'They just shot me,' N.J. man tells 911 of 'prowlers' who turn out to be state police
The state troopers had responded to the wrong home. Gerald Sykes, 76, thought they were intruders.
As he lay wounded in bed next to his shotgun, 76-year-old Gerald Sykes told 911 dispatchers he had been shot by "prowlers" - who he later found out were two New Jersey state troopers who had responded to the wrong house.
"We had prowlers, they just shot me," Sykes said in the call just before midnight July 29 from his rural home in Upper Deerfield Township, Cumberland County.
The Inquirer and Daily News obtained a recording of the call from the county Thursday through a public records request. The county said it redacted parts of the call involving personal information.
"Who shot you?" the dispatcher asked.
"The prowlers," Sykes said.
In the same call, when Sykes was transferred from a county police dispatcher to a state police dispatcher, he described what happened when he walked into the living room with his gun to investigate shadowy figures he and his wife had seen on the back porch. The porch connects to the living room through a door.
"I walked out to the other room, and they were standing out there," Sykes said. "And all the sudden they just shot three times through the glass door."
"Who did?" the state police dispatcher asked.
"The guys out on the porch!" Sykes yelled.
Several times he told the dispatchers, "Hurry."
"We have the police and ambulance on the way," the county dispatcher told Sykes at one point. "The police might be even there already."
Authorities had dispatched the troopers to Sykes' home after mistakenly tracing to that location a disconnected 911 call in which the caller did not speak. Only one of the two troopers opened fire.
The state Attorney General's Office, which is investigating, has not said where the disconnected 911 call came from or who made it, or why authorities believed it originated in Sykes' home.
Rich Kaser, the family's attorney, said Thursday he believed the original call bounced off a cellphone tower next to Sykes' home before disconnecting. Kaser said the call was made from within Cumberland County, but more than a mile from Sykes' home.
The Attorney General's Office, in an earlier statement, said troopers had knocked on Sykes' front door and heard no response, then approached a sliding-glass door in the back and knocked there, shining flashlights into the house and announcing they were responding to a 911 call.
Sykes' family says neither he nor his wife heard knocks.
Two bullets struck Sykes in the chest and one in the upper groin.
Sykes, falling backward as the trooper's shots hit him, fired a shotgun shell before retreating to the bedroom bloodied and in a panic, according to Kaser.
Kaser and Sykes' family have said that the trooper fired first, and that the family is considering legal action.
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