By Massad Ayoob

Situation:

One brother officer is badly wounded and down, the other is reloading, and you’re out of ammo … and the bad guy isn’t.

Lesson:

There are reasons police went to guns with more — and better — ammo. Creative thinking and commitment can pull you through seemingly hopeless situations.

In the March/April 2016 issue of Handgunner magazine, the Ayoob Files section focused on Tim Gramins’ shooting in Skokie, Ill., in which 54 shots were fired in about as many seconds, 33 of them by the officer before he finally killed his heavily armed assailant. The suspect had soaked up 17 .45 slugs before giving up the ghost. In the May/June issue we printed a letter from Ken Howard. The letter began, “When I read this story, I was transported back to 1974 when I learned a hard lesson about having sufficient ammo on your person for the fight.” This got my attention and Editor Roy Huntington’s, since both of us remembered having to carry six-shot service revolvers on duty in roughly that same time period, 3,000 miles apart.

Soon I was sitting down in Virginia with Ken, who retired in 1997 after a distinguished career beginning with DC Metro Police and ending with him as a Captain of the Alexandria, Va. PD. It turned out the 1974 incident in question was the second of three shooting incidents he experienced in his career. This is the story of the one he was talking about in his letter. Ken feels it’s the one with the most learning points.

Flashback

It was a cold, dark night in Alexandria on November 24, 1974. Then-Detective Howard was working the four to midnight tour in the Criminal Investigations Division Robbery Squad, the time when victims and witnesses were home from work and accessible for interviews. Wearing the then-mandatory coat and tie and carrying the APD-issue snub-nose .38 and six spare cartridges, Ken was driving a new unmarked Dodge to just such an interview at approximately 6 p.m. when he monitored a high-risk radio call.
We’ll let Ken set up the situation:

“A patrol unit (was) saying he had one man chasing another man with a gun a short distance from me. I headed in that direction when the dispatcher put out a call for an armed robbery at the state liquor store close to where the patrol officer had been a few moments ago. That officer, Jim Ammons, radioed he had the suspects still in the car, knew who one of them was, and asked for emergency back-up. Officer Morty Ford was assigned backup as I continued to the scene, cutting through a couple of parking lots to get there faster. At this point the radio became quiet (I was expecting to hear something from either Ammons or Ford), and as I drove into the parking lot across from the liquor store the suspect’s car was coming out, right at me.”

Shots Fired

Things go into slow motion for Ken at this point. He is the third cop to arrive — uniformed officers Ammons and Ford have gotten there ahead of him — and he sees the driver of the Dodge sedan reach out his car window and fire a large revolver at Ford. He sees his brother officer clutch at his chest, stagger backward and fall, dropping his department-issue S&W Combat Masterpiece .38.

This driver has just shot a cop, and he’s about to lead the police on a running gun battle through Alexandria’s streets during rush hour — and Howard is not going to let him do it. He aims his new unmarked unit at the front of the getaway car, braces himself, stands on the accelerator and rams the Dodge head-on.

The crash brings both vehicles to a jarring halt. The driver appears to be the only one in the getaway car. Howard flings open his own door and, a southpaw, snatches his Colt Detective Special from the holster on his left hip. He has become a creature of his training. Taking cover at the juncture of the open door, he crouches to get the engine block between him and the gunman, brings his revolver to eye level and fires.

In the darkened parking lot, there isn’t enough light to see the sights; the cars are nose to nose, and his headlights can’t illuminate his target or silhouette his sight picture. He fires anyway, as fast as he can roll the double action trigger. Ken’s “fight or flight” response has put him in a world of his own. It seems that he and his opponent are all that exist. He does not consciously see anything but the gunman bobbing and weaving in the front seat of the getaway car as his bullets punch through the windshield. Ken is aware everything has gone silent and he cannot hear his own gunfire, though he does perceive his muzzle flashes. Yet he is also aware Officer Ammons is fighting from his left, and that to his right, a heroic citizen is carrying the severely wounded Officer Ford out of the line of fire.

Though it feels as if everything has gone into slow motion, things are actually happening fast. His antagonist has ducked down beneath the cover of the dashboard and is exiting through the right front passenger door. The little Colt is empty; Ken opens the cylinder and shifts the gun to his right hand, muzzle up, as his left palm slaps the long ejector rod and clears all six empties. Still crouching behind the “V” of his open car door and his engine block, he tilts the muzzle down with his right hand as his dominant left hand snakes into his coat pocket for his speedloader. The six round-nose 158-gr. bullets seem to glide effortlessly into the chambers, and Ken peels the empty neoprene Hunt Multi-loader away and lets it fall as he closes the cylinder. His left hand wraps again around the checkered walnut stocks and the grip adapter. Ken is back in the fight.

By now the gunman has emerged through the front passenger door. He is down prone on the asphalt, belly-crawling like an infantryman under fire, his long-barreled revolver pointing toward Howard’s left in the direction of Officer Ammons. Ken extends his snubbie and fires six more shots in rapid cadence. He is certain at least some of his bullets are striking home, but the gunman is still moving with gun in hand.

And at this moment, Ken Howard is out of ammunition.

Ken knows Officer Ammons is somewhere off to his left and the suspect can shoot him at any moment, but he is equally aware that if he charges the gunman head-on he is likely to be shot himself. Ken moves back around his unmarked unit and sprints around behind the two rammed-together cars, emerging on the gunman’s blind side. On the way he somehow gets his empty Colt back in its holster, though he will have no conscious recollection of having done so. He does remember his left hand closing around the only weapon he has left, a spring-loaded blackjack in his left hip pocket.

Ken lunges at the prone gunman, crashing the blackjack’s lead tip into the back of the man’s head, and he sees the big revolver leave the man’s hands. Dropping his knee on the gunman with full body weight behind it, Ken snatches his handcuffs from his belt and manacles the suspect. Only now is he aware that the gunman is soaked with blood. He shouts to Officer Ammons, and determines the other officer is okay. Ammons, now reloaded himself, stands guard on the suspect as Ken returns to his vehicle to radio for medical and backup.

Meanwhile …

Every player only gets his own piece of the puzzle. The first stage of the gun battle had already ended by the time Ken arrived at the scene. He only saw and engaged one of what turned out to be three suspects.

The gunman he had seen shoot Officer Ford had been the driver of the getaway vehicle. Before Ken arrived on the scene, an accomplice to the robbery had jumped from the left rear seat of the getaway car and fired his revolver at Officer Ford, the .22 slug passing harmlessly through the cop’s hair. This gunman had fled the scene on foot, pursued by yet another uniformed cop. During that foot pursuit, there was gunfire and a stray bullet wounded a passing citizen in the buttocks.

And the third suspect? Minutes later at the shooting scene in the parking lot, his back to the fugitives’ wrecked Dodge, Howard saw two other detectives draw their guns and rush toward the car behind him. They had spotted a 24-year-old male emerging from the front seat of the suspects’ vehicle. Unarmed by that point, this suspect surrendered. He had been under the dashboard, unseen, throughout the entire gunfight. Such is the price of tunnel vision.

Aftermath

The gunman Howard had shot was identified as Jesse James Brewer, 48, with a long record of violent crime. He had waited in the car throughout the robbery with a Ruger Blackhawk in .45 Colt, acting as both wheelman and as “outrider,” his mission being to kill any officer who interdicted their robbery. Brewer had been shot eight times. Four of those wounds, it was determined, had been inflicted by Detective Ken Howard. Brewer died the following day in the hospital.

The second armed suspect was Michael Leon Jones, 24. Though he was able to escape the pursuing officer in the darkness, Jones was arrested when he subsequently turned up at a hospital for treatment of a gunshot wound. A former bank robber, Jones would serve time for the liquor store robbery and shootout. After his subsequent release he would shoot — and almost kill — a DC police officer.

Assigned to ride in the ambulance with the mortally wounded Brewer, Ken borrowed six rounds from another officer to reload his empty Detective Special. Later that night, returning to the station, he was met by CID commander Captain Norman Grimm. The captain told Howard he had done what he had to do, and he was behind him a hundred per cent. It was a gesture of support Ken Howard would remember gratefully for the rest of his life.

Officer Morty Ford was rushed to the same intensive care unit as the man who had shot him. Surgeons repaired his serious chest wound, but he required transfusions. Tragically, some of the blood was contaminated. “Morty wound up with hepatitis-C from that,” Ken remembers sadly. “The specialists told Morty that there was about a 98 percent chance he would die of liver cancer as a result. And it’s exactly what happened.”

Another Perspective

Officer Jim Ammons’ “piece of the puzzle” took shape sooner than Howard’s because he arrived at the scene earlier. Ammons told me in 2016:

“I had tunnel vision, for sure. I saw Jones jump out of the car, shoot at Morty and take off running. I fired three shots at him. When Brewer opened fire I thought he was shooting at me; Morty Ford was way over on my right and I couldn’t see him at all. I fired three shots at Brewer while he was still in the driver’s seat and I think the bullet that hit him in the face was one of mine. That was all six. I was reloading when Ken rammed the car, jumped out, and started shooting. I couldn’t believe how fast Ken was shooting and reloading. It seemed he got off 12 rounds at Brewer before I could blink!

“While I reloaded, I moved to the back of the patrol car so when I came back up I wouldn’t be where Brewer had last seen me. After all that shooting Brewer was still low-crawling with his gun out, trying to get at me. I was getting ready to shoot him in the head when I saw that big .45 go flying out of his hand…”

Lessons From The Fight

At the time of the shooting, Alexandria PD issued the 4″ S&W Model 15 for uniform wear, and new 2″ Model 10’s or 2″ Colt Detective Specials to plainclothes investigators. Senior men got the new guns. As a new detective, Ken got an older Colt. Regulation ammo carriers were double dump pouches for uniform, and a single 6-loop cartridge belt slide for plainclothes. Not long before the incident Ken had been carrying his personal 4″ S&W Model 19 Combat Magnum but — partly for comfort, with the S&W more than three-quarters of a pound heavier than the Detective Special, and partly because of regulations — he had gone back to the issue Colt he was wearing at the time of the incident. He had recently bought two of the Hunt speedloaders and had been carrying both in his left coat pocket. On this night, he had left one of them in his desk. Why? “Convenience,” he sighs bitterly.

