Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, September 20, 1994                   TAG: 9409220060
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By MELISSA DeVAUGHN, ROBERT FREIS and KATHY LOAN STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG                                LENGTH: Medium

MAN WHO SHOT POLICEMAN KNOWN AS 'POWDER KEG'

The man who fatally shot a Christiansburg officer Sunday had a history of shoplifting, resisting arrest and assaulting police officers, authorities said Monday.

Samuel Jerome Patterson, 34, of Princeton, W.Va., shot and killed Officer Terry L. Griffith as Patterson ran from Hills Department Store on Roanoke Street in Christiansburg on Sunday evening.

Griffith was shot once in the head with his own service revolver. Police said Patterson also shot Sgt. Billy Wiatt of the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office in the cheek, but the wound was superficial.

The officers had responded to a shoplifting complaint at Hills, where Patterson was suspected of stealing a carton of cigarettes.

Patterson, who fled down Roanoke Street in Wiatt's patrol car, was killed when he was surrounded across town at Phlegar and Main streets, where he had ditched a second car he had stolen and attempted to get into another police car. Two county deputies shot at him when he refused to follow their orders to get out of the car and surrender.

An autopsy was not complete Monday, but Patterson was shot in both arms, a hand, his chest and his head, police said. State police are assisting Christiansburg and the county with an investigation of both shootings.

"He has a violent criminal history ranging from resisting arrest to shoplifting," Christiansburg Police Lt. Doug Marrs said in describing Patterson at a midmorning news conference Monday. He would not elaborate on Patterson's past.

But Mercer County, W.Va., court records depict Sam Patterson as a man who, for the past 14 years, was violent and abusive to the people he knew. In Mercer County alone, he was charged with 15 crimes, ranging from misdemeanor battery against various women to felony armed robbery and grand larceny. Most of the cases were dismissed when the complaining witnesses or prosecutors did not show up for court.

Patterson also was described as a man who disliked police officers and had little respect for the law. In a 1992 warrant charging him with beating his girlfriend, Jill Walker, she quoted Patterson as saying, "[expletive] the cops over there, they ain't nothing but [expletive]."

In another incident in 1986, Patterson was charged with resisting arrest and assaulting Bluefield, W.Va., police officer J.C. Gillespie when being served with a warrant at his motel room.

Gillespie said he and other Bluefield police officers knew Patterson as a powder keg.

"He was always into something, shoplifting or domestic incidents. Not major crimes, but you had to go and put him up," said Gillespie, now a West VIrginia state trooper.

Patterson, he said, was muscular but not a large man.

"He always put me in the mind of having a violent streak. Sort of a calm fellow until you put him in a corner. Then he would run on you and you had to chase him down. He'd do what it took to get away."

Patterson was arrested six times in Mercer County for battery, but four of those charges were dismissed when the plaintiffs failed to show up for court. One of the others, coincidentally, was the result of an attempted shoplifting at Hills Department Store at Mercer Mall. In 1989, an employee there was assaulted when he confronted Patterson and a woman on suspicion of shoplifting. Patterson was found guilty of battery and served two days in jail for that offense.

Patterson had a bad temper, said Rosalyn Enders of Princeton, who attended school with him in Bluefield and later dated him.

Enders said she broke up with Patterson in 1985 after he beat her, slashed her car's tires and stole money from her apartment.

Charges from that incident were dismissed as part of a plea agreement, according to Mercer County court records.

Patterson's violent streak went beyond misdemeanors. In 1982, he was charged with malicious assault, a felony, when he allegedly stabbed a female acquaintance, Vanessa Booker, above her left breast.

Keywords:
FATALITY