Kenneth Caplan, a reserve
deputy constable for Harris County, Precinct 6 in Texas, has been arrested for shooting
a woman in a road rage incident earlier this month.
The incident happened on
November 11, and escalated when the woman, who was not identified in multiple
reports, said Caplan cut her off in traffic. Annoyed, she honked her horn and
then bolted around Caplan’s car and cut him off.
This sent the man into a rage.
He pulled alongside the woman. She thought that he was going to cuss at her.
She shared the full harrowing experience in comments to the Houston Chronicle,
noting that he “drove alongside her, rolled his window down, pointed his weapon
and opened fire.”
“I just started crying because
I knew I was going to die,” she said. “I wanted to call my mom to tell her ‘I
love you.'”
Caplan had a female passenger
with him. Together they fled the scene.
“He was aiming at me and I
thought he was going to cuss me out. It didn’t register that I was, you know,
going to get shot,” the victim added. “The blood was in between my nails, just
crazy blood, and all over my cellphone, just covered.”
Click2Houston reports that the
bullet grazed the woman’s head and that she was later admitted to the hospital,
where she would stay for three days with “non-life threatening injuries.”
The Chronicle states that
Kenneth Caplan was not wearing his uniform at the time of the incident, nor was
he on duty.
“Precinct 6 neither condones
nor tolerates the actions taken by Kenneth Caplan that connected him to this
incident, and the necessary measures were taken to collect his credentials and
remove him from our status,” Precinct 6 later stated in a news release.
With all the media attention
given to officers using deadly force, this latest incident doesn’t help the
relationship between peace officers and the general public.
In August, there were two
separate shootings that received a great deal of national attention — one
involving Dillon Taylor, a white unarmed man who was killed by a police
officer, and then Michael Brown, who died after being shot several times by
Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson, Missouri, police department.
In both cases, grand juries
decided that there wasn’t enough evidence to pursue charges. Nevertheless,
stories like these and that of Kenneth Caplan could continue to put the public
on edge when dealing with law enforcement.
Do you think the officer who
fired at the woman for honking should be given hard prison time?
