Officer Interrupts Stabbing On Domestic | Dallas Bodycam Breakdown

Watch the full breakdown on Rumble

This is the kind of call that does not make a highlight reel and should. It is a man alone with no good options.

August 7, 6:50 a.m., 8500 block of Park Lane in Dallas.

A 911 caller reported that 37-year-old Isidoro Melo-Munoz was armed with a knife and assaulting a woman he had dated. A Dallas Police Department sergeant was the first unit there. A witness flagged him down and pointed him toward it.

He came around the corner into a stabbing already in progress.

He gave repeated commands. “Get off of her. Get off of her. Do not make me shoot you.” Melo-Munoz did not stop. He stabbed her multiple times and then ran, still holding the knife.

The Dallas sergeant fired one round at him as he fled. He missed. Melo-Munoz got out of the immediate area. A knife was recovered along the path he took. Investigators pulled three more off that scene. Four knives in all.

The victim was transported by Dallas Fire-Rescue, went to surgery, and was later listed in stable condition.

Melo-Munoz was taken into custody the following day at a convenience store on the 6700 block of Abrams Road, booked on warrants for aggravated assault – family violence with a deadly weapon and for burglary with intent to commit assault from an August 5 incident involving the same victim.

Every comment section on this one said the same thing: he should have shot during the assault. She was being stabbed. Why did he not fire?

Go back and look at where he is standing.

There is a slatted wood fence between him and them. The victim and the suspect are stacked together, moving, at close range. He does not have a clean angle on anything.

Firing through a slat fence at a suspect who is physically on top of the person you are trying to save is not a shot. It is a gamble with her life on the table. Rounds deflect off wood. Rounds pass through and keep going. And the man is not standing still and neatly separated from her — he is on her.

You can hear it in his voice. He is yelling because yelling is the only tool he has that reaches them. He has a firearm he cannot responsibly use and a fence he cannot get through. That is the whole problem.

If he fires and hits her, this is a national story about a cop who killed a domestic violence victim. And he would deserve it.

The round he fired went at a man who had just stabbed a woman multiple times and was running into an apartment complex full of people while still holding the knife.

Some people do not like fleeing-felon shootings. I understand the discomfort in the abstract. This is not the abstract.

This is the exact fact pattern the doctrine exists for. He has demonstrated — on camera, seconds earlier — that he will use a deadly weapon on a person. He is still armed. He is running into an area full of civilians who have no idea he is coming. Anyone he reaches next is in danger, and there is no reason to think he would stop at one.

That round is legally defensible and, more importantly, it was aimed at the actual problem.

Strip away the tactics and look at what this man was handed.

He was alone. He was watching a woman get stabbed in real time, close enough to hear it and too far to stop it. He could not reach her. He could not shoot without risking her. And the second the suspect broke and ran, he had about a half second to decide whether to let an armed attacker disappear into a complex full of families.

He got the outcome that mattered — she lived, she came through surgery, and the suspect was in custody the next day. Not every call gives you a clean answer. This one gave him none, and he still got the important part right.