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In March 2015, a meme was circulated about deputy Scott Wood of the Wyandotte County Sheriff's Office, who was attacked by three assailants when he stopped by a convenience store on his way home from a shift: In the very early morning hours of 4 March 2015, off-duty Wyandotte County, Kansas Deputy Scott Wood was shot at a 7-11 convenience store during an attempted robbery. On 5 March 2015, television station WDAF-TV in Kansas City reported that Deputy Wood called in the crime (then in-progress) and subsequently reported he sustained gunshot wounds before he was shot again in the face: On 9 March 2015, the same station reported that three men in custody were under investigation in relation to the ambush in which Deputy Wood was seriously injured: Deputy Scott Wood's shooting and recovery were reported extensively in the news media, although the coverage was primarily local in nature. According to the FBI's Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) tally, about 50,000 police officers are assaulted in the line of duty each year, with about 250 of them suffering injuries from assaults with firearms. Obviously all of these incidents involving the shooting of police, as unfortunate and tragic as they may be, don't make the national news. In Deputy Wood's case, there were no additional reported factors present that served to propel his case into the national sphere: the shooting was not fatal, the assault on him was not premeditated (he was coincidentally present when armed robbers entered a convenience store), and there was no indication that he was targeted due to his race. Thankfully, Deputy Wood was not killed in the assault and recovered from the brutal crime relatively speedily. By 13 March 2015 Wood (who suffered seven gunshot injuries) had made remarkable strides and was breathing and walking on his own, a factor which (sadly, some might reflect) made his shooting a somewhat less noteworthy story outside of Wyandotte County by news media standards. Another factor that may have played into less extensive news coverage is that Wood's assailants had not been officially identified at the time the above-reproduced meme began to circulate, and no arrests had been made in the shooting. It wasn't even clear if police had determined that the men described as persons of interest in early news reports were in fact connected with the crime. By April 2018, however, three men had been arrested, convicted, and sentenced for their part in the attempted killing of Deputy Wood:
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