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Officer James Kuzak Jr. was shot five times and left paralyzed from the waist down after responding to an armed home invasion in Clairton, Pennsylvania, on the night of April 4, 2011, and no one has ever been convicted of shooting him.

The call came from a duplex at 858 Miller Ave., where two armed men had knocked at the door demanding drugs and money, according to trial testimony. A woman, her fiance and two children, a girl, 8, and a boy, 4, were inside. The couple called 911, and the woman later testified that she was sexually assaulted in an upstairs children's bedroom during the robbery.

Three officers responded. Kuzak, 40, of Belle Vernon, went to the rear of the house and was working on the back door to let those inside know police had arrived. Prosecutors said one of the intruders was heard saying the men would have to shoot their way out, and gunfire came through the door.

Kuzak testified that he saw the door change and then saw "the first muzzle flash," and that he understood what had happened as soon as he went down. "I knew in my mind I was paralyzed," he told the jury. One round lodged next to his spinal cord and was never removed. He had 18 years in law enforcement and had been with the Clairton department about three weeks.

Two men arrested in the days after the shooting were released when their alibis held up. Allegheny County prosecutors then charged Emilio Rivera, 27, of McKees Rocks, and Marcus Andrejco, 19, of Rankin, with attempted homicide, robbery, burglary and more than two dozen other counts. Both men said their confessions had been coerced.

The trial opened July 24, 2012. On Aug. 16, the jury acquitted Andrejco on every count and cleared Rivera of all charges tied to the shooting, convicting him only of the home invasion itself: burglary, four counts of robbery, four counts of recklessly endangering another person and three counts of aggravated assault. "We are hurt by the verdict and need time to heal as a family," Kuzak said.

Rivera was sentenced Nov. 15, 2012, to 50 to 100 years. Kuzak, who uses a wheelchair and has continued physical therapy, spoke at the hearing. "All I am concerned with is the well being of my family, and hopefully I can give them back what I took away from them as being a police officer for 20 years," he said.

The recording runs about ten minutes and twenty seconds and is police radio traffic from the night of the shooting rather than a 911 call. It carries the dispatch of the Miller Avenue call, the traffic between units and the dispatcher as officers arrived and the shooting was reported, and the start of the search for the men who ran. It is a logging tape, the continuous recording a dispatch center keeps of its radio channels, so the transmissions run as they were broadcast, with routine traffic and dead air between them.