EAST SPENCER — A Salisbury policeman struck and killed a woman early Saturday as he sped to the aid of a fellow officer pinned down by gunfire in a late-night restaurant parking lot.
Investigators say Beverly Ann Fisher, 38, of 308 S. Boundary St., stepped in front of the oncoming car driven by Salisbury Police Sgt. Mike Dummett. Fisher died at the scene, according to a N.C. Highway Patrol report.
City officials blame the death on activities at JR’s Night Hawk, which they see as closer in nature to a night club that attracts what Mayor Erma Jefferies called “undesirable behavior.”
Fisher had just left the business, patrons said, after police were called when a fight turned into a melee.
But several people who were at the restaurant Saturday morning, and the business owner, say police are at fault for the death. The city, they said, is looking for an excuse to blame JR’s.
Jefferies said she’ll call a meeting this week of the East Spencer Board of Aldermen to discuss the town’s options for dealing with the business.
Jefferies said she drove by JR’s, which is behind Lloyd’s Grocery on South Long Street, around 11 p.m. Friday, but didn’t see a large crowd in the parking lot.
Around 1 a.m., Jefferies said, she got a call from Alderman Titus King. He had driven by the business and “said there were about a hundred people standing around up there and we needed to get police officer up there to disperse the crowd,”she said.
The mayor called East Spencer Police Officer Vince Kotarsky, one of two officers in the town’s police department.
Kotarsky was returning to Rowan County after driving a juvenile offender to Gastonia. Instead of going home, he turned north on Long Street and headed for JR’s.
“When I got there, there were more people than I figured,” Kotarsky said. He estimates the crowd at about 150, but said they weren’t all in the parking lot.
There was no trouble, he said. So he walked inside the business briefly, then sat in the parking lot.
Around 3 a.m., JR’s proprietor James Theron Lloyd, who leases the building from his mother, Lloyd’s Grocery owner Sheila Lloyd, closed the business and started ushering people out.
Two men got into a fight in the parking lot, Kotarsky said, and he tried to break it up. When they continued to fight, he pulled a pepper spray canister from his belt and shot a stream into the air.
Some of the people who were there said Kotarsky sprayed the crowd around the two men. Kotarsky said wind caught the pepper spray and spread it into a lot of people’s eyes, including his.
One thing everybody agrees on: that’s when the trouble really began.
“Pretty much all hell broke loose,” Kotarsky said. “One fight turned into three fights, turned into 10 fights, turned into pretty much everybody fighting.”
Kotarsky said someone hit him from behind, then several people hit him.
Then he heard the gunfire.
Kotarsky said he crouched close to the ground, drew his weapon and scanned the parking lot for the source of the shots, but the gunfire seemed to be coming from at least three directions.
With more than 100 people scattering, and cars all around, he said, he couldn’t see who was shooting.
“It was mayhem,” he said. “Iwas right smack dab in the middle of it.”
Unable to make it back to his patrol car, and unsure whether he could get to another car or some other cover, Kotarsky hit a panic button on his radio, signalling an emergency to other police agencies.
Kotarsky said it felt like forever, but he’s sure it was only a couple of minutes before the first officer responded to his call. A Spencer police officer was followed closely by a Rowan County Sheriff’s deputy.
Soon after the other officers arrived, sirens blaring and blue lights flashing, the parking lot began to clear.
But there were still more officers on the way. Granite Quarry Police Officer Todd Taylor was speeding up Long Street, followed closely by Salisbury Police Sgt. Dummett.
Dummett never made it.
A tragic end
Two 200-foot-long patches of rubber mark the spot where Dummett slammed on his brakes. The skid marks start in front of Shady Grove Baptist Church and continue past Correll Street.
It was there, said First Sgt. Vincent Mellone of the N.C. Highway Patrol, that Fisher stepped into the road, and into the path of a car going 67 mph.
Mellone, who investigated the accident, said Dummett’s car slid 98 feet before the impact and 98 feet after.
He said Dummett was running with blue lights and sirens. And video taken by an in-car camera shows the Salisbury officer couldn’t avoid hitting Fisher, Mellone said.
Video from the camera in the car driven by Granite Quarry’s Taylor shows Fisher nearly stepped in front his car, Mellone said. It appears she may have been trying to flag down one of the officers, though Mellone doesn’t know why. He asks that anyone with information call him at 704-637-7574.
Kotarsky said the impact knocked Fisher into the air and she landed on the rear window of the Salisbury officer’s car, shattering the glass and coming to rest inside the car.
