What happened when a SEPTA officer’s handgun spontaneously fired in Philly’s Suburban Station

On a summer evening inside Suburban Station in 2019, a transit police officer’s gun went off.

It was a Sig Sauer P320, a model that SEPTA police started using in 2016 but that had also given rise to reports of misfires and lawsuits claiming the weapon was defective.

Officer Craig Jacklyn’s Sig Sauer P320 was in its holster. His hands were not on the weapon when it fired, he says, and authorities would later conclude the gun discharged through no fault of his own.

The bullet narrowly missed his knee and a woman who had just crossed the bullet’s path during a busy rush hour.

“It was incredible that nobody got hurt, and it was incredible that the gun would discharge like that with no human manipulation,” said Jacklyn, a 24-year member of the SEPTA police force as well as a Marine veteran, who spoke publicly for the first time.

The incident caused many SEPTA officers to lose faith in the guns and prompted the agency to ditch the P320 within weeks. Now the officer’s own account, together with video footage and documents from a police investigation obtained by The Inquirer, further illustrates the potential danger to the public of a gun that is alleged to have serious defects and that its manufacturer has never recalled.

This month, a federal law enforcement officer filed a suit in Philadelphia claiming his P320 fired unintentionally, as well, wounding him during training at a Delaware shooting range.

Across Pennsylvania, 750 municipal police officers are certified to use a P320 as their on-duty weapon, state data show. The gun could be department-issued or personally owned, a Pennsylvania State Police spokesperson said.

At a time when police use of force has come under more scrutiny, the stakes for an officer’s career are high, Jacklyn says.

“No officer should be put in a position where their credibility is in question when they have a defective weapon,” he said. “The consequences are too great.”

Since 2017, Sig has faced at least 13 lawsuits contending a P320 owner was shot and injured — in one case, fatally — when the gun misfired. Six of those suits were brought by people serving in law enforcement when the gun fired. Last year, Sig Sauer settled a class-action lawsuit that alleged design defects in the P320. Another proposed class-action suit over alleged defects is pending in New Hampshire.

No federal agency can force a safety recall of guns, unlike virtually all other consumer products in the United States.

The company did not respond to interview requests. Based in Newington, N.H., owned by a Germany parent company, Sig has long denied in court that the P320 is defective. Yet since August 2017, it has also offered to “upgrade” the weapon with new parts should gun owners request it.

In an online explanation of why it offers an upgrade, the company says “the P320 meets and exceeds all U.S. safety standards.” But, Sig adds, testing has shown that “usually” after the gun has been dropped multiple times, “at certain angles and conditions, a potential discharge of the firearm may result when dropped.”

The company’s roots date to the 1850s, as a wagon factory turned rifle-maker for the Swiss Army. Under the name SIGARMS, it established an American presence in the mid-1980s, and, in 2007, committed to an expansion and rebranding as Sig Sauer.

The gun-maker launched the P320 in 2014, and it helped the company make inroads with police and military customers. A full-size model can retail for about $500 and more.

By 2017, Sig beat out Glock and other firms for a major government contract: replacing the U.S. Army’s sidearm for the first time in more than 30 years. Sig’s winning bid was based on the P320 design.

As of last June, Sig said its U.S. division has more than 2,300 employees, according to gun trade publications. The company now manufactures a military version of the P320 — known as the M17 and M18 — for all branches of the armed forces.

SEPTA’s 260-person police had been using Sig Sauer guns since 2003. The agency was looking for new weapons in 2016 when “Sig Sauer offered to provide the new P320s in exchange for the older weapons,” spokesperson Andrew Busch said. Then, in December 2018, SEPTA received a “P320 safety upgrade” from the company, at no cost. Sig “replaced all of the guns that were in use by SEPTA police officers at that time,” Busch said.

Jacklyn was carrying an upgraded P320 in a leg holster, strapped to his right thigh, during the evening rush hour of Aug. 26, 2019. He had a long history handling weapons, having served as a primary marksmanship instructor in the Marines. That evening Jacklyn was on patrol with SEPTA’s counterterrorism unit.

Sitting behind the wheel of a motorized cart, Jacklyn and his patrol partner cruised the station concourse slowly, passing storefronts and pedestrians. He had a large iced tea in the cupholder.

They stopped in front of a beauty supply shop. Jacklyn says his hands were on the steering wheel when the weapon fired inside his leg holster, pointed toward the front dash.

At first, Jacklyn didn’t realize his gun had gone off. He thought a tire on the cart might have blown out. He checked the tires. Then he saw a hole in the front of the cart.

Both officers checked their weapons to see if they had discharged, Jacklyn’s partner told an investigator. Jacklyn’s holster was warm to the touch.

They looked inside the vehicle. “Then we saw a hole through his ice tea, through the console and out the front of the cart,” Jacklyn’s partner explained, according to the investigative file. The bullet landed about six feet away.

Jacklyn later recounted the episode to a Virginia police officer, who claimed her P320 service weapon had fired without a trigger pull in 2018, leaving her badly injured.

