Man Who Stabbed Another Engaged and Shot By Police Officer

A video with a police officer engaging a nut job with a knife recently made it to the top of everyone's news feed over the past few days. This story is insane and shows how quickly things can go sideways, with a bunch of lessons to be learned.

There is so much we can learn from this video and its story that I can't ignore it even though others have covered it. I have more to add.

But first …

Some back story: Before the female police officer ever even caught up with this guy, it all started over a mask. The man, named Sean Ruis, 42, was angry that he was being refused entrance to a store. At some point an argument took place, which led to the man stabbing a 77 year old with a knife.

After the stabbing took place Ruis fled the scene only to be spotted shortly after a 911 call was placed. The female officer was a 22-year veteran who can be seen in the following video pulling the suspect over:

As you can see, the suspect immediately gets out of his car with a knife in hand. For anyone who understands just how dangerous a determined person can be with a knife and how much distance they can make up, you know that it just got real for her and that it'll take a miracle on her part to deescalate him to the ground without engaging.

Plus, before pulling this person over, the officer knows that he just stabbed someone and is likely not in the right frame of mind to reason with. She didn't know if he had a gun, or just the knife he used to allegedly stab the 77 year old at the store.

As a side note, I want you to consider that she already had her firearm out of the holster, trained on the alleged, now deceased, stabber with at least an understanding that he wasn't playing with a full deck and things would likely go sideways.

Think about you being in a similar situation with a holstered gun. How would you react? I like to put myself in different situations, mentally, and this is a good one to do that with. Reason being, as can be seen here, the statement “you don't bring a knife to a gun fight” has no validity unless you can get to your gun.

She had her gun in her hands and still struggled to bring him down.

Anyway, back to the point —

At some point she must have realized the predicament she was in as she can be seen trying to put distance between them. But as quickly as she's putting distance between them, he's making it up. Suddenly, he rushes at her and she's forced to shoot.

She shot several times, I can count maybe 9 or 10, but it's hard with the echo, and he seemed largely unaffected by the fact that she was shooting him.

It's unclear at this point if she missed or if he was high, or maybe just had so much adrenaline pumping through his veins that he didn't initially feel any pain, but this is an important factor to consider when choosing your concealed carry firearm.

(I'm going with she “may have” missed, but if she did miss, I don't think she missed them all. More on this in a moment.)

There are several guns out there that are lagging in the round-count department. You always want to put as much ammunition in your gun as you can in case you do miss, are dealing with more than one bad guy, or if the single bad guy you're dealing with is unable to feel pain for whatever reason.

If police still carried revolvers, likely like they had when she first started on the police force more than 22 years ago, I doubt the story would have ended well. He would have connected somehow with his knife after the sixth shot.

The alleged stabber had succumbed to his wounds, and I get it. She shot him a lot, but they were necessary shots. This also brings up the important point about how much is too much because I'm sure there are some people out there who are pro looting but anti people protecting themselves.

I don't think she shot him too many times. I think she did the best she could in understanding the circumstances she was in and he continued to press on even after her initial shots were ineffective or worse, missed.

And, I'm leaning towards she didn't miss. While I'm unsure of how good of a shooter she is, you can learn a lot by how someone handles a gun in a non-shooting manner. What I mean, is that she cleared the malfunction like a boss. Your average concealed carrier cannot perform a basic tap-rack all that well, but she handled it great.

Something like that takes practice to be able to do right under stress and by what I can see, she did really well here.

And, before any conclusions are made about the malfunction and how it happened, or that it happened with the type of gun she was using, if you watch the video frame by frame like I have about 10 times by now, you can see that the bad guy comes into contact with her gun in an attempt to take it away from her as you can see in the still I grabbed below:

This is very easy to miss if you're watching the video at full speed, but if you watch the video frame by frame, it's apparent that contact with him somehow caused the malfunction.

In the very next attempted shot she has a malfunction. I therefore don't believe that she limp-wristed the malfunction, but believe the gun was out of battery because he grabbed onto it while she was defending herself.

Then there's also the fact that her WML (weapon mounted light) came on when she was shooting. If you watch the video frame by frame, you can see the light on his body several times at center mass. Here's a still I took from the video highlighting this point:

I'm therefore making the conclusion based on that alone that she probably did not miss her target. If more info comes out about this and she did miss I'll pull this statement, or at least edit it to show that. Until then, I'm going with she didn't miss all the shots, maybe none of the shots. But again, I'm not positive.

And, running with the whole malfunction thing, I'd like to urge you to practice clearing malfunctions. In the Marines, it's something that's drilled into us, but the average concealed carrier has a hard time. We've got a few things to help with malfunction clearing, one of them is absolutely revolutionary in design, and it's the Type 3 Malfunction Round that lets you train for this type of stoppage for the first time.

And of course, we always recommend using dummy rounds in training to help simulate other types of malfunctions. You can find our dummy round page, here.

If you have anything to add about this entire incident, please let us know in the comments below.