All shots fired by the police that night were with department-issue .38 Special ammo: 158-gr. lead RN +P. This type of bullet was notorious for punching narrow wound channels. It was likely to exit a felon’s body with enough power to kill a bystander, but was infamous for poor “stopping power.” Brewer had taken eight hits in his face, chest, and upper and lower abdomen, and was still trying to shoot cops when Howard finished the fight by “jacking him out.” Two of the bullets fired by Ken had gone through and through Brewer sideways as he lay prone while attempting to shoot Officer Ammons.

Ken recalled what the after-effects were for his department in terms of gear:

“There was a hue and cry about ‘dum-dum bullets’ and what awful people we were for wanting hollow points, but shortly after this incident we got 158-grain lead semi-wadcutter +P hollow points, the FBI load. We also had a new chief from outside who had been told by some elements of the community that our use of shotguns intimidated them, so he took the shotguns out of the patrol cars. That’s why all we had that night was 6-shooters. There was a big kerfuffle after Morty got shot, when the union said he might not have been wounded if shotguns had been available. I told the chief the same thing to his face — if Morty and Jim had been armed with shotguns, the gunfight would have been over before I even got there. To his credit, the chief listened and gave us the shotguns back.”

Later, semiautomatic service pistols were phased in. Today, the retired captain reports, Alexandria Police are issued 14-shot Glock 23 duty pistols with .40 S&W JHP ammunition, and there are AR-15’s in most department vehicles.

Another learning point from the incident came in the form of bystander assistance. During the shootout, a man who worked at the Ye Olde Hunter firearms emporium in Alexandria ran into the line of fire to pull the wounded Morty Ford clear and apply first aid. Ken considered him forever after a “citizen hero.”

Howard’s Eventful Career

During his first two years in law enforcement on DC Metro, Ken Howard responded to a burglary with other officers. When they found the suspect and he pointed a sawed-off shotgun, Ken leveled his issue 4″ Colt .38 at the man’s chest and fired, along with other officers. They killed him before he could shoot.

In the ’80’s he was a uniformed patrol supervisor called to the scene of a possible hostage-taking in Alexandria. There he found an incoherent madman holding another man with an arm around his neck and a butcher knife in the victim’s mouth. Verbal negotiation failed, and when it was apparent the hostage taker was about to thrust the big knife up into the victim’s brain, Howard leveled the department-issue S&W Model 15 and quickly put two .38 Special “FBI Loads” into his neck and chest, causing him to fall down and away from the victim. When the downed suspect reached for a second weapon, Ken shot him in the knee and anchored him. The victim escaped with minor lacerations of the mouth. The suspect survived, though Ken felt the 158-gr. lead SWCHPs had done a much better job of “stopping” than the old RNs.

In all three of the incidents Ken was involved in, he never heard the gunfire and he experienced tunnel vision. In the shooting outside the liquor store, between the darkness and the slow-motion effect of tachypsychia, he felt like a man swimming underwater. Still he persevered and prevailed each time. In the liquor store shooting, when his gun ran dry he went to his blackjack and finished the fight like a soldier with an empty rifle going immediately to the bayonet. There’s a lesson there as well.

Concealed soft body armor — introduced by Richard Davis of Second Chance — was available at the time of this shooting but APD had not yet adopted it. It could have defeated the bullet that went into Morty Ford’s upper torso and ultimately shortened his life.

We are also reminded night shooting sucks. Night sights were still far away from being standard equipment. Ken had hit with every shot in his prior DC incident, where the cops had flashlights for illumination, and likewise scored 100 percent hits in good indoor lighting during his final shooting, the hostage rescue incident, in which he was two arm-lengths away from the knife-wielder. Today with night sights, weaponlights and frequent training in poor light, we’re all ahead of the game. During our meeting, Ken reminded me his 33 percent hit ratio in the liquor-store gunfight stands in stark contrast to the 95 percent-plus he averaged over the years on the range during qualification.
A huge lesson from this is the importance of sustaining fire. Ken believes that Morty Ford had emptied his gun, reloaded laboriously one cartridge at a time from his dump pouches, and had just closed the cylinder at the time he was shot down. If he’d had a gun that held more rounds … if he’d had a speedloader as Ken did … well, you do the math.

Retired from a career spanning three decades, Ken still carries a semiauto. And a spare magazine.

Note to readers: Years after this incident, when Alexandria PD switched to autoloaders, the department’s service revolvers were traded in and while officers were allowed to purchase the handguns they had used to protect the public, Ken’s was in evidence and was traded before he could buy it. Ever since, he’s yearned to recover the gun he used that night. If you should run across a 2nd generation Colt Detective Special with an unshrouded ejector rod and 2″ barrel (SN 689642), please let me know and we’ll see if we can reunite a retired public servant with the instrument he used to “protect and serve.”

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By Massad Ayoob

Situation: You watch in horror as a routine arrest turns into a cop-killing. The police are all down or out of ammo … but there’s a dropped gun where you can reach it.

Lesson: This young man was not the first citizen to save police lives with a gun, nor the last.

More than 80 years after his death, John Dillinger remains a household name, the most famous “celebrity criminal” of the 20th century. Long since lost to the radar screen, though, are his many criminal accomplices … and the good guys with guns who took them down. Buried even more deeply is the fact some of Dillinger’s cohorts fell to the guns of law-abiding armed citizens. This is the story of one of them, whose name was Herbert Youngblood, Dillinger’s partner in the infamous Crown Point, Indiana jailbreak.

Breakout

Law enforcement thought Dillinger had reached the end of his long criminal trail when he was and locked up in the Lake County jail in Crown Point, under the supervision of Sheriff Lillian Holley. Photos of the time show the authorities took the infamous Public Enemy Number One quite seriously: the jail was surrounded by law officers with shotguns and Thompson submachine guns and even militiamen, the latter armed with Springfield rifles.

On March 3, 1934, John Dillinger pulled off the most notorious of the many jailbreaks he was involved in over the years. Historians still debate whether he used a real gun, or a fake one carved of wood or soap — Dillinger bragged it was the latter — but he was able to convince jail personnel it was real, and that was enough. One by one, he cornered them at gunpoint, assisted by fellow inmate Herbert Youngblood.

There is no indication Dillinger knew Youngblood, a 29-year-old African-American, until he met him at the Crown Point jail, but Youngblood was one of three active henchmen during the break. At one point using a toilet plunger as a club to cow the intimidated jailers, Youngblood switched to a loaded Thompson submachine gun as soon as he and Dillinger raided the armory. I’ve never seen the exact inventory of what guns they “liberated” that day, but by all accounts the two former inmates were heavily armed when they took Sheriff Holley’s personal Ford V-8, the most powerful sedan in the sheriff’s department garage, and quietly drove away unchallenged with two hostages: Deputy Sheriff Ernest Blunk and mechanic Edward Saager. The other two inmates who had been in on the escape had second thoughts, and went no farther than the sheriff’s garage. Dillinger and Youngblood later released the hostages unharmed.

Youngblood apparently left the Thompson with Dillinger when they parted company, the latter allegedly dropping him off near a streetcar stop on Chicago’s Western Avenue. The legend says Dillinger left him with a “thanks” and a hundred dollar bill.

There is no solid evidence the two escapees ever had contact with one another again. Dillinger went along on his own violent path, which ended in a pool of blood outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater on the night of July 22, 1934.

Herbert Youngblood didn’t last nearly as long.

Brief Freedom

Youngblood made his way to Port Huron, Michigan, roughly 350 miles from Chicago. It was a good choice for a fugitive. Until the Volstead Act ended Prohibition a few months earlier, this area of the Great Lakes had been a funnel for bootleg booze and a wanted fugitive might have considered it a place where criminals might be winked at instead of stared at. Advertised as a “gateway to Canada,” Port Huron put someone in Youngblood’s situation close to a border across which to escape if he sensed the police too close on his trail. Finally, Port Huron at that time had a small but growing African-American community in which a black man could inconspicuously blend.

Unfortunately for Herbert Youngblood, being inconspicuous was not in his nature. We do not know what Youngblood was doing to get money for the almost two weeks he remained at large, but newspapers said later he was drinking heavily in local bars during that period, flashing a large roll of bills and bragging about his friendship with the notorious Dillinger to all who would listen. On March 16, 1934, a Friday morning, his behavior backfired on him.

Final Confrontation

Youngblood turns up that morning at a tiny Port Huron grocery store owned by Mrs. Pearl Abraham. He is armed with two semi-automatic pistols, a “.38 automatic” according to reports and a ten-shot Savage .32 ACP. Both are concealed.

He is drunk and obstreperous. Loudly proclaiming himself a “badman,” he takes a pack of cigarettes and refuses to pay for them. Making an ass of oneself is not a crime, but petty theft is, and that’s what causes the owner’s son to call the Sheriff’s Department.

Three lawmen arrive. One is the Sheriff himself, William van Antwerp. With him are his second in command, Undersheriff Charles Cavanaugh, and a deputy, Howard Lohr.

They accost Youngblood and pat him down. Cavanaugh relieves him of the .38. It appears everything is copacetic and this is going to be a routine arrest.

But they’ve stopped their search when they found the first gun. And now, Herbert Youngblood’s hand dives into his pocket and comes out with the second pistol.

Shootout

The tiny store explodes into a short but savage death duel. Youngblood fires first. Multiple bullets tear through Cavanaugh’s chest, piercing both lungs. Cavanaugh draws and returns fire, even as he is falling. The other cops draw and fire too and Youngblood is hit, but he still keeps shooting. The Sheriff is wounded in the upper body. Deputy Lohr sustains a severe chest wound.

Both are pumping bullets into Youngblood, but Youngblood is still up and shooting.

Caught up in this horror is Eugene Fields, the storeowner’s son. Suddenly, he sees a dropped police service revolver on the floor.
He picks it up, brings it to bear on Herbert Youngblood, and shoots him twice.