“The round missed my knee cap by less than a half an inch,” Jacklyn wrote to the Virginia sheriff’s deputy, not long after the Suburban Station incident. The bullet went through the motorized cart, “missing a female shopper who had just passed the front of my vehicle.”

Thinking about what could have happened, he wrote, “I get chills.”

Video taken from inside the beauty supply store shows a woman entering the store, and “at almost precisely the same time she jumps as though startled,” the investigation file notes. “Just a fraction of a second later,” the file said, a “round projectile ... lands on the concourse.”

Jacklyn was cleared to return to duty the next day. SEPTA moved to purchase 350 new Glocks to replace the P320 on Sept. 16, 2019, the agency said. “It was concerning and we moved right away to take action,” Busch, the SEPTA spokesperson, said. The police force experienced no other accidental discharges with the P320, he said.

At the time, the wait in making the switch left officers uneasy, reported WHYY-FM, the first news outlet to cover the incident. “I think it’s an issue for the public and our officers,” a transit police union leader told the radio station in late September 2019.

SEPTA says that the Philadelphia Police Department ultimately transferred weapons from its own inventory to the transit police. The transition to using the Glock 17 began Oct. 7, 2019, and was completed by the end of that year, as officers became trained on the new weapons. The total cost — including the weapons, ammunition, holsters, and shipping — came to about $300,000.

Busch said SEPTA and Sig “recently reached an agreement” on reimbursement of the costs, and did not provide further details.

Last September, Keith Slatowski, a deportation officer with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), attended training at a shooting range in New Castle, Del. Slatowski, who lives in King of Prussia, was carrying the P320 issued for his job. Without touching the trigger, he alleges, the P320 fired when he put his hand on the gun’s grip.

“The bullet struck him in his upper right hip and exited out the back of his lower thigh, causing substantial injury, maceration of tissue, blood loss, and nerve damage,” according to a lawsuit filed Feb. 17 in federal court in Philadelphia. Connecticut attorney Jeff Bagnell and the Philadelphia law firm Saltz Mongeluzzi & Bendesky are representing Slatowski in the $10 million claim against Sig.

An ICE spokesperson declined to comment.

Bagnell has represented law enforcement officers and other P320 owners over the last several years. One of his clients was Marcie Vadnais, the Loudoun County, Va., sheriff’s deputy with whom Jacklyn corresponded. She was sitting in her car outside a police training academy, removing her holstered P320 from her belt, when the gun allegedly fired without her pulling the trigger. The bullet tore through her right leg, shattering her femur. Sig settled the suit in 2019 for an undisclosed amount.

The P320 raises issues for public safety, Bagnell said: “The typical innocent bystander could get hit by this and potentially killed.”

When Sig introduced the P320 in 2014, it was the company’s first striker-fired pistol: There’s no external hammer, and the striker inside the gun operates under spring pressure. Part of Sig’s pitch to law enforcement was better safety. Other guns required the owner to pull the trigger in order to disassemble and clean it, creating a risk of accidental discharge. The P320 didn’t necessitate a special tool or a trigger pull for maintenance.

As Sig marketed the P320 to police, the company also sought a coveted contract from the U.S. Army, based on the P320 design. Sig won the $580 million contract in January 2017.

That spring Sig CEO Ron Cohen was inducted into the National Rifle Association’s “Golden Ring of Freedom,” a recognition for donors who make gifts of $1 million or more to the gun-rights group.

“Serving military and law enforcement customers, their life depends on what we do,” Cohen said in a video for the event. “It’s the most gratifying part of the job.”

Signs of trouble surfaced publicly that summer. A Stamford, Conn., police officer filed a lawsuit saying he was shot in the leg when he dropped his holstered P320 in a parking lot. Online video by a firearm retailer showed the gun firing when dropped. And in early August 2017, the company announced its “voluntary upgrade” for the gun.

The following year, a CNN investigation revealed that the military had also required a fix for the weapon, because it fired unintentionally during drop-testing in April 2016. That left a months-long gap until Sig notified the public of the “upgrade,” by which time Sig had already sold some 500,000 P320 guns, CNN reported.

Bagnell says Sig made more “extensive changes” to the military version of P320 than it has offered under the “voluntary upgrade” program. He also argues that the P320 can fire without a trigger pull even if it has been upgraded.

As a striker-fired pistol, the P320 is “under constant pressure to fire,” Bagnell said. He likens it to a bow-and-arrow, pulled taut. Inside the gun, a metal piece called the sear should keep the weapon from firing until the trigger is pulled. But that’s not working in the P320, he said. The P320 could fire not only when it’s dropped on the ground but also when it’s affected by day-to-day movement, Bagnell said.

Sig has issued recalls for other weapons it makes. But not the P320.

Jacklyn considers how his situation could have been worse. Officers pull their guns to hold suspects. They handle weapons in close quarters with colleagues.

He’s glad he wasn’t at home when the gun fired. His police department, he said, made sure he was all right.

“I was just lucky,” Jacklyn said. “Another officer might not be so lucky.”