SNYDER — No one had seen Dwayne Birmingham so angry.
A small crowd of friends and young children started to leave the two-bedroom house with peeling white paint just six blocks east of the police station as Birmingham raged outside.
The 41-year-old father and fast-food worker was drinking beer and arguing with his wife early Tuesday.
He had a gun no one would later really remember seeing, or where it came from. He pointed it at Michelle Birmingham, who’d been with him for 17 years. He emptied the gun into the air, and then reloaded.
“Somebody’s going to die tonight,” a friend at the house that evening heard him say. “Somebody’s going to die tonight.”
Dwyane Birmingham would lay dead in his driveway minutes later and a Snyder police officer would cling to life in Birmingham’s front yard, shaking a tight-knit law enforcement community that had not seen such violence against an officer in more than 20 years.
“He just snapped,” Michelle said. “Something just clicked in him.”
Witnesses said Birmingham opened fire on Cpl. Darrell Campbell around 12:25 a.m., as the 41-year-old officer investigated reports of gunshots. Officer Lee Ortiz, 37, returned fire in a brief shootout, killing Birmingham.
Campbell was in critical condition Tuesday afternoon with a gunshot wound to the head at University Medical Center in Lubbock.
Friends and fellow officers who gathered at a Tuesday evening vigil said he was responding to his family and could squeeze his hand.
Stunned, stoic and tearful officers and deputies stood outside the county courthouse in Snyder, just up the road from the crime scene, to listen to Scripture and to pray for the corporal.
“This is something you see happen in Dallas, or Austin — big places, not little bitty Snyder,” said Leroy Ochoa, a juvenile probation officer assistant. “It’s affected a lot of people. It’s just like a brother being hurt.”
The small house down the road wasn’t a regular stop for officers. Birmingham had a record reaching back to the mid-1980s that included resisting and evading arrest, but nothing violent. Family described him as a good father, a family man.
Witnesses remembered someone warning him that night he wouldn’t be able to see his children if he didn’t calm down, and it seemed to send him over the edge.
“So much anger built up in him,” Michelle said. “We were having problems in our relationship.”
Dwayne Birmingham reloaded after he fired the gun in the air, and leaned up against a brown car in his driveway.
The officers arrived a short time later.
Campbell had stayed on more than an hour past the end of his shift to help other officers with a heavy call load, said Sgt. Brian Peterson, who said he’d known the corporal for 15 years.
Campbell had been with the department since 2009 and had worked with the Sweetwater Police Department and Mitchell County Sheriff’s Office before that, Peterson said.
He worked patrol, occasionally trading his car for a bicycle to work rallies and other events, Snyder Lt. Brian Haggard said, just because the officer was fit.
But no one could offer any real hobbies.
Law enforcement and his children were Campbell’s life, Peterson said. Campbell’s youngest is 3.
“It was either work or family, there was no in between,” Peterson said, and then corrected himself. “Is. Is.”
When he arrived at the scene, Campbell asked Michelle if she knew anything about gunshots, and she said no. He turned to Dwayne.
Jeanette Martinez, a friend who stood in the front yard as the shooting happened, said it started without warning and was over in an instant.
“When they went to go check out Dwayne, that’s when he took the first shot,” Martinez said. “After everything happened, all we could do, honestly, was cry, I guess.”
Police, deputies and state troopers flooded the scene. Campbell was taken to a local emergency room and then by helicopter to the regional trauma center in Lubbock.
Family said no medical care was given to Birmingham.
Snyder Police Lt. Brian Haggard said Birmingham died at the scene.
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