Mellone said he’ll turn his completed report over to the Rowan County District Attorney’s Office, which will consider whether to file charges. Police say they have no doubt Dummett was not at fault.
“I know that officer and every other officer thought I was getting ready to die,”Kotarsky said. “If it wouldn’t have been for those sirens coming, I probably would have died, because they would have kept on shooting.”
Salisbury Police Deputy Chief Mark Wilhelm said Dummett was taken off duty for the rest of the weekend, but that he wasn’t traveling too fast in the 35 mph zone, given the situation.
“It’s up to the officer’s discretion at that point, but you have to consider he was responding to what he thought was a life-or-death situation with another officer,” he said. “It’s just an unfortunate incident; we’re all sorry it happened, but there’s nothing we can do to change it.”
A rescue gone awry
Not everyone agrees with that assessment.
Some who where at JR’s early Saturday said the situation wasn’t nearly as bad as police claim. And the owner faults Kotarsky for not giving the all-clear in time to prevent Fisher’s death.
JR’s proprietor Theron Lloyd said there were very few people in the parking lot when Kotarsky arrived at the business.
“When he got here, he did nothing about it,” Lloyd said. “That’s how bad it was.”
Lloyd estimated that about 120 people remained at the restaurant — which he said has a capacity of more than 500 — when the scuffle started. About 30 of them were still inside, he said.
Franswa Wilkerson, standing in the parking lot of Lloyd’s Grocery with friends Saturday afternoon, said there wasn’t much of a fight until Kotarsky doused the crowd with pepper spray.
“That’s when all the rowdiness started,”Wilkerson said. “He just panicked and started spraying everybody.”
Lloyd said he heard five shots, and he saw one man fire three of them. All of them, he said, were fired into the air and no one tried to shoot anyone else. The evidence, he said, is that no one was injured there.
“The worst shot in the world, with 80 people around, will hit somebody,” he said.
Lloyd said the parking lot cleared about five minutes after the shots rang out. He said the accident that claimed Fisher’s life occurred as Kotarsky and other officers stood in the empty parking lot looking for shell casings.
“He should have radioed that he didn’t need them,” Lloyd said. “That way the Salisbury Police car would not have been running down the road and hit that woman and killed her.”
A friendly face
Acquaintances remembered Fisher on Saturday as a pleasant woman who was always friendly.
“She was an ideal worker; she was full of laughter all the time,” said Ray Crawford, an assistant manager at K&W Cafeteria, where Fisher worked. “She had a lot of friends here and she will be missed.”
Family members reached by telephone at Fisher’s father’s house in Faith declined to comment. No one answered the door at her darkened apartment on Boundary Street.
Sheila Lloyd said Fisher was a frequent customer at her store.
“She was very friendly when she came in here,” she said. “She was a very sweet young woman.”
Lucia Gaither, an assistant minister at Gethsemane Missionary Baptist Church, said Fisher had begun attending her church. She said Fisher had two children, and called her a “really nice young lady.”
Trouble spot
Jefferies said Fisher’s death is attributable to problems at JR’s, problems the Board of Alderman feared when Lloyd said he wanted to open the restaurant.
“We were worried about someone getting killed ... not in that way,” she said.
Town officials objected to Lloyd’s obtaining a temporary permit to sell beer at the restaurant. And in the wake of Saturday’s events, Jefferies said she’ll try to prevent him from getting a permanent permit.
And Jefferies said she will explore the city’s legal options in dealing with the business.
“I believe there is enough evidence to take some type of action,” she said. “We have tried to work with them, and told them our concerns.”
The parking lot was quiet later Saturday, with a half-dozen or so people hanging around. A fence made of railroad ties turned on end surrounds the lot. A junked Ford Galaxie and piles of old tires sit beside the building.
Two-foot-high dingy white letters and the faint imprint of letters that used to hang on the faded red block wall give away the building’s old identity, the Red Light Club, the name it operated under for years.
The sign leaning against the wall by the front door lists numerous rules, among them no loitering, no fighting and no weapons.
Saturday was not the first time shots rang out in the parking lot, Theron Lloyd acknowledged. In fact, his father was shot there on New Year’s Eve in 1997.
But, he said, Saturday was the first time he recalls police responding so quickly.
“We’ve had people on the lot with guns threatening people and never got police response; they show up 30 or 45 minutes later,” he said. “Then, the police calls and they’re running over people to get here. That’s a disgrace as far as I’m concerned.”
Contact Scott Jenkins at 704-797-4248 or sjenkins@salisburypost.com
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