And at last, Youngblood collapses to the floor, and the gunfight is over.

Aftermath

Undersheriff Cavanaugh did not survive the multiple bullets Youngblood pumped into his chest. Dead at age 47, he left behind a widow and a child.

Deputy Lohr was gravely wounded, but survived, as did Sheriff van Antwerp. Fields had sustained a superficial wound to one shoulder.

Accounts vary, but Herbert Youngblood sustained at least six and perhaps as many as 10 gunshot wounds before he went down. He died in a local hospital four hours later. He had apparently been hit by all four men who had shot at him. Before he succumbed, he claimed he had been partying with Dillinger a matter of hours before. There is no evidence to support that, and it is generally believed he made that statement in hopes of sending police on a fruitless false trail.

Lessons

For police, the lessons are stark, and you’ve probably heard them all before. Cops aren’t the only ones who carry backup guns. When you find and remove one weapon from a suspect, don’t assume that’s all he has. Go with the “plus one” rule: each time you find one weapon on him, there’s a damn good chance he has another.

There’s a reason for “cuff first, then search.” Youngblood was able to make the first move. He might or might not have been able to get the hidden gun out with his hands manacled behind his back, but he certainly could not have fired from that position with the deadly accuracy he delivered that terrible day.

There’s no such thing as a routine call. What seemed at first to be just another loud-mouth drunk turned into a cop-killer in an instant.
Never give up! The heroic Undersheriff Cavanaugh overcame both surprise and mortal wounds to return fire even as he fell, buying time for brother officers to unlimber their guns and shoot the cop-killer. That may have been the difference between two wounded cops and a wounded citizen who survived and what might well have otherwise been three murdered policemen and a dead citizen.

For citizens, note that Eugene Fields was apparently known to the police officers as the owner’s son, a complaining witness instead of a potential accomplice of the suspect. Under other circumstances, in a situation as dire as a shootout such as this one, an unknown person picking up a gun and firing could have been perceived by the embattled officers as another attacker instead of a rescuer, with tragic results.

That said, Fields’ action was obviously the right one. He could have simply run to safety while cops and thug were shooting it out. Instead, he executed a “battlefield pickup” of a dropped gun and, it seems, fired the final shots that ended the deadly danger Youngblood presented. Amidst the cacophony of what the local newspaper described as a “gun battle which filled the tiny store with dense smoke,” Fields stopped Youngblood from inflicting further death and destruction. There was certainly an element of enlightened self-interest: a witness to the shooting of the cops, and the man who had called them in the first place, Fields had every reason to believe he might be the next to die if Youngblood stayed on his feet. Yet that does not detract from his heroism in shooting the killer down.

What had Youngblood been in jail for at Crown Point in the first place? He had been there awaiting trial for … murder. His bragging to all who would listen in the Port Huron bars, and describing himself as a “badman,” are good indicators. Once he broke out of jail with Dillinger, his self-image was apparently conjoined with that of the nation’s most famous criminal. Though apologists say John Dillinger never killed anyone, the witnesses were sure it was Dillinger who machine-gunned East Chicago, Indiana policeman Patrick O’Malley to death during a bank robbery in January of 1934, and that’s how Dillinger was seen by the public and, we must assume, the now hero-worshipping Youngblood.

Michael Bentt was the man who played Herbert Youngblood in the recent Dillinger movie, “Public Enemies.” Preparing for the role, he studied Dillinger, and came to respect him. Timesherald.com, the website of the Port Huron Times Herald, quotes the actor: “Think about it, 1934? You know relationships between blacks and whites were not as they are now. And for John Dillinger to embrace this black man back then … and for John to embrace that, it just speaks about the guy’s character.” Bentt’s viewpoint could explain why Youngblood’s dying words were a lie to misdirect the authorities away from the master criminal who had gotten him out of jail, and who, history would later show, was in Chicago at the time of Youngblood’s death. Perhaps it was just that rare case of “honor among thieves.”

Not The Only One

Eugene Fields was not the only citizen to pick up a gun and fight back against Dillinger minions during the years those men terrorized the Midwest. On June 30, 1934, the John Dillinger/Baby Face Nelson gang hit a bank in South Bend, Indiana. In the shootout that followed, Dillinger’s fellow traveler Homer Van Meter shot and killed police officer Harold Wagner with a customized .351 Winchester semi-automatic rifle. Armed citizen Harry Berg stepped out of his nearby jewelry store and shot Baby Face Nelson in the back with his .22 caliber target revolver, and ducked back behind cover before Nelson’s return fire from a Thompson submachine gun could reach him: the tiny bullet had stopped on Nelson’s bullet-proof vest.

Moments later, Berg re-emerged, and this time his sights were on the cop-killer Van Meter. As the jeweler fired, the criminal’s knees were seen to buckle: he had scored a head shot on Van Meter. Dillinger caught his cohort and threw him into the getaway car, and the gang fled, successfully escaping.

It was later learned the armed citizen’s .22 slug had glanced off the murderer’s head, temporarily stunning and disabling him but not penetrating the brain. Accomplices confessed to police much later that at their hideout, the psychopath Nelson was in a mouth-foaming tizzy that he had almost been killed by a potential victim, and Van Meter had to be placated by Dillinger himself to keep him from returning to South Bend to murder the armed citizen who had nearly killed him.

Lesson

As much as everyone likes to say shot placement trumps ballistic power level, we have to recognize that if citizen Berg had been armed with something more powerful, the outcome might have been different. Had he been using, say the .38 Super that Colt introduced in 1929 expressly to defeat body armor of the time, his shot to Nelson’s back might have proven fatal and his hit to Van Meter’s forehead at the hairline might, instead of carving a groove out of his skull, have penetrated and pierced the brain. Had that been the case, neither of those vicious criminals would have gone on to commit more murders, as both apparently did.

Earlier, on October 13, 1933, the Dillinger gang robbed a bank in Mason City, Iowa and once again had reason to regret the existence of armed American citizens. In his office in an upper floor of a building across the street, elderly Judge John Shipley saw what was happening and took umbrage at the band of heavily armed bandits who were not only looting a bank but terrorizing the citizenry. He unlimbered what the newspapers of the time called an antique revolver from the Frontier era, and opened fire.

One of his bullets hit Dillinger Gang member John Hamilton, and another burrowed into John Dillinger himself. The judge ducked away from the window he fired from and got behind cover as Dillinger’s vengeful return burst of fully automatic gunfire merely chewed up the outer walls of the building. The gang made their escape. Both Dillinger and Hamilton had been hit in their right shoulders. Was the judge being merciful, and merely aiming to “wing” them … or did his ancient six-shooter just tend to hit off from point of aim? This, history does not record.

Bottom Line

Contrary to the modern narrative of the gun prohibitionists, history is replete with cases of armed citizens helping cops and even saving cops in deadly force situations.

It is sad to see two wedges driven between natural allies, the armed citizens and America’s police. One wedge came from the gun prohibitionists, when anti-gun mayors turned some of their appointed municipal police chiefs into puppets who mouthed their bosses’ sentiments. Another, perhaps more sadly, came from a minority in the pro-Second Amendment community who strangely decided that to be pro-individual rights must automatically make them anti-police.

This case shows a more real paradigm. The police came to that little store to help the staff deal with a belligerent customer. They didn’t know they were dealing with a homicide suspect more deeply invested than ever in his criminal identity. When Herbert Youngblood opened fire on them, those cops bravely fought back, to protect not only themselves but the citizens in the store. When all three of them had been shot, one of those citizens picked up a dropped police handgun and ended the threat, saving the cops in turn.

Such things should not have to happen. But when they do, they should end with the murderer neutralized. Thanks to three courageous law enforcement officers and one brave armed citizen, that’s exactly how this incident ended.

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By Massad Ayoob

Situation:

A family’s morning is shattered when a big, enraged man kicks in the front door and violently enters the home. The man of the family grabs his pistol, and …

Lesson:

Danger threatens sometimes at the least opportune moments. Even when the criminal justice system handles a justifiable homicide by the book, some in the community just don’t understand.

January 5, 2015, Austin, Texas. It is approximately 6:15 a.m. at the home of John Daub in a nice suburban neighborhood. The teenage sons and daughter are getting up and about, John’s wife is ready to sit down with her morning coffee, and John, 42, is a few hours ahead of them all. A mobile software engineer who owns his own company, he’s also a firearms instructor and martial artist who teaches part-time for Karl Rehn’s well-known local school, KR Training. Up at 3:30 a.m., he has been to the gym and back, and preparatory to his morning shower is sitting on the toilet with his smartphone, absorbed in reading his email.

When danger unpredictably strikes, it can find you in an awkward situation.

John hears a loud male voice outside, and shouts to his wife wondering what’s going on. In the main living area of the home, John’s wife is startled: first by what sounds like a human imitating a coyote’s howl, and then by loud, angry shouts outside. There is a violent shaking of the doorknob, and then a heavy banging on the front door. She can see it actually moving from the impact. She realizes someone is trying to kick down the door.

She screams to John.

Sudden Action

Tunneled in on his iPhone, John has heard a loud male voice, but not the howling or the impacts against the door. What he does hear is his wife’s voice, filled with a tone of absolute terror he has never heard in the 20 years they’ve been married.

He will remember jumping up and pulling up his gym shorts. He will not remember reflexively pocketing the iPhone as he dashes into the bedroom where he has left his carry pistol in his gym bag. The Smith & Wesson Military & Police Compact 9mm is swiftly in his hand, fully loaded with Speer Gold Dot 124-gr. +P hollow points. Now, he sprints down the hall.

He’s so focused on putting himself between the danger and his loved ones that when he passes two people in the hall running in the other direction, he doesn’t actually recognize they are his wife and daughter, only that they are members of the family. His training has engaged. He is looking for the threat.

And now, in the living room, he finds that threat. Suddenly, he is facing a powerfully-built man he has never seen before. Daub can see his front door is wide open, the door-frame broken and the intruder is already well into the living room.

