Asleep in his bed when the window directly opposite came crashing in, Ingle's first instinct was to reach for the pistol he kept by his bedside — a cheap Lorcin automatic. Having never been convicted of a felony, it was perfectly legal for him to have the gun; perfectly legal for him to use it to defend his home against intruders. He had bought it a few years before, he said, because of how bad the neighborhood had gotten. His house had been broken into in the past. A few months before, at a store only a few blocks away on Main Street, a robbery had turned into a shootout, and two people had been killed. Even so, Ingle couldn't have shot anyone with the gun even if he'd wanted to. Years before, someone had pounded the wrong clip into the gun and jammed something inside. Ingle and his foster brother, Eric Nelson, say it couldn't even chamber a round, much less fire.
A second after he sat up, Ingle said, the room “kind of filled up with light,” and he could see the officers outside the window, in their black helmets and body armor. “I could see that they weren't robbers, so I threw the gun down,” Ingle said. “A second later, I heard one of the police officers say, ‘He's got a ****ing gun'… I could hear him turning in the leaves, and as soon as he turned, he turned around and started shooting.”
This is where Ingle's story and that of the two officers involved diverge. The officers, identified only as “Victim 1” and “Victim 2” in a NLRPD investigation report concerning the shooting, both told investigators that Ingle was sitting up and bed and pointing the gun in their faces when they raked away the sheet covering the window, giving them no choice but to open fire. Ingle, meanwhile, says that the gun was already on the floor, and he was in the process of raising his hands when the shooting started.
Whatever the case, the first shot that hit Tracy Ingle was devastating — most likely a high-velocity .223 round, given the damage it inflicted. The bullet entered Ingle's leg just above the left kneecap and blew his thigh apart. Surgeons would later replace a large chunk of Ingle's femur with a stainless steel rod.
He knew he had been shot, Ingle said, and his first instinct was to try to get off the bed — away from the window, at least, where the two officers were now pouring fire into the room. As Ingle tried, he got tangled up in the blankets and his ruined leg folded under him, the shattered bone grating inside. He fell to the floor in agony. As he fell, the officers outside the window kept shooting, hitting him four more times — arm, calf, hip and chest. The round that hit him in the chest is still there, too close to his heart to be removed. Days later, Ingle's brother, Eric, would dig four more bullets out of a space heater that was only a foot from where Ingle's head lay, and spackle up nine bullet holes in the wall over Tracy's bed. Some of those rounds had gone completely through and into the bathroom on the other side of the wall, two of them blowing ragged holes through both sides of a plywood shelf.
