“What’s going on?” he asked.
Inside the small office at the Old Town Shopping Center, a homeless man named Vincent Gutierrez, 40, was dead, a single gunshot wound to his chest.
An officer asked if anybody was bleeding out inside the office. No, Kramer said.
But then.
“There’s a dead guy in there, and I didn’t kill him,” he said.
It must have seemed like an open-and-shut case, a senseless murder of an unlikely victim that Oct. 28, 2017, night and the tragic demise of a force for good who had broken very bad.
Kramer hadn’t left the scene, hadn’t called 911. The revolver he held, a .38 Smith and Wesson Special, proved to be the murder weapon. A .38 round was found in his Ford pickup. Those who knew Kramer said he had fallen far fast in the space of mere months, sucked into a dark, bizarre and paranoid place by his monthslong methamphetamine use.