He takes the big man at gunpoint and yells, “Get the fuck out of my house!” There is no reaction. John repeats the command.
The man moves aggressively toward him.

John Daub is a tall, strong man himself, and is thoroughly trained in hand-to-hand as well as with guns. His training has taught him a criminal intruder moving toward a homeowner legally holding a gun on him should be assumed to consider himself capable of disarming the homeowner and killing him and his family with his own gun. With his wife and three children behind him, this is a chance John Daub cannot take.

He opens fire.

Shots Fired

Unlike some in this situation, Daub heard his shots, and will remember the incident as having happened in real time, not in the commonly perceived slow motion effect known as “tachypsychia” nor as “it happened so fast.”

He perceives the big man turning away from him, back toward the door, and instantly stops shooting. He sees the man take two or three wobbly steps, reach the doorway, and then collapse just outside, his feet at the doorsill.

With his free hand, Daub gropes reflexively for his phone and finds it in his pocket somewhat to his surprise since he cannot remember placing it there. He dials 9-1-1 to report and request police and ambulance, and realizes he can hear his wife, elsewhere in the house now, calling the same number.

As he is talking to dispatch, he can hear the last, rasping breath of the downed intruder just outside the still-open door, and it is over. He sets down the pistol. Austin Police and paramedics arrive quickly.

The intruder will be pronounced dead where he lies.

Legal Aftermath

John Daub was (and still is) a member of the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network (armedcitizensnetwork.org). He called ACLDN founder and director Marty Hayes, who told us, “I got a call from John while the police were there. John asked me to call Attorney Gene Anthes, a network-affiliated attorney. I gave him John’s phone number and had Gene call him direct. I explained to both it was John’s responsibility to retain counsel; he did, and Gene and I were on the phone within an hour. Gene was at the Daub residence already, and speaking to the press. We got $10,000 to Gene immediately.”

Daub found the police to be polite and professional. Police press conferences informed the public that the deceased — Jared James, 24 — had been diagnosed as autistic and had a history of being committed to mental institutions due to his behavior. He had been living in a residential care facility a short distance from the Daub home. Investigation determined shortly before the incident, James had become agitated at the group home, began acting out, and then as one news source put it, “escaped.” A staff person at the facility had followed James a short distance, but returned when James refused to come back, and neglected to call authorities. James had gone on to pound on several neighborhood doors, and then to violently break the front door of the Daub home out of its frame and make entry. It was then the shooting occurred.

Between the shooting and the case being sent to the grand jury, as all homicide cases routinely are in Texas, the mental health facility in question was shut down and surrendered its license. On June 2, 2015, the Grand Jury after reviewing the evidence returned No True Bill, effectively determining no crime had been committed by John Daub. No lawsuit has been filed at this writing.

Details

Few people are able to recall how many shots they fired in self-defense when the matter goes beyond two or three rounds. John was no exception. What we have with him, however, is the rare case of a man who was a deeply trained firearms instructor becoming involved in a shooting. It’s rather like an oncologist who is diagnosed with cancer himself: an uncommon opportunity for someone heavily experienced in the thing from the outside, to experience it from the inside. Here are some of John’s recollections.

“I know I fired with a two-handed grip. I don’t recall seeing the sights, nor do I recall not seeing — I just don’t recall either way. I do know I brought the gun up into a ‘proper isosceles’ stance (i.e. I wasn’t hip shooting or anything), and at least was sighting/indexing off something … if not the sights properly, at least off the slide, etc. This was all happening at about two to three yards.

“I cannot swear to this, but I believe I was target fixated … focused more at the threat. Probably trying to figure things out, being able to observe what was happening (e.g. expression on his face, etc.). Again, no conscious decisions at the time — it’s just looking back on what I remember and in hindsight trying to add some possible explanation to things.

“I am pretty sure I ran the trigger and fired as fast as I’d normally run it, but I can run .20-splits (.15’s if I really crank) so it just felt “normal” to me. I don’t recall it feeling faster than normal, nor slower. I had no idea how many shots I fired — it was just keep shooting until the threat isn’t a threat any more (as per all my training). As soon as I realized he was turning to leave (i.e. threat was ceasing to be a threat), I stopped shooting. Of course, that’s part of why there was one shot that landed behind the lateral midline, but of course it was only one shot. Turns out it was five shots, five hits; four bullets recovered (we assume one must have passed through and is probably somewhere in my front garden somewhere).

“One interesting thing is after it happened, on the phone with 9-1-1 … I fell back as far as I could in the house that would get me as far away as I could be yet still able to see things (my belief was we were being robbed and likely the dude had friends). While I was on the phone, there was a time I realized I had shifted the gun to my weak hand (so I could be on the phone with my strong hand). I distinctly recall realizing this and thinking how STUPID it was to have the gun in my weak hand, in case something else did happen. But I didn’t shift it back because I’d have to do this fumble/shuffle between gun and active-phone, and I was not about to do this since I was actively engaged with 9-1-1 — my plan then was if shit started to fly again, I will drop the phone and get to work. Of course I didn’t have to use it, but yeah … would I do something different? I’d not shift the gun to my weak hand,” John concludes.

Personal Aftermath

The after-effects of a deadly force action are many, and John Daub went through a range of them. He told us, “I experienced a sense of exhaustion. When your brain has been going a million miles an hour, it leaves you feeling exhausted. I know for a fact I lost six pounds that day because I was in the midst of a weight loss regimen and weighed myself daily. It takes many, many, many hours to get the taste of adrenalin out of your mouth. I was constantly thirsty and never really felt it was quenched. There were no crazy nightmares, however. Hundreds of hours of training, along with teaching every weekend at KR Training definitely helped. There was a lot of stress inoculation, and that was huge.”

“Training,” John concludes, “gives you more than skills.”

Family Aftermath

“Our family on the whole handled it decently,” John told American Handgunner a year-and-a-half after the shooting. “A lot of this came from the fact everyone was inoculated. They know what I do and teach, and we had talked about it. The possibility of it happening and how to handle it was not a completely foreign concept. Everyone was able to handle it. My wife and daughter were hit hardest: for my wife, hardest thing was realizing she could have lost her husband. When it was going down, she had sequestered herself and two of the kids in the master bedroom and when she heard me yelling and heard gunshots, was thinking the worst until she heard me shouting to call 9-1-1, which was a massive relief for her. For my daughter, it was just the whole shock of it to a teenage girl. She likes to sleep on the couch in the living room, and that night she had decided not to. There was the reality of ‘Gee, I could have been right there in the thick of it.’ Both of my sons were largely unaffected by it. Our older son has done some training with us at KR. They were raised with a protector, defender mind-set. He was ready to grab a rifle and start fighting.”

He adds, “What affected all of us was a bit of hypervigilance, jumping when someone knocked at the door. A few days later there was a bit of red nail polish on the dining room table, and the resemblance to blood startled us for a moment. That eventually went away. Not ’til the grand jury no bill came through, in June 2015, did things really start to return to normal.”

One inevitable result of such an incident is what the great police psychologist Dr. Walter Gorski called “Mark of Cain” syndrome: Your having killed someone changes the way you and your family are seen — and treated — by others. This certainly appeared after John’s shooting. He told American Handgunner, “There were a lot of interesting reactions. At the beginning, in both the neighborhood and the community there was confusion as to what happened. The Austin PD spokesperson said all the right things, but one word they used, ‘threshold,’ made a lot of people think it happened at the front door or I let him in or shot through the door. He collapsed on the front porch, so some neighbors got the impression it had happened there, though he was six to 10 feet inside the house when I shot him. It was definitely not an instant collapse. He took at least two steps after being shot before he went down.”

John continues, “There was a lot of misunderstanding, so with my lawyer we released photos of the broken door, and the court of public opinion changed back toward reality. Not a heroic thing with a dead scumbag, not a vigilante who shot a young man, just a tragic thing for all concerned, though there are still a few neighbors who seem to think I’m a murderer. A lot of what we got was sympathy and support, people who wanted to do something but didn’t know what to do, but we knew there was a lot of care and love. Some were more curious than others about details. Some neighbors didn’t want to talk or interact. There’s still one neighbor who turns coldly away when we say hello to her. No anonymous death threats or anything like that. We did see some negative things in news commentary section, Facebook, all of that. There were some people who behaved in an ugly manner, fueled by their own biases or just didn’t have the correct information. We just shrugged it off.”

Lessons

John is still carrying same kind of ammo, in a full-size M&P usually but sometimes in the compact, depending on the day’s wardrobe. Having committed to the platform some years before, then and now he’s had multiple M&Ps in both sizes.

Would he have been able to deliver an armed reaction sooner if he had been “home carrying”? Of course, and he knew that. “I always carried at the house,” he told us, “and still do.” At the time of the home invasion, however, he had stripped off everything but the gym shorts and was on the toilet and about to take a shower. Hence, the rush for the pistol in the master bedroom.

“There was one change we did make afterward,” John reports. “We got a big, heavy storm door for the front, security style with shatterproof laminated glass. It gives my wife more peace of mind.”

He wishes he could have known the mental health facility so near his home contained people with a propensity toward violence, and at least one of its residents was dangerous. However, the group home had kept a very low profile, and HIPPA regulations would probably have prevented the organization from giving such warnings to residents.

John feels much of the credit for his family surviving without any physical harm can be attributed to his training. He was so focused on what he knew he had to do, that there was no time to become terrified. Prior to the incident, his training had taught him he might experience perceptual distortion during such an encounter. Thus, he was not distracted or disoriented when he realized “some things were a bit of a blur.” This included not actually recognizing his wife and daughter as they raced past each other in the hallway.

The family knew what to do in an emergency. Each ran to safety, and the older son was about to access a rifle to join in the home defense when John fired the shots to end the invasion.

Let us end with another lesson John would like us to pass on: “Being able to sleep at night for the rest of your life is really important.” Having since been called both hero and villain over this incident, John Daub considers himself neither. He was simply a devoted husband and father doing what he had to do to protect his wife and children.

He would say when it was over, “I don’t believe any person would want such a thing to happen to them, no matter the context, no matter the circumstance. It’s an unfortunate and tragic situation for all involved. My heart breaks for his family. I ask you to please pray for the repose of his soul and for peace for his family.”

