In January 2008, Ryan Frederick, a 28-year-old who worked the night shift at a Coca-Cola plant in Chesapeake, Virginia, found himself at the center of a tragedy. Just days after his home had been burglarized, Frederick was jolted awake by the sound of his dogs barking and someone breaking through his front door. Grabbing his handgun, he cautiously approached the noise. A lower panel of the door had been shattered, and an arm was reaching through, fumbling for the handle. Frederick fired. The arm belonged to Detective Jarrod Shivers, who died from the gunshot wound. Frederick was arrested and initially charged with capital murder, with prosecutors even considering the death penalty. This episode revisits the night that changed Frederick’s life forever and ended Shivers’s. We hear from Frederick himself as well as veteran narcotics officer Neill Franklin.

Transcript

Ryan Frederick: My name is Ryan Frederick. 45 years old now. Born and raised in an area of Chesapeake, Virginia, called South Norfolk. Grew up with a pretty simple normal childhood. Had a mom and dad, sister, grandma and grandpa close by. Kind of small town, blue collar. Really happy childhood.

Radley Balko: At the age of 28, life was going pretty well for Ryan Frederick.

Ryan Frederick: Everything was good. I was engaged to be married with a girl I had been with for about four or five years. I worked as a merchandiser for Coca-Cola. And that was a great job for me, because I was a morning guy. Typically would wake up around 3, get to the first store between 3:30 and 4:30 fill the shelves with the product, move on to the next store. Pretty easy job. Great benefits. It was a great job for someone in their young 20s, had potential future promotions throughout the whole company, could transfer anywhere in the country or world for that matter. You know, I could have worked there for another 20, 30 years. It would have been a job I would have probably retired from.

Radley Balko: He had also taken up gardening.

Ryan Frederick: I had got some banana trees from my grandfather’s house when he had passed, and I cloned them and had them growing in buckets in the backyard.

I had a big dream, but it probably was silly. I was going to clone Japanese maples and start a business selling trees.

Radley Balko: And for a while, Frederick also grew cannabis. He was a shy guy who had lost his parents at an early age. So to relax, he smoked pot. And after discovering his green thumb, he thought it would be less risky to grow his pot himself.

Ryan Frederick: Yeah, at the time, I did smoke marijuana and had, I don’t remember how many plants, just a few plants. Nothing major. I didn’t want to have to deal with going to find people to buy it. And I just figured it would have been easier just mind my own business, deal with my own stuff.

Radley Balko: But over the course of just a few days, the drug war would come crashing down on him — and change at least two lives forever.

Ryan Frederick: I didn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t digest that. I was like, “What?” He was like, “You just killed a police officer.”

Radley Balko: From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage.

I’m Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years.

The so-called “war on drugs” began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country’s fervent commitment to defeat drug addiction, but the “war” part quickly became all too literal.

When the drug war ramped up in the 1980s and ’90s, it brought helicopters, tanks, and SWAT teams to U.S. neighborhoods. It brought dehumanizing rhetoric and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections.

All wars have collateral damage: the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause. But once the country dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs, we were more willing to accept some collateral damage.

In the modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to the Nixon administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This is Episode 2, A Death in the Dark: The story of Ryan Frederick and Detective Jarrod Shivers.

Ryan Frederick: It was either a Monday or Tuesday. I’d come home from work. I had a fenced-in yard, and my privacy fence had been bashed in. It didn’t look right. Someone had come in and done that.

Radley Balko: It was January 2008. Ryan Frederick had just come home after working his shift at the Coca-Cola plant to discover that someone had broken into his home.

Ryan Frederick: And then I went in my garage where I had those plants growing. There was all but like two of them stolen, door kicked in.

Radley Balko: Those plants were marijuana — eight in total, according to Frederick.

At the time, it was still illegal to grow pot in Virginia for any reason. Possession of the drug was a misdemeanor, punishable by 30 days in jail and up to $500 for a first offense. So for obvious reasons, Frederick didn’t report the robbery. He told only his fiancée.

Ryan Frederick: So the break-in happened, my fiancée comes home. She comes unglued, livid, like, “Get this crap out of here, I told you this should have never been in here,” blah blah blah.

Radley Balko: Until then, Frederick says his fiancée had been more worried about the police than about thieves breaking in to steal the plants. But the burglary unnerved her.

“It gives you a really, really, really, really uneasy feeling when you’ve seen your home broken into.”

Ryan Frederick: So I gather everything up, except for a banana tree. Take it and dispose of it, get rid of it up the road. All right, I’m done. I’m on board with her. I’m like, if this is gonna be the result of it, I don’t need that. I would rather go pay for it if I’m gonna do it than chance somebody coming in here and, you know, frazzling her. It gives you a really, really, really, really uneasy feeling when you’ve seen your home broken into.

Radley Balko: Three days later, on the night of January 17, another break-in. This time, Frederick was home when it happened.

Ryan Frederick: It was a Thursday evening. I go lay down, probably around 7:45ish, 8 o’clock. Everything’s pretty typical day: Went to work, come home, grab the locks, fiancée said she was going to the game, I said I’d probably be in bed. So I went home, had dinner, went to sleep.

And then, abruptly startled out of my sleep, I hear this big bang, crashing sound, and then I hear, like, wood breaking, like a tree, and I’m like, “What?” And then my dogs are just, like, barking out of control in a way that I’ve never heard them bark. So I’m already a little bit uneasy because we just had a break-in. So I’m like, “What the world is going on?” So I grab my gun and I started heading down the hallway.

