Shooting victim: ‘I’m just done’

911 tapes reveal supervisor wanted friends, family to stop calling to ease tension

Hours before she was shot and killed in a standoff with police, a Lawrence woman told a 911 dispatcher, “I don’t have anything to lose.”

“I’m just done,” Marsha L. Mace can be heard telling a dispatcher during her 911 call, made from inside a trailer in which she’d barricaded herself at 110 N. Mich.

At another point, a supervisor can be heard directing someone to ask Mace’s friends and family members to stop calling her inside the trailer.

“See if we can just ease the pressure off of her for a bit; see if that doesn’t help,” he says. “Seems like a lot of folks have been trying to call and talk to her. I don’t want to create further tensions.”

Those exchanges were part of a series of police dispatch recordings played by the city Tuesday in response to a request by the Journal-World. A detective who had taken up a position behind a squad car shot and killed Mace with a rifle at 1:23 p.m. Sept. 24. – something police say happened only after she emerged from the trailer and began firing a revolver at officers.

About 30 minutes before the shooting a commander on the scene can be heard telling another officer, “Unless it’s self-defense, you’re the only one authorized.”

“That was the tactical commander making sure that all officers knew that unless it was self-defense, they were not to return fire,” Lawrence Police spokesman Sgt. Dan Ward said.

In one of several 911 calls she made from inside the trailer, Mace tells the dispatcher she’s been diagnosed with brain tumors and had her home foreclosed. At one point, she interrupts the dispatcher by yelling that she won’t speak with anyone other than an officer she knew personally.

“I don’t have anything to lose. Do you understand where I’m coming from?” Mace asks.

At other points in the recordings, officers can be heard discussing their maneuvers outside the trailer and trying to evacuate neighboring trailers at the Mobile Village trailer park.

The standoff began that morning after a Lawrence Police officer was dispatched to check Mace’s welfare. Her boyfriend called police shortly before 9 a.m. and asked officers to go by her home at 443 Ark.

“She called me and wouldn’t respond, and I heard some commotion in the background and I’m not sure exactly what it was,” the boyfriend can be heard telling a 911 dispatcher. Eventually, officers learned Mace was alone at her father’s trailer at Mobile Village.

When an officer first came to the door, Mace fired a gun inside and demanded to speak with an officer she knew, according to the dispatch recordings. The officer wasn’t available, but police began negotiating with Mace, first through a public address system and later by phone.

About an hour into the standoff, an officer on the recordings says he learned from Mace’s boyfriend that the last time he talked with her, she couldn’t find her medication – possibly something that had been prescribed to her through Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center.