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By Massad Ayoob

Situation: In a bullet-pocked chase, the gunman has killed one victim and tried to murder many more. Now, 80 or more yards away, you’re the only one positioned to stop him … and all you have is your carry pistol.

Lesson: Shooting skill is based on solid marksmanship fundamentals. It’s critical to be aware of shooting backdrop and to fight tunnel vision. What you have immediately at hand is probably what you’ll finish the fight with, and when you’ve made shooting under pressure the norm, this will be on your side when it’s life or death.

In August of 2016, 35-year-old Nathan Terault was sentenced to 51 years and eight months in prison, the maximum under the jurisdiction’s sentencing guidelines, for a vicious shooting spree leaving a 71-year-old grandfather dead. It provided closure to the community of Puyallup, Washington which had been horrified by Terault’s meth-fueled shooting spree a year before in which he had attempted to murder several victims including multiple police officers.

On the day in question, the murderer — already a convicted felon, with multiple assaults and a drive-by shooting on his record — had strapped on a black shoulder rig and armed himself with a near-twin pair of GLOCK’s: a G32 in .357 SIG and a G23 in .40 S&W. At least one of the pistols was stolen.

The rampage had begun when the murder victim, Richard Johnson, caught Terault on his property rifling through Johnson’s pickup truck. He tried to run when Terault pulled the .357 on him, but was shot multiple times. Terault fled from the murder scene, carjacked an SUV and led police on a decidedly un-merry chase. During the course of the pursuit that followed, said the area newspaper The News Tribune, Terault “fired more shots at grade school children, teachers home for the summer, passersby and police.” Thirteen houses had been hit by bullets.

The closure of Terault’s adjudication also opened the door for American Handgunner to be the first publication to get the inside story from Puyallup Detective Scott Bramhall, the man who ended the terror when he shot the still-armed killer down.

Enter Scott Bramhall

Says Bramhall, “On August 11, 2015 I was on the phone at my desk getting ready to drive to interview a suspect in an out-of-area jail. I had 33 years on, my application for my new retirement job was in and I was waiting to hear about my job application. I was intending to submit my two weeks’ notice and two weeks of vacation together and retire. I was thinking this suspect interview in an out-of-area jail could be the last case of my career. A radio call of an active shooter went out over the air. Dispatch relayed reports from multiple 911 calls of a ‘white male walking down the street actively shooting on 13th St. SW and 6th Ave. The suspect is a white male dressed in blue flannel shirt and jeans shooting a handgun. Man down.’”

Bramhall continues, “I grabbed my portable radio. I was dressed in plain clothes as per my assignment in general investigations/fraud financial crimes. As soon as the call went out I heard Officer Kowalski radio he was in the area. Officer Kowalski radioed citizens were pointing south of his location, he heard gunshots and he was ‘out.’ I know Mike Kowalski very well, we were on the SWAT team together for 10 years, we have been hunting together, we are good friends and if I were asked to pick one employee of the Puyallup Police Dept. who I would want to go through a door with, Mike Kowalski would be my first choice of over 50 commissioned officers.

“He would be the last Puyallup PD officer an active shooter would want to have come after him. When Mike Kowalski said he was ‘out’ I knew he had grabbed his rifle and was on foot going after the active shooter. I got in my unmarked police car thinking this would be over before I got there; coming from the police station at 2:30 p.m. the short route to the location of the incident would take about five minutes with lights and siren in traffic in an unmarked vehicle.

I figured I’d be arriving and taking the statements of witnesses. Of course multiple officers answered up immediately, giving their locations as closer than mine.”

Reaching The Scene

Those who say ordinary citizens don’t need guns because they just have to call 911 and the Starship Enterprise will instantly beam down some cops, simply don’t understand the laws of time and space. Cops do, and on that sunny August afternoon Bramhall confronted it: traffic was maddeningly heavy, and the meth-head killer was driving — and shooting — wildly and unpredictably. As the pursuit changed directions, in the time it took officers to radio information in and other officers to respond accordingly, the criminal had time to change directions yet again.

At one point, as the chase turned toward Bramhall’s location, he realized he might be in position to meet the fugitive vehicle head-on. Bramhall’s unmarked unit was a Chevy Impala, a vehicle not as big as Impalas used to be, and as soon as he considered ramming the stolen SUV from the front, he discarded the thought. He didn’t think his smaller vehicle could stop the larger one. Moreover, if the driver was not disabled in a head-on and came out shooting, he and the officers behind the fleeing SUV would be in a crossfire with one another. Bramhall was prepared to reluctantly let him go past and then join in the pursuit — but then, a wild card turned up in the game.

Confrontation

Relates Bramhall, “I see the suspect coming north on Fairview, then I see the suspect vehicle stop. Later I learned he had collided with a citizen’s vehicle; however, I did not see this. I observe the suspect with his entire torso sticking out of the driver’s door window and I witness the suspect fire about five shots into the front of the marked police car behind the white SUV he is in. I hope for the best for the officer. The offender is wearing a blue flannel shirt and has a black handgun. Then as I watch, the offender gets out of the white SUV and trots north to a vehicle stopped in the roadway and fires about five shots at the citizen driver from the vehicle’s driver’s side rear wheel. I figure I just witnessed a homicide, if not two homicides.

“I can’t shoot because of all the citizens in cars stopped in the intersection in my line of fire. The offender trots obliquely from my right to left. I find myself as perimeter unmarked police unit where the suspect has broken out of primary containment putting me, a perimeter unit, in a primary contact position.”

Time To Shoot

It’s known to Detective Bramhall this man is a deadly threat. Bramhall, 57, has been shooting since he was a kid and winning trophies in shooting competitions since the early 1980’s. He shoots with such famed Pacific Northwest firearms experts as multiple gunfight winner John Solheim and master trainer Bill Burris, and Bramhall has spent many years as a firearms instructor and SWAT operator. He has trained at Thunder Ranch with Clint Smith, and through the Washington State Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors Association, has taken training with Jeff Cooper, me and many others.

Around his waist in plainclothes he wears a matched set of hip holster, single mag pouch, and dress gunbelt, all in horsehide by ace leather-smith Greg Kramer. Bramhall carries a privately owned, department-approved Colt Lightweight Government Model with aluminum frame and 5″ barrel, with Novak sights, a front post he has colored yellow and a forged stainless barrel bushing. The pistol has a factory standard trigger pull.

And now, he has stopped the Impala, flung open the driver’s door, and set his left foot on the pavement as he reflexively draws, goes into his familiar two-hand hold and braces his Colt on the windshield frame. Bramhall holds his fire until he sees he has a clear firing path: no one is between him and the armed offender, and the gunman is walking in front of a solid fence made of 2″ square steel posts. Amidst the heavy city traffic, he at last has a clear shot with a good backstop.

As he has done countless times before in preparing for such a moment, Bramhall presses the trigger rearward. The pistol discharges. There is no reaction downrange. Miss! He presses again.

The gunman drops like a bag of rocks.

And then, two things happen almost simultaneously. Bramhall sees a marked Puyallup Police Department Chevy Tahoe roll atop the downed gunman, pinning him to the ground, and another police vehicle pulls up between Bramhall and the suspect. Bramhall’s finger instantly comes off the trigger, and his muzzle moves into a safe direction.

Nathan Terault’s deadly rampage is over. It has lasted for eight terrifying minutes from first shot to last. The murderer’s illegally possessed GLOCK 23 will be recovered from him where he fell; the stolen GLOCK 32 will be recovered from the scene of the Johnson murder.

Detective Bramhall has only gotten one thing wrong. He has estimated the distance to be about 40 yards.

Investigation will show conclusively Detective Scott Bramhall has shot down the killer and ended the deadly fight from a distance of between 80 and 84 yards.

Perceptions

Dr. Alexis Artwohl and many other authorities have documented altered perceptions in people involved in fighting for their lives. Things like tunnel vision, auditory exclusion and tachypsychia — the sense of things happening in slow motion — can all occur. Detective Bramhall’s experiences in this regard are fascinating and instructive.

He recalls it happening in real time, not slow motion. However, he remembers thinking when he fired the first shot, which sounded to him like a “poof,” that he was mentally processing such: he consciously looked to see his hammer was back and his slide forward and that no, he didn’t have a squib.

“I heard the spent shell case ‘tink’ across my windshield so I knew my gun has at least completed the ejection cycle,” he wrote later. Scott told me, “I had expected to hear the second shot, but I heard another ‘poof’ and I remember thinking at the moment, ‘This is bizarre.’ I had thought things like auditory exclusion came from stress, but throughout the shooting I had no awareness of accelerated heartbeat or anything similar.” When our brain goes into survival mode, it seems to screen out things that distract us from survival imperatives; some in the medical world call it “cortical perception.”

It appears Scott Bramhall defeated tunnel vision as well, because he was consciously, deliberately looking at his shooting background and the periphery of the situation. He knew officers were chasing this man and could at any moment appear in his line of fire. He was watching for this, saw it in time and ceased fire in time.

Another reality in such matters is different people perceive things differently. Some witnesses, who had not heard Bramhall’s shots, thought Officer Micah Wilson had run down Terault with his patrol Tahoe. Wilson himself, also not hearing Bramhall’s gunfire, thought Terault had tripped and fallen, and he was simply driving his vehicle onto the man to hold the killer down.

And Bramhall? When he saw the killer fall at his second shot, he thought he must have hit the spine, because he didn’t expect even his Federal HST 230 grain +P ammo to drop a man with anything less than a central nervous system hit. It turned out the bullet had struck Terault in the thigh and shattered his femur, resulting in Terault’s immediate collapse.

Lessons

A quiet career isn’t quiet ’til it’s over. Scott Bramhall was counting the days to his retirement on the day he had to use his gun to stop an armed murderer. Prior to then, the closest he had come to shooting a man was using bean-bag rounds against a suspect when he worked on the SWAT team. (He wasn’t impressed with the effect of the bean bags, but that’s another story.) However, he had a full-size fighting pistol and more important, awareness and training in both tactics and defensive shooting, and still made a point of shooting weekly. All this allowed him to successfully perform what Jeff Cooper would likely have called “a feat of arms” ending a deadly threat to the community Bramhall had sworn an oath to protect.