Radley Balko: It was a few hours past dusk, so it was dark outside.

Ryan Frederick: So I’m going down, and I’m hearing these dogs, and I’m walking around the corner down the hall, and as I pass the end of the hallway, I can see in the door — it’s a four-panel door, two long panels at the bottom and two smaller square ones up top — someone had busted one of the bottom panels out of the door. And all I could see was blue jeans and a black jacket.

Now, that person that was standing there, I could see he was reaching down, reaching up for the deadbolt. I could kinda see that there was one other person behind him. So I was like in total freak panic mode at that point. And I’m like, “Oh my god.”

So I’m thinking in my head, this guy that’s broke in my house a couple days ago, he left a couple things and maybe he didn’t get it all ’cause I’m coming home and ran in and scared him off. He’s back. And he’s got somebody with him.

So, as that hand was going for that deadbolt, I shot for his hand. His arm quickly came back out of that door.

Radley Balko: Frederick couldn’t find his cordless phone to call 911. But he suspected a neighbor must have witnessed the break-in and called the police.

Ryan Frederick: It felt like five minutes had passed, but I don’t know that it was. And I finally saw cop cars, and I was like, “Oh, thank God.” So I opened the door at that point, and I’m getting ready to come out, and there’s like what seemed like 50 cops with all their guns drawn on me.

So I get down onto the ground, and he cuffs me. And he asked me, he said, “Do you know what you just did?” And I was like, “Not, not really. I don’t know what’s going on.” And he was like, “You just killed a police officer.”

Radley Balko: The arm he’d shot at belonged to Detective Jarrod Shivers. Like the other cops, Shivers was dressed in dark clothing with police demarcations that weren’t visible to Frederick. He could only see a dimly-lit sleeve reaching through the door panel. He assumed he had just shot a burglar. Already in handcuffs, Frederick says the officers then took their anger out on him.

Ryan Frederick: It was one elbow to the back of the head to the next elbow until I was just [dragged] two doors down. And they finally stopped and took me to a police car. Then I got in the back of the police car. And a gentleman was asking me questions, and telling me that I just killed a police officer and wanted me to tell him what happened.

But a whirlwind of emotions had come through me, and I was very sick and started throwing up in the back of his cop car when he told me. ’Cause I’m like, “No, no, no, what? Like, I went from sleeping, and 15 minutes later, you’re telling me I killed a cop.” And I just, I, I don’t know how to register that.

Radley Balko: Just a week earlier, Frederick was engaged, working a job he loved, and gardening in his spare time. In the span of just a few days, he’d been burglarized, then woke up a few nights later to find someone breaking into his home once again.

Now he was sitting in the back of a police car, being interrogated about killing a cop. It was in this chaotic moment that it first hit him: The break-in and the raid on his home must have been connected.

Ryan Frederick: He’s asking me these questions. And I’m trying to walk him through it. ’Cause I’m like, “Hold on dude. We gotta go back a couple days before I tell you this.” First of all, trying to tell him, “Listen, you’ve got to understand there was a break-in three days ago.” And he was like, “Listen, we already know about that break-in.”

And he asked me what was growing in the garage. And I said, “I got a banana tree.” And he said, “What’s in the garage? We know you got a lot of marijuana in the garage. Where is it?” And I’m like, “I don’t have any. I got a banana tree.”

Radley Balko: It was a fleeting moment in the midst of a tense exchange. But for Frederick, it was revelatory. How could the police have known about the break-in?

Ryan Frederick: Afterwards, when I replayed every single second of that night over and over and over and over again in my head, it occurred to me that he said he knew about the break-in, but I never reported it. And that was the beginning of starting to realize that this isn’t as honest as it always seems in the movies.

Radley Balko: Frederick was taken to the Chesapeake jail. He would soon be charged with capital murder — the intentional killing of a police officer. Within days, a prosecutor announced that the state was considering seeking the death penalty.

I first heard about Ryan Frederick shortly after the police raid on his home in 2008. I had been writing about aggressive drug raids for long enough that readers had started sending me stories about these incidents as they happened. This one seemed particularly bad. It was a marijuana raid, but the police had only found some young Japanese maple trees.

In most cases, when a drug raid goes wrong, it’s the target of the raid who pays the price. But not always.

Detective Jarrod Shivers is one of dozens of law enforcement agents who have been killed while serving a search warrant for drugs. In most of the deaths, like Shivers’s, it could have been prevented with less aggressive tactics. But as with the other fatal raids before and after this one, instead of reckoning with the failed policies that culminated in Shivers’s death, Virginia police and prosecutors came after Ryan Frederick.

Ryan Frederick: I never would have known that it can be as dirty of a justice system as it is.

That prosecutor is looking at it like a football game. He’s not looking at it like right and wrong. It’s a win or loss. And that’s what you are. You’re a winner or loss to the guy.

Radley Balko: As weeks and months passed, it became increasingly clear that the state’s prosecution of Frederick was as much about a vindictive effort to distract from the mistakes of police officers — mistakes that cost them the life of one of their own — as it was about justice.

“How many times do they do it and don’t get caught?”

Ryan Frederick: I have a lot of animosity towards the police force and the prosecution for doing things so dirty and unethical, but doing it with such ease and so much comfortability of doing........

© The Intercept