Baltimore County detective who was shot and critically injured calls it ‘a bad nightmare’ at David Linthicum trial

Cassidy Jensen

The Baltimore Sun

September 19, 2024

When the gunfire started, Jonathan Chih’s first thought was that the silhouetted figure standing several feet away from him along a dark road in Cockeysville had punched him in the face

It took a moment before Chih, then a detective with the Baltimore County Police Department’s vice and narcotics section, realized the person he had mistaken for a hitchhiker walking along Warren Road after 9 p.m. Feb. 9, 2023, was shooting at him.

Chih tried to sprint across the road to get away from the shots and his police truck’s flashing lights, but a bullet that struck his left buttock dropped him in the middle of the left lane, he testified in Baltimore County Circuit Court on the third day of 26-year-old David Linthicum’s trial on attempted murder, assault, carjacking and firearms charges.

“I couldn’t get up and I couldn’t reach my gun,” Chih said. “It was a bad nightmare.”

Chih said he tried to turn so his bulletproof police vest could better block his body before the impact of another gunshot rolled him onto his back. He remembered staring up at the sky, thinking he wouldn’t make it to his dad’s birthday party that upcoming weekend.

Somehow — Chih testified that he didn’t know exactly how — he got his handgun into his right hand and returned fire as Linthicum got into his truck and peeled away, tires squealing. Everything appeared “blurry” and “delayed,” as if he were drunk, he said. His department-issued rifle was still in the Dodge Ram’s back seat.

According to prosecutors, Linthicum drove Chih’s black pickup truck across the Loch Raven Reservoir and into Harford County, where he eventually was arrested the next morning after a stand-off.

Prosecutors played a longer version of Chih’s body-worn camera video than one shown during the first day of trial, in which officers applied tourniquets to his limbs, carried him to a pickup truck and then loaded him into an ambulance. The video became shaky and eventually went dark, but Chih’s speech and the voices of officers and medics were audible.

Chih, who joined Baltimore County Police 16 years ago after enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps, wore a gray suit jacket over a short-sleeved shirt in court Thursday morning, a “fashion faux pas” that Deputy State’s Attorney John Cox said he requested so Chih could show jurors injuries on his arms.

He was wounded in his right forearm, where a gunshot shattered his ulna, as well as under his triceps on his left arm, he said. Doctors told him a bullet traveled through his face, into his neck and out his upper back. The wound in his left buttock damaged his sciatic nerve, Chih said. He has since returned to light duty with the police department, working behind a desk.

At one point, he held up his police vest for jurors, showing them a bullet hole and removing two pieces of bulletproof padding with dark stains. Cox asked Chih whether the “discoloration” on the tan fabric was there before.

“It certainly wasn’t,” replied Chih, becoming choked up.

Chih spent 10 days at the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center after the shooting before he moved to an impatient rehabilitation center that he left in early March.

The detective encountered Linthicum more than a day after police responded to a call for a suicidal subject with a gun and walked into the man’s basement bedroom in Cockeysville. They fled after Linthicum fired his AR-15 through a wall, striking Baltimore County Police Officer Barry Jordan, prosecutors have said.

Near the end of Chih’s 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. shift Feb. 9, a supervisor asked Chih to check on someone reported walking along Warren Road wearing a black hoodie.

The body camera video showed Chih passing a figure on the right side of the road, pulling over ahead of him and getting out of his truck.

“I’m out with him. I think he’s trying to hitchhike. I’m making contact,” Chih said into his radio.

He turned on his truck’s flashing red and blue lights to make clear that he was a police officer, he testified.

He stepped out of the truck and walked behind it until he was even with the back of the truck bed. A voice in the video asked, “Are you here to kill me?”

“No, why?” Chih said, before shots rang out.

Linthicum’s attorney, Deborah Katz Levi, director of special litigation for the Maryland Office of Public Defender, asked Chih how much he knew about the then-ongoing multiagency search, which she said included 500 members of the county police department.

Linthicum’s Powers Avenue home was nearby and he was considered armed, dangerous and suicidal, according to a “be on the lookout” alert the department issued and which Chih said he never saw.

“No one specifically told me that he had mental illnesses,” Chih said.

While Chih said he knew about the “manhunt” for someone who had shot a police officer, he believed Linthicum had returned to his home at the time and that the person he saw was an unrelated hitchhiker who needed help.

When Levi asked Chih why he parked ahead of Linthicum instead of turning his car around and approaching him with more caution, he responded: “I could’ve done a lot of things differently that night.”

Chih testified during cross-examination that he never gave a statement as part of an internal investigation into the firing of his weapon, something the department routinely conducts when officers use deadly force.