What you have on your person is very likely all you’ll have to fight with. On that particular day, Bramhall’s personal Colt AR15 was not in his unmarked unit. It’s not likely in the fast-breaking circumstances, he would have had time to deploy it from a locked rack or rifle case anyway. He also did not have time to access the body armor in the trunk of the unmarked Impala.

If you are trained to recognize altered perceptions which may occur in such circumstances, they won’t alarm or distract you if and when they do take place. Note Bramhall was actually able to cognitively process and analyze the fact he was experiencing auditory exclusion in the course of the fight and this awareness did not get in the way of his getting the necessary job done.

Consciously scanning the danger zone can beat the tunnel vision effect. Bramhall was acutely aware of everything in the “shooting backdrop” from even before he un-holstered his Colt .45. This allowed him to take advantage when he briefly had a clear line of fire and a solid, safe backstop. It also allowed him to see two different police vehicles coming into his line of fire, in time to get his finger off the trigger of his weapon and divert his muzzle to a safe direction.

When life is on the line, it helps if shooting under pressure has become “the norm” for you instead of, “This is it!” Scott Bramhall joins a long line of Good Guys (Wyatt Earp, Jelly Bryce, Col. Charles Askins, Jr., Jim Cirillo, Bill Allard and many more) who in the course of trophy-winning competitive shooting conditioned themselves to later successfully running a gun when the stakes were much, much higher than trophies.

Know thy weapon (and its trajectory). A life-long shooter, Bramhall often used his handguns at extended ranges, out to 200 yards. He was known to get 4″ 5-shot groups at a hundred yards with carefully crafted handloads from his pet Colt Single Action Army revolvers. With that experience, it’s no surprise he was able to hit a moving gunman at 80 to 84 yards, using a service pistol with which he was intimately familiar.

It’s hits that count. Scott Bramhall retired from the Puyallup Police Department on schedule, a matter of weeks after the shooting. He, Wilson and two other officers earned medals for their performance that day. Today, in retirement, Bramhall describes himself as a “revolver guy” who is perfectly happy carrying a 6-shooter or even a 5-shooter launching big bullets to where they are aimed.

It ain’t over ’til it’s over! Detective Bramhall did not immediately get on his radio after the shooting. The reason was, the incident wasn’t over. He knew a “suspect down” broadcast might falsely lull other officers now arriving closer to the suspect into the belief the man was out, when in fact all that was known was for this moment, the suspect was down. It turned out Terault was indeed out of the fight after Bramhall’s .45 slug dropped him, but Bramhall was wise in maintaining radio silence at the moment of what the Supreme Court, in its Graham v. Connor decision called “tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving” circumstances.

SCOTUS, and indeed all our courts, take into account “the totality of the circumstances.” This incident is a classic example of how those rapidly evolving circumstances must be just as rapidly processed by the first responders in situations of deadly danger such as this one. American Handgunner wishes to thank Scott Bramhall for allowing us to be the first publication to share his detailed perceptions of the incident in which he became one of the life-saving heroes of the Puyallup Police Department.

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By Massad Ayoob

Situation:

A prize-rich shooting match sponsored by a successful armed citizen brings many violence survivors together, allowing them to share the lessons they’ve learned.

Lesson:

Being practiced and ready — and being armed to begin with — allow you to apply your hard-earned skills quickly enough to win, whether the venue for the gunfire is an alley or a firing range.

In September of 2016, I received a most welcome phone call from an old friend, Richard Davis. He had called to say, after an 18-year layoff, he was once again going to hold his famous Pin Shoot in 2017. Let me offer some background, to explain why this is relevant here in this particular corner of American Handgunner.

Davis is “the man who bulletproofed America’s police,” having come up with the first practical, concealable soft body armor wearable all day under a uniform shirt. His life-saving product came out in the early 1970’s. To show a cop would be able to absorb a bullet’s impact on a soft vest and not only survive but still be able to return fire, he came up with a dynamic demonstration. Before the eyes of assembled cops, he would shoot himself on the vest, then spin and blast some bowling pins off a table with the same revolver.

Son of an Iwo Jima combat vet and a former Marine like his dad, Rich was a lifelong shooter. It occurred to him a shooting match with good prizes might be an appropriate way to thank his customers. In 1975, while shooting a commercial video for his Second Chance brand body armor, he invited some cops he knew to join him and the five “Second Chance saves” who re-enacted the incidents in which Davis’ vest had preserved their lives. Those 30 folks on the informal range on Davis’ property in scenic Central Lake, Michigan comprised the first Second Chance Shoot. The rules were simple: whoever shoots the bowling pins off the table fastest, wins. Everyone had fun.

The following year, Richard announced the match publicly, and hundreds of cops attended; one more year later, he opened it to law-abiding citizens and the crowds were bigger still. From a shooter’s perspective, I thought it was the most fun of anything on the shooting match circuit. I’ve always said if shooting tournaments were rock concerts, Second Chance would be Woodstock. But from a researcher’s point of view, Richard had established something else: a reservoir of knowledge.

Think about it: in that very first event, one out of six contestants had stopped gunfire on their vest, fought back and prevailed, and some of the other invited cops were gunfight survivors, too. The ratio might have changed over the years, but one thing remained constant: the folks at Richard Davis’ Pin Shoot were a rich source of experience in armed survival in real world encounters.

Jim Vollink’s Shooting

One of the regulars at what was then called the Second Chance Shoot was Jim Vollink. Not every shootout survivor at the match was a cop. While Jim Vollink had worn a badge in the past, he was a private citizen when he had to use the very same pistol he competed with at the pin shoot to save his life. He was in a drive-through at a Burger King when a man rammed his vehicle from behind. When Jim got out the other driver menaced him with a Browning 9mm. Jim grabbed his own .45, and when the road rage guy shot at him, Jim shot back. Three rounds of Remington 185-grain JHP put the opponent down, fatally.

Police investigation determined it to be a justifiable homicide. However, the family of the deceased filed a lawsuit. Jim’s .45 — a military surplus Ithaca 1911A1 with extended thumb safety and S&W adjustable sights added — became a focus. Here’s how I wrote about it in Ayoob Files appearing in the Nov/Dec, 1989 issue of American Handgunner:

“When they found out the man who killed the deceased was a gun owner, IPSC shooter and NRA member, the lawyers must have licked their chops. They asked him, he said, the following question: ‘Wasn’t that your favorite pistol?’ ‘Well,’ the citizen answered, ‘it’s the one I had the longest.’ ‘No,’ the lawyer sneered, ‘I mean, isn’t that your favorite pistol?’ The citizen paused for only a moment before he answered, ‘It is now. Strike that from the record,’ cried the attorney for the plaintiff.”

Meet Some Saves

One of Richard’s Guests of Honor was Skip Beijen (pronounced “Bain”), a New York State Trooper. At the time of his incident, NYSP issued a K-Frame .357 Magnum revolver with full power 158-grain magnum loads. S&W had made a special run of fixed-sight heavy barrel Model 10’s with longer cylinders and chambered for .357, especially for that agency; the company subsequently introduced the exact gun as the Model 13. Skip and a brother trooper had pulled over multiple bad guys, who were more than reluctant to be arrested. In the midst of the fray, Beijen heard his partner scream, “Skip, he’s got my gun!”

If you can feel your blood pressure go up a little just reading that, imagine how the adrenaline must have been surging through Skip’s system as he heard it at the scene. Turning reflexively toward the threat, the trooper was facing the man who had overpowered his brother officer — when the fireball bloomed from the muzzle of the snatched .357. The bullet hit Skip Beijen right over the heart — stopping on the Second Chance vest. Beijen told me it felt like a strong man poking him in the center of the chest with a stiff index finger.

And now Skip was shooting back with his own .357 which, suffice to say, instantly solved the problem. Lessons: always return fire no matter how bad you think you may be hurt, and remember the norepiniphrine and endorphins releasing instantly, along with adrenaline, have a pain-killing effect.

Another Guest of Honor was John Solheim, from the Pierce County, Washington Sheriff’s Department. Retired today after multiple gunfights, Solheim is an outstanding instructor. He had been chasing an armed robbery suspect when the suspect stood on his brakes and John had to do the same or crash into him. Action beats reaction; by the time Solheim came to a stop, flung open his door, and began to step out of his cruiser, the other man was already running toward him with a stolen Colt Python in his hand.

A 110-grain .357 Magnum hollow point crashed into John’s center chest, at the edge of his sternum. He said later it felt like getting hit with “a ball peen hammer on a good wind-up swing.” The would-be cop killer stood there grinning, knowing he had scored a heart shot on the deputy with his .357, waiting to watch him fall and die.

Instead, he saw — and felt — Deputy Solheim empty his Smith & Wesson .41 Magnum into him. At this point, John’s K9 was out of the car and keeping the screaming gunman occupied while John sprinted to cover and reloaded. He had won the fight. Amazingly, the suspect survived multiple hits from full power 210-grain soft nose .41 Mag that had gone through and through him, and wound up sentenced to a very long term in prison.

Lessons John shared? Today, he would have simply shot through the windshield before the other man could shoot at all. Not having been trained to do that, he didn’t. He lived to teach other cops to learn this survival lesson. John soon switched to a .45 auto as a duty weapon for more firepower. Solheim trained other rookies not to make the mistake that this time had worked for a cop. Don’t take a shot, and stand there grinning expecting your opponent to fall down. And, of course, Solheim has been a proponent of concealed soft body armor from that day forward.

Another “Save” at one of Richard’s first shoots is a municipal police officer I won’t name, because there are some who might take it wrong when they learn his first thought after he stopped a bullet was “You hit my vest, you son of a bitch, and now it’s my turn.” I documented the case, though. He was in foot pursuit of a burglary suspect and when he got close enough to grab him, the suspect turned on him and shot him square amidships with a stolen Colt .45 automatic. The full power 230-grain hardball felt, he said, like a very hard and focused punch. Before the thug could fire again, the cop cleared leather and instantly emptied his 4″ Model 66 .357 Combat Magnum into his antagonist. The wanna-be cop-killer died in his tracks. The cop went home to his family.

