen. If it wasn’t for BWV it could have been different. It would have been just our account without the video.”
Lucy gave a written statement to the police watchdog and broke down in tears while giving evidence at the inquest into Mr Fox’s death a year later.
She returned to firearms duties once the hearing was over.
But Lucy still carries the burden of taking a life. She says: “I have never told my children. I have told my sister but not my mum. It will always have an impact on me.”
Sam, her colleague on the Met’s firearms command, said the traumatic experience of using his weapon to kill had changed him.
The married dad of three, in his 40s, was one of two officers who opened fire on gunman Richard Cottier outside a petrol station in Romford, East London, in April 2018.
Mr Cottier was under the influence of drink and drugs and suffering a recent bereavement when he began making threats at his home and claimed to have a gun.
Sam, not his real name, said: “It looked like a sawn-off shotgun slung on his shoulder.
“We deployed and identified ourselves as armed police.
“He turned and started walking towards my colleague, who was five or six metres away.
“He started to lower the weapon to my colleague, who fired.
“Within a split second I fired but on the BWV it seems both were fired at the same time.
“He immediately went down. I ran back to the car to get the first aid kit. We could see he had catastrophic injuries with an exit wound to the neck.
“He was in a pretty bad way. We tried to treat his injuries but he died within a minute and a half.”
The inquest three years later heard the gun being carried by Mr Cottier was a modified air rifle.
Sam came under investigation and was absolved of any blame.
But the process caused him huge anxiety. He said: “It plays on your mind. You are constantly thinking ‘Is there going to be a knock on the door and someone waiting with handcuffs?’
“My wife is a police officer and has been a firearms officer.
“She gets angry and frustrated around the accountability process.
“My wife says a little bit of me died after it happened. She thinks I lost a bit of my mojo and spark.
“We need to be investigated if someone dies and we need to be transparent. But that needs to be balanced on how it impacts on us. We are human beings and it has a massive impact.
“It is life-changing. It doesn’t matter how emotionally strong you are, it does change you. It had an emotional impact on me.
“This guy was like me, a father of three, married, but had just made some bad decisions.
“His actions dictated what we did that night but it didn’t stop me going home thinking ‘I have taken a father away from his kids’ and thinking about my own children. I struggled with that a lot.
“Any incident we go to, it’s in the back of my mind ‘what are we going into and what is the aftermath going to be like? What s***storm is coming our way?’”
