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Dan Kegley/Chilhowie Police Lt. Kevin Testerman and Chief Stephen Price talk at the police station Thursday morning at the end of Testerman’s night shift.

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State’s police chiefs honor CPD officer for valor

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

It’s been almost a year since gunshots disturbed a sunny September morning in Tiny Town Trailer Park and left two men seriously injured, one of them Lt. Kevin Testerman of the Chilhowie Police Department.
Last week, police chiefs from across the state joined in honoring Testerman for his actions that ended the incident without the ending of any lives.
Testerman received an Award for Valor from the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police at a banquet in Richmond.
That morning last fall, emergency scanner traffic about a domestic situation in Chilhowie suddenly became tense with the radioed alert about an downed officer.
Police officers from other jurisdictions zoomed to the scene to help, if they could, a brother in blue. That scene was described in a booklet handed out at the banquet and on the VASP Web site:
On September 17, 2007 at 09:47 hours, Chief Stephen Price and Lieutenant Kevin Testerman were dispatched to 161 Tiny Town in reference to a domestic disturbance and possible suicide attempt. At 09:53 hours, they arrived at the location and observed the offender, Billy Joe Parris, holding a shotgun under his own chin. Parris’ wife, Charlotte, was struggling with him attempting to take the shotgun away from him. Chief Price and Lt. Testerman drew their weapons and repeatedly ordered Mr. Parris to drop his weapon. Parris stated several times to Chief Price and Lt. Testerman, “Go ahead and shoot me!”
Mrs. Parris lost her hold on the shotgun and Mr. Parris ran toward the front door of the trailer. Mrs. Parris followed him shouting that the weapon was not loaded. Chief Price and Lt. Testerman continued to verbally order Parris to drop the weapon. Mr. Parris ran into his residence and Lt. Testerman took a position of cover behind the right front wheel of his vehicle. Chief Price got Mrs. Parris and moved her out of harm’s way behind the trailers at 163 Tiny Town. As the chief attempted to keep her in a safe area, Mr. Parris emerged from his residence with a loaded weapon. Lt. Testerman again ordered Mr. Parris to put the weapon down several times. Upon hearing gunshots and shot gun blasts, Chief Price turned away from Mrs. Parris towards Lt. Testerman, who exclaimed that he’d been hit.
Lt. Testerman was bleeding profusely from his hands as he took cover behind the right rear wheel of his vehicle. Lt. Testerman continued to order Mr. Parris to drop his weapon as Parris advanced on Lt. Testerman’s position. As Parris came into Chief Price’s line of sight, Lt. Testerman fired his weapon, striking the offender in the ankle. Parris reacted and Chief Price ordered him to drop his weapon, as did Lt. Testerman. This time, Parris complied and laid his weapon on the ground. Chief Price then arrested Parris and conducted a search of the offender’s person for weapons and then called for EMS units to the scene. Chief Price secured the offender’s weapon and locked it inside his patrol vehicle just as several additional units began to arrive. Lt. Testerman was placed in the ambulance and was transported to Smyth County Community Hospital with buck shot wounds to both hands and arms and the right side of his head. The offender was taken by medical flight to Bristol Regional Hospital.
From the window of a nearby home, a witness watched the last moments of the confrontation and said he saw Parris, whose name he did not then know, walking toward one of the officers, then heard the officer shouting for the man to put the gun down.
“He raised that gun at the officer,” David Tuell said. “Then pow, pow, pow, pow. And he was still standing there. He threw the gun down and backed up. The next thing I knew, he was on the ground.”
When the shooting started, Tuell ducked, unsure who was shooting or how many times.
“It was pow, pow-pow-pow, pow.” Tuell said. “All he had to do was put the gun down. He pointed that thing right at the officer.”
It happened on Testerman’s third day with the CPD where he’d gone after seven years with Marion’s police department.
Chilhowie’s small-town rumor spun into action, asserting almost as the last shots still echoed that it was Price who was not only hit by gunfire, but killed.
“Our pastor, Frank Branson, came down there and said to me, ‘You need to call your dad,’” Price remembered Thursday morning. “I said I’d call him later. Frank said, ‘You need to call him now, because the rumor is that you were killed. And you’d better call your daughter at school before it gets there.’”
Testerman was optimistic from the start about his recovery, and marched in Chilhowie’s Apple Festival parade to the applause of onlookers.
“Since you took it easy last year during the parade, I’m going to put you at the traffic light this year,” Price teased Testerman.
Last week’s award presentation was “really an honor,” Testerman said. “It made us feel appreciated for what we had done.”
Asked whether the incident had changed him over the intervening months, Testerman said he sees a divine purpose in his survival.
“I know now I have a purpose,” he said. “I really do. I thank the Lord every day for opening my eyes and seeing that.”
He’s changed professionally as well.
“I’m more intense in my job now,” Testermand said. “Before, I would do my job to the best of my abilities. But now, I know what it’s like to be the victim. It’s made me more compassionate.”
The incident didn’t change the way Price works, the chief said, but it “drives home that you tell younger officers to expect the unexpected.”
For Testerman the outcome of that domestic call was not a complete surprise.
“I’ve learned to trust my gut more because I had a feeling that morning something could happen,” Testerman said. “It was weird when it was going down because I’d had that feeling.”
Parris was booked on a capital murder charge and indicted by a grand jury on charges of aggravated malicious wounding and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. He began a 10-year prison sentence on a plea agreement in May.
Judge Issac Freeman sentenced Parris in Smyth County Circuit Court to 25 years in the penitentiary on the malicious wounding charge, but suspended 18 years, court papers showed. Parris will also serve a mandatory three-year prison term on the firearm charge.
The documents said Parris will serve 10 years of active probation after his release from prison and is ordered to have no contact with Testerman.
Under the plea agreement, Parris avoided a possible sentence of 20 years to life, life spared by Testerman in action that won him last week the accolades of Virginia’s police chiefs.