Lessons: Again, the importance of swift and devastating retaliation. Reacting, not with horror or shock, but with righteous anger being channeled instantly to the appropriate response with sufficient force to extinguish the deadly threat.

Genesis

People thought “the man who bullet-proofed the cops” — Richard Davis, the real inventor of concealable soft body armor with his Second Chance product — must have been an inspired supercop. In fact, he was an armed citizen and his inspiration was a shootout he experienced with armed robbers, prevailing against three-to-one odds.

It was 1969, and Davis was a pizzeria owner in crime-plagued Detroit. It had become popular for small-time thugs to call for pizzas and then rob the delivery person at the point of knife or gun. One busy night when he was short of deliverymen, Richard’s fiancée had volunteered to do deliveries and been robbed and terrorized at gunpoint by a trio of punks.

Eight months later, the pizzeria got a call for a delivery to the same address. Davis decided he would handle this delivery himself, and he took the only handgun he owned, a 6-shot Harrington & Richardson .22 revolver. He held it beneath an empty pizza box below the real ones. His fiancée had been robbed by three men. If this went down the same, he made a plan: two shots on each.

Arriving, Davis had to walk down an alley to reach the address. Three men loomed out of the darkness, fitting the description of the trio who had so terrified his beloved. One of them pointed a chrome-plated pistol at Davis’ head, and perceiving the man’s finger to be tightening on the trigger, Rich Davis knew he had run out of time.

He opened fire, point shooting from under the pizza box. He saw one bullet hit the gunman on the point of the chin, and perceived the other had struck him in the chest, and saw him sprawl backwards. His third shot missed the second perpetrator but the fourth connected, and the man whirled, his hands going toward his waistband as if going for a gun, so Davis fired again. He saw the man’s shirt pluck up at mid-back as the bullet hit, and saw him instantly collapse. Knowing only one round remained in his revolver, Rich fired it at the third man, who snapped his head as if he’d been hit, and ran into the darkness. His gun now empty, it occurred to Richard that a run into the darkness would be a good idea for him, too.

The enemy was in disarray, but not helpless. One of the thugs fired on Richard and he felt it strike him in the head. A .25 auto slug had deflected off the bow of his eyeglasses, knocking them off, skidded along his skull, and lodged under his scalp. He felt a stinging slap as another .25 slug caught him in the back of the leg. Richard kept running, made it to his car, and raced to the hospital.

All the thugs were subsequently arrested. He later learned the one who had jerked his head did so because Davis’ last .22 bullet had passed through his Afro. The second, who had fallen, had taken Richard’s bullets in the shoulder and spine. The first man, despite hits center chest and head, survived too. The little .22 slug hitting his chin on course for the central nervous system had glanced off the mandible and exited near his ear, never reaching the brain. The .22 LR striking center chest had deflected off the sternum, missing the heart by an inch and exiting the back. The gunman had fallen, but apparently returned to the gunfight and shot Richard Davis twice.

There were multiple lessons. Davis would forever after be an advocate of powerful self-defense handguns: .45’s, magnums, 10mm’s. What he learned later in studying countless gunfights involving his vest customers only reinforced the belief. One reason he chose a format of shooting heavy bowling pins two-and-a-half to three feet back off a table was to enforce the use of potent handguns. Having become a friend of Jeff Cooper by then, Davis believed in Cooper’s mantra of DVC: Diligencia (accuracy, or precision), Vis (power) and Celeritas (speed). Whoever shot the pins off fastest won the event, but they needed power to blast the pins backward and accuracy to channel the power to where it was needed.

Six shots and four hits had been a good performance, but not having more than six may have been what got him shot twice. You are far more likely to find Richard Davis carrying an auto pistol today than a revolver, even though the little H&R .22 6-shooter saved his life. Davis, by the way, was the first gunfight survivor I met who was able to count his shots when they went past three or four. All these decades later, I can still count on my fingers the number who were able to do so. Each time, there was some compelling reason why. In Richard’s case, it was the acute awareness his plan for two-two-two had gone off synch after his third shot missed. “Four! Five! Six! Oh, crap ….”

Davis also learned getting shot sucked and there had to be something better to stop bullets with than one’s own body. It was in the emergency room that night his idea for soft, concealable body armor was born. Within a very few years, Richard Davis had revolutionized officer safety. His Second Chance Body Armor was the first such product to be sold to American police. By the beginning of 2016, well over 3,000 lives had been documented as “saves” by Davis’ invention, encompassing not only his brand — but the many copies that sprang up thereafter by various manufacturers.

You can read the full details on the incident in the Ayoob Files archives available at www.americanhandgunner.com/ayoob-files-archive/. It was in the Jan/Feb 1987 issue.

And Into The Future

The fabulous Second Chance Shoot ended in 1998 and a few years later, Richard Davis retired. His Second Chance Body Armor company was bought by Safariland. Richard’s son, Matt, opened Armor Express in Central Lake, Michigan, and following in his dad’s footsteps makes some of the best body armor available today, the brand I personally wear now. Armor Express products have already saved many lives.

One Armor Express save scheduled to be at the Pin Shoot in June of 2017 is Lt. Brian Murphy. On August 5, 2012, a mad dog killer murdered half-a-dozen people and wounded four more at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. One of the latter was Lt. Murphy. As he pulled up and saw the gunman, he attempted to deploy his AR15 but its tactical sling hung up on his mobile data terminal. Drawing his service pistol to engage, Murphy came under fire and one bullet destroyed his thumb, taking the gun out of his hand. He didn’t have a backup handgun at the time.

Lt. Murphy was shot 15 times with 147-grain 9mm Hydra-Shoks. In one of the great stories of human resilience ever, he survived. The bullets that would have killed him stopped on his Armor Express vest. The gunman was put down by Oak Creek PD firearms instructor Sam Lenda, firing from some 60 yards away with an AR15. His guts blown out, dying, the mass murderer put his Springfield XD(M) to his head and gave himself his own coup de grace.

Meeting Lt. Murphy will be worth the trip in and of itself. I caught his talk at a conference of ILEETA, the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers, where I’ve served for many years on the advisory board. I can tell you there were tears in the eyes of many of the hundreds of cops in the audience. Murphy’s story of survival and determination is not to be missed and is the sort of learning experience you can get at The Pin Shoot.

Like I said, it isn’t just a shooting match.

And One More Thing …

In the spirit of total disclosure, let me share one more point. In the early 1970’s, I was a young patrolman writing for police magazines and spotted the first Second Chance ad in one of the police journals I wrote for, Law and Order. I got one, wrote it up, and wore armor ever since. Over the years, as the saves accumulated, I saw almost half of them were vehicle crashes. Living and working in Northern New England and knowing how many fatal or crippling crashes were caused by folks who didn’t know how to drive on ice and snow, it occurred to me if I had to dress in layers in winter anyway, I might as well have a layer that stopped more than the cold. I got into the habit of wearing the concealed vest on my own time. It was warm, and a great windbreaker. I could wear a flannel shirt and duck-down vest instead of a heavy mackinaw if I had the ballistic vest on underneath, and have more mobility and range of movement.

Long story short: on a bitter cold day in fourth quarter 1996, I was so attired when I couldn’t avoid a crash with a vehicle that blew a stop sign in front of me. I was stupid enough not to be wearing my seat belt. The air bag did not deploy.

Richard Davis’ Super FeatherLight vest did.

I wound up with a major concussion, long term post-concussion syndrome, and some hearing loss from that. The doctor told me without the vest, I would probably have died from a flailed chest when my thorax hit the steering wheel. And without the vest slowing down body and head momentum, the closed head trauma would likely have been an open skull fracture with brain matter spattered all over the windshield. I became Second Chance Save #682 and Kevlar Survivors Club member #1946. Not a great war story, but you can understand why I’m a very satisfied customer of the Davis family’s products nonetheless.

Remember www.pinshoot.com, June 9–17, 2017. One of the all time great shooting matches is back, and you might, like me, also find it a treasure trove of life-saving advice from gunfight survivors.

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By Massad Ayobb

Situation: When an outlaw puts a knife to his wife’s throat, she fights back … and goes on trial for attempted murder.

Lesson: It takes more than a “who got hurt worse” assessment to distinguish perpetrator from victim in some use-of-force cases.

On an August night in 2011 in Saratoga County, N.Y., 911 dispatch received a call from a woman requesting an ambulance. Her husband, she explained, tried to kill her: they had both been stabbed, were both bleeding and both needed emergency medical assistance. Police and EMS arrived swiftly.

The officers first saw the woman, still holding a bloody KA-BAR knife. They ordered her at gunpoint to drop it. She did.

Entering the house, they found a tall man on the floor, covered with blood, one hand hidden. Over drawn guns, they ordered him to show his hands. He didn’t. They pulled his hands out and secured them, also securing a big sheath knife on his right hip, and a folding knife from one pocket. Near where he lay, they noticed the sheath from the KA-BAR, and a leather biker vest with distinctive patches.

Both were rushed to the hospital. The man would stay there for roughly a week, as the staff tended to some dozen knife wounds. The woman would leave the hospital under her own power. She would soon be arrested for attempted murder.

Lydia’s Account

The woman, Lydia Salce, was 50 years old, 5′ tall, and weighed 116 pounds. Her younger husband of about six months, Michael McKee, stood 6’1″. She cooperated willingly with police investigators. She explained Michael had been drinking heavily for some time and staying out late with his friends from the Prisoners of Fate motorcycle club, loosely affiliated with Hell’s Angels. The marriage had gone downhill lately. A few weeks before, she called police to have him removed when she kicked him out of her house after he threatened to kill her. Arriving officers had done more than that: they arrested him on an outstanding warrant.

And now, he had come home after another night of drinking with the bikers. A club “prospect” or wanna-be member, Michael had been driven home by club road captain Victor Ortiz. An angry Lydia had met them in the driveway and delivered a verbal outburst. The marriage was over, she yelled, and she was going to divorce him. She mocked the club’s insignia as “Boy Scout patches” and commented Michael must have kissed a lot of butt to get his patches.

Later, when they’re alone, Michael becomes angry and throws a Mason jar, which shatters; Lydia gets some minor nicks on her hand cleaning up the pieces from the kitchen floor. And then, suddenly, Michael grabs her hair and pulls her head back with his left hand and begins to punch her in the face and head with his right fist, from the bottom of which now protrudes the blade of the KA-BAR knife. He holds its edge to her throat and snarls, “I’ll kill you, you f**kin’ c**t!”

Lydia pushes the knife down and away from her and pulls away. Suddenly she’s falling.

Michael is bending over her from her right side and slightly behind. His blows have knocked her glasses off, leaving her all but blind, a condition exacerbated by the fact her hair has fallen into her eyes. He kicks her and stomps on her foot with his engineer boots. On the floor, she sees the knife and grabs it, point forward. She tries to swing it but can’t reach, and it’s slipping in her bloody hand. She re-grips, now holding it as he had, icepick style, and flails wildly in his direction. It feels to her as if she is hitting only air, but three times there’s a sort of a bump which tells her she may have hit Michael with the knife.

And suddenly, it’s over — he’s on the floor. She manages to get to her feet. She goes looking blindly for her cell phone, at last finds it, and it occurs to her there’s so much blood on her hands it might short out the phone. She washes her hands, then makes the 911 call.

She realizes there’s more blood on her hands and wonders how much she is losing; she hurts almost everywhere.
And then, the police are there.

Michael’s Stories

Within hours, in the emergency room, Michael McKee gave this account to an investigating officer: “… my wife Lydia Ann McKee stabbed (me) with a big kitchen knife at our residence. We were in the kitchen face-to-face, the next thing I knew she had a knife in her hand and stabbed me directly in my chest, I saw her hand raised and she thrusted (sic) the knife into my chest in a downward motion. I tried to grab her but she kept stabbing me in my chest, arms, stomach, shoulder, head. We fell to the ground, I remember her saying ‘I’m going to kill you’ … I just tried to push Lydia away from me, I didn’t hit her or anything….”

As the case made its way through the criminal justice system, however, Michael’s account would change. The big kitchen knife morphed into the KA-BAR, of course. Well, maybe he did hit her, but only one punch. Lydia was no longer screaming “I’m going to kill you,” but instead chanting repeatedly, “It’s over, it’s over!” And, still later, Michael would increasingly resort to the mantra, “I don’t remember.”

Hard Evidence

According to the undisputed testimony of the treating physician, the dozen knife injuries inflicted on Michael McKee were mostly shallow lacerations, with a few shallow stab wounds. None were more than 2″ deep; most were much less, and were closed with staples instead of stitches. The two most serious were chest punctures which had gone through the chest wall, creating pneumothorax but not deep enough to damage either lung.

Lydia had two black eyes, cuts on her hands, and bruises on torso, buttocks, and legs along with a foot injury from where a stomping boot had come down on her sandaled foot.

The pattern and distribution of Michael’s wounds could have been in keeping with his account, but were also absolutely consistent with Lydia’s description of the fight. The one stab wound in the upper thigh (which the prosecutor kept calling a “groin” wound) was consistent with him behind her and to her right side as the movements flowed, as were the wounds to his back if he turned away from the blade once he realized she was fighting back.

Where the nature of the wounds was starkly more consistent with her account than his, was in their depth: As noted before, both defense expert Dr. Herb Reich and the doctor who spoke for the prosecution found the stab wounds quite shallow. Though the prosecutor constantly described Lydia “plunging” the knife into Michael, even a petite woman would have probably driven the KA-BAR to the hilt if it had been true. The point was sharp, so was the edge, and the KA-BAR has for almost three-quarters of a century been described as a “fighting/utility knife” or “combat/utility knife,” with “fighting” and “combat” being the operative terms.

If, however, Michael was in the position remembered by Lydia, her limited reach would have put her at the very end of her right arm’s range of movement when the blade took flesh, with the power of her swing almost completely dissipated by then. This would be exactly consistent with the minimum penetration noted.

Lydia had told the police she only felt the knife make contact three times. One wound was a minor scalp laceration, in which the blade would have contacted the hard bone of the skull. The two penetrations of the chest wall, which caused the pneumothoraces, could be expected to have provided enough resistance to the knife for the wielder to feel it. The other, lesser wounds would have offered less felt resistance to the blade. Greatly reduced dexterity and loss of sense of touch is part and parcel of “fight or flight response.” Taken together, those bits of evidence fit hand in glove to support Lydia’s account.

The Trials

The Saratoga County Public Defender’s Office handled the defense, which was led by the very capable Andrew Blumenberg. He tried to offer expert witness testimony as to the knife and other dynamics related to this incident, but the judge in the first trial granted the prosecution’s request to keep the testimony out. A less-than-fully-informed jury found her guilty in the summer of 2012, and she was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

An appeal was filed, and in January 2015, the State of New York Supreme Court Appellate Division, Third Judicial Department found reversible error, ruling she hadn’t received a fair trial because the expert testimony Blumenberg tried to get in should have been allowed. The Court of Appeals also took issue with an instruction it felt the trial judge should have issued. The second trial began on April 29, 2015. This time Blumenberg was able to put me on the stand as the weapon expert, and Dr. Reich again as the defense’s medical expert. Blumenberg then tied in our testimony perfectly in his closing argument, to show the jury the wounds and other evidence were more consistent with Lydia’s account than Michael’s.

On May 11, 2015, the jury found Lydia Salce not guilty on all counts. She walked out of the courthouse a free woman. She had been behind bars without interruption for 45 months.

Lessons

False positive effect: Why would the police arrest the victim instead of the original assailant? I was able to explain the “false positive” factor to the jury. Let’s say you have come down with Disease A and have gone to the Emergency Room. Once there, you present all the symptoms of Disease B. No one should be surprised if the ER folks recognize the symptoms of Disease B, and therefore diagnose a case of Disease B, and naturally prescribe treatment for Disease B. If the treatment for the wrong disease aggravates the condition of the patient who actually has Disease A, we will have what medical professionals sometimes euphemistically call a negative outcome.

The same can happen in cases like this, with the same results. The typical paradigm in cases of aggravated assault, attempted murder and homicide tends to be the person found lying in the puddle of blood is the victim, and the person holding the smoking gun or the blood-dripping knife turns out to be the perpetrator. However, when there is a successful act of self-defense, the perpetrator ends up lying in the puddle of blood doing a very convincing imitation of a victim.

If the victim is standing there with the bloody knife — as she literally was in this case — she in turn is doing a remarkably convincing imitation of a perpetrator. The “test” has resulted in a “false positive,” as it were, and the manner in which the matter is treated flows from there, accordingly. This is what I believe lay at the core of the Salce prosecution.

The quantity of injury element: Most readers will recall the 2013 trial of George Zimmerman. The prosecution in this case made a huge deal out of Zimmerman only having “minor” injuries to the back of his head, when his taller assailant was pounding his skull against the sidewalk before Zimmerman fired the single shot which saved his life. Something similar happened here.

A veteran police investigator testified, when she told Lydia she was under arrest, Lydia asked why. The investigator related, “And I said to her, well, Lydia, let me put it to you in layman’s terms. You have a small discoloration over your eye. Mike’s got 14 stab wounds. You have a small discoloration over your eye; he’s got two punctured lungs. You have a small discoloration over your eye; he’s in critical condition. So, now do you understand?”

This sort of misunderstanding is so prevalent anyone who carries a gun or is prepared to carry out self-defense in any way, needs to be able to put things back in perspective. The very purpose of self-defense is to prevent, or at least minimize, injury to oneself or other innocent parties! Presuming a determined attacker, the attacker must be rendered physically disabled so any successful act of justified self-defense is likely to result in the attacker being hurt more seriously than the defender. To suggest otherwise simply twists the truth. In this instance, Drew Blumenberg’s carefully-crafted defense was able to untangle this truth and allow the jury to “get it straight.”

Additional Cautions

Misunderstanding facts: Lydia said at the scene she had been stabbed and her head and neck hurt, and requested to go to the hospital. When the blood was washed off, there were only minor lacerations present on her hands, and a black eye. This led the police to believe she was exaggerating her injuries, and deliberately lying. Blumenberg wisely had his investigator Mike Alvaro photograph her in jail a few days after the incident. By then, a second ecchymosis had become visible on her other eye, along with other bruises all over her body. He also photographed her foot injury, which had gone unnoticed.

Some of the cuts on her hand came from picking up pieces of the broken Mason jar, but one horizontal finger laceration would have been consistent with her description of evading Michael’s knife. Her hands had bled; she had washed them before using the phone; there was still blood there afterward, so she washed them again, leading her to believe she had been cut in the fight. This was simply misunderstood.

Motive excluded: Both juries must have wondered why either of the spouses would attack the other with a deadly weapon. When Lydia told Michael in the driveway “It’s over,” even his biker friend witness said she uttered the words when she said she was going to divorce him. Divorce is way easier than murder, and it wasn’t as if she was going to collect a big insurance payoff if he died. They must also have asked why Michael, who had previously neglected Lydia but never before physically abused her, would suddenly put a knife to her throat and voice an intent to kill. In neither trial were the jurors allowed to learn his motive.

Michael was desperately trying to win membership in Prisoners of Fate, a local group which celebrated the “one-percenter” biker lifestyle and is said to be loosely associated with Hell’s Angels, the world’s most notorious outlaw motorcycle gang. His vest, found at the scene, bore the signature red and white patch of a Hell’s Angels Supporter. In one-percenter culture, any disrespect shown to the club and its patch must be severely punished. Lydia had just dissed the club and the patches in front of a high-ranking member. To a prospect, this would be the perfect storm of motive. But, the jury never heard a word of it. Some days before the knife incident, another biker had texted Lydia