1985-11-11 1
Off-duty Amarillo Police officer shot after stopping to give assistance
Shortly after 4:00 p.m. on November 11, 1985, Amarillo Police Sergeant James Mitchell, 42, was driving home from work when he witnessed an accident.
Randall Hafdahl, who was driving across Texas with two friends, Shawn David Terry and Daniel Helgren, was driving recklessly and lost control of his car.
Mitchell saw Hafdahl's car swerve around his truck and watched as it veered off the road.
Hafdahl's car left the highway, crossed a frontage road, crashed through a wooden fence, and came to rest in the back yard of a private residence.
Hafdahl later told investigators that he had consumed alcohol and hallucinogenic mushrooms earlier in the day.
Officer Mitchell stopped to investigate and to assist in the wreck. Mitchell was off duty and still dressed in his police uniform, wearing an unzipped windbreaker with "Amarillo City Police" emblazoned on the back.
Seeing the off-duty officer come come into the yard through the downed fence,
Hafdahl tried to restart the car, without success. He then hid a loaded 9 mm pistol under a jacket he was carrying, ran from the car and tried to flee through a gate. He could not unlatch the gate.
Mitchell drew his gun and pursued Hafdahl through the yard. An eyewitness said Mitchell identified himself as a police officer and ordered Hafdahl to stop.
When Mitchell was approximately six feet away from Hafdahl, Hafdahl turned and fired four shots. All shots hit Mitchell. Two of the four wounds were fatal, perforating Mitchell's heart and lung. Mitchell never returned fire.
A witness told police that after the officer was shot, one of the men ran to the trunk of the wrecked car and grabbed what appeared to be a bag of marijuana from the trunk.
After shooting Mitchell, Hafdahl fled the scene, only to turn himself in later that night.
Shawn David Terry, 22, was arrested near the scene of the shooting.
The third man, Daniel Louis Helgran, was later arrested in Clovis, New Mexico.
Terry told police he witnessed Hafdahl shoot the officer.
Helgra testified that he was removing the license plate from the wrecked vehicle when the shots were fired
On the night Hafdahl was arrested in Amarillo, he was arrogant, showed no remorse and claimed to not know why he was being arrested.
During a search of the wrecked car, the police recovered a gin bottle and beer cans and several pieces of identification with at least three different names.