An officer responding to a domestic disturbance at a North Texas residence, shot and killed off-duty sheriff’s deputy Larry Hostetter, 41, shortly after midnight. Police were tight-lipped about the incident other than to say that the Texas Rangers are leading the investigation.
In a news conference Monday morning, Sheriff Paul Cunningham said Hostetter was a good person, had been a law enforcement officer since 2000 and that being a sheriff’s deputy was everything to him, according to NBC 5.
Cunningham added that Hostetter, of Fredericksburg, was married and had three children.
“We just want to give our condolences and sympathies to everybody involved,” Cunningham said.
This is not the first time in recent weeks where we have seen that thin blue line injuring its own.
At the end of January, we reported on a Yonkers police officer who shot a suicidal officer from another precinct, claiming he feared for his safety.
Earlier in the January we also reported on an undercover Albuquerque police officer who was shot by another officer during a drug bust over $60 worth of meth. The media called it a “tragic accident” while, in reality, it was another example of police shooting someone who poses no threat to them.
In another tragic incident, John Ballard Gorman was shot and killed by fellow officer during a training exercise in Tunica, MS last month. The officer who shot Gorman failed to switch out his weapon for a training weapon and fired a real round into his fellow officer, killing him.
While 116 citizens have been killed at the hands of law enforcement thus far this year, the only shooting deaths of officers this year have all been attributed to fellow officers. Over the weekend in Dallas an officer was killed in a murder-suicide but the shooter has not been identified.
The recent chorus from cops, that blue lives matter seems to ring hollow, as it isn’t officers that are being gunned down in the streets on a daily basis by citizens.
Judging from the incidents that have transpired so far this year, it seems the greatest deadly threat to blue lives, is other blue lives.
