Valor Awards
Cutting to the chase
In what could have been part of a Hitchcock movie, a dispatch by
the Vineland Police Department to a report of an emotionally dis-
turbed person turned into a bloody bathroom brawl on Sept. 21, 2016.
Upon arrival, Officers John Warrington and William Burris were in-
formed by the mother of the suspect that he was currently locked in
the bathroom.
“We arrived, and there was a little bit
Bronze Medal of Valor
of a language barrier,” Warrington ex-
plained. “We knocked on the bathroom
Officer John Warrington
door but he wouldn’t answer, so I let his
Unit Citation
mom translate in Spanish through the
Sergeant C. Candelario
door.”
K-9 Officer Louis Platania
When the subject refused to answer,
Officer William Burris
Warrington was forced to kick open the
Officer Domenic Ferrari
bathroom door. Without warning, the
K9 Agir
disturbed man attacked, stabbing War-
Vineland/Buena
rington in the face with a knife.
Local 266
“At that point I was actually knocked
unconscious for a minute,” the 19-year
veteran recollected. “When I came to, I saw that a physical battle was
going on between Officer Burris and the man. I drew my weapon, but
I couldn’t take the shot because the man was in Burris’s face. So I put
my weapon away and went in hands-on with the guy, landing in the
tub enclosure. It was hell for five minutes.”
Meanwhile, a call for assistance was put out during the melee. Ar-
riving units – consisting of Sergeant C. Candelario, Officers Domenic
Ferrari and Louis Platania and K9 Agir – found a blood-covered scene
with officers still engaged in a struggle. Agir was deployed and was
able to subdue the suspect and abruptly end the altercation.
Warrington, never having backed down from the fight, sustained a
wound to the face which required several surgeries, as well as other
additional injuries from which he is still recovering.
“It was just instincts and training at that point, to be honest,” War-
rington emphasized about his reactions that harrowing day. “I was
telling Billy’s wife that everything went so quickly that I couldn’t take
the shot. If I had taken the shot, it would have went thought the sus-
pect and ended up injuring or killing Officer Burris. It was a split-sec-
ond decision. That’s all it was.”
Warrington noted that while there’s a lot of “Monday-morning
quarterbacking” about things he could have done differently, he feels
blessed with the way things turned out, stating, “I didn’t have to shoot
the guy, and I’m still here to talk about it.” d
58
NEW JERSEY COPS
■ DECEMBER 2017