40-year sentence for 'breathtakingly dangerous' shooting that injured Milwaukee police officer

When Milwaukee police Officer Herbert Davis III arrived on scene to perform a welfare check on a cold January night in 2022, "he was the model of what we want our police to be," Milwaukee County Judge David Feiss said Thursday.

Davis was called to check on a man, Jetrin Rodthong, 23, of West Allis, who was slumped over in a vehicle. Davis woke Rodthong up and politely asked him a few questions about what he had been consuming that day. Davis told him a medical unit was coming.

"Officer Davis was concerned about you," Feiss said in his courtroom to Rodthong, after watching Davis' body camera footage. "His attitude towards you is completely respectful."

That should have been the end of it. But instead things devolved and became "breathtakingly dangerous," Feiss said.

Rodthong stepped out the vehicle and eventually raised a gun on Davis, who turned around and fled. Rodthong opened fire as he went after Davis, shooting him twice before stealing his squad car and crashing into another vehicle.

"It's difficult to think of any case I've ever seen that is more serious than this," Feiss said. "I can't imagine the horror (Davis) felt, realizing that he was completely exposed, no cover."

Davis survived that incident and walked out of a hospital to a joyous crowd a day later. But the horror he experienced is still with him and it appears that it has ended what was a dream job for the 27-year-old officer.

In the year since, he is still going through physical and mental therapy, his mother, Crystal Thompson, said. He cannot sleep well and anticipates living with trauma for the rest of his life.

Davis wanted to be an officer since he was 8 years old, she said.

"He showed up to be a remedy," Thompson said, "and in return he was almost killed by the person he'd offered support. The defendant snatched away my son's career and his spirit of public service."

In a letter read by Thompson, Davis asked Feiss to put Rodthong away for the rest of his life. A Milwaukee County prosecutor asked for a 40-year sentence. The defense asked for 20 years.

On Thursday, Feiss sentenced Rodthong to 40 years in prison, followed by more than 11 years of extended supervision.

His decision came after Rodthong himself and his family apologized for his actions. They appealed for leniency by arguing that Rodthong – who grew up in a broken family, dropped out of school after the eighth grade and was basically left on his own to became a drug addict in his teens – never had much of a chance at a productive life.

But it didn't persuade Feiss.

"You made terrible choices that put you in this situation," he told Rodthong.

The sentence came after Rodthong in January pleaded guilty to five felonies, including attempted first-degree intentional homicide. The hearing drew a large crowd from the law enforcement community, including several members of the Milwaukee Police Department's executive command staff. Davis did not attend.

All told, Rodthong and Davis exchanged at least 14 shots with each other from around 15 feet away on the 2100 block of West St. Paul Avenue before Rodthong, who was also shot twice, then took off in Davis’ squad car. Both Feiss and Assistant District Attorney Megan Newport said they had never seen anything like it.

At the time of the incident, Rodthong was on pretrial release from three felony cases filed against him in 2020, each of which involve accusations that he either fled police in a vehicle or was driving a stolen car.

He eventually began missing court dates for those cases and arrest warrants were issued in October 2021, according to online court records.

Davis had been with the department for seven years at the time, spending his first two years as a police aid and then working in the technical communications division before becoming a sworn officer. He was one of three law enforcement officers in Milwaukee who were shot and injured in separate incidents in the month of January 2022.

Rodthong grew up the youngest in an immigrant Laotian family in Milwaukee. Two of this sisters said at the hearing that when their parents split, neither was there to look after their 10-year-old son. He lived with siblings, but was not given the supervision he required.

He turned to drugs to fill that void, they said.

At the time of the incident, Rodthong said he developed an opioid addiction and was using daily, according to court records. He hadn't slept in a week.

He said Thursday that when Davis woke him up, he was intoxicated and confused. He became emotional as he tried to explain himself.

"I didn't mean to do what I did," he said.

Contact Elliot Hughes at elliot.hughes@jrn.com or 414-704-8958. Follow him on Twitter @elliothughes12.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Man who shot Milwaukee officer and stole squad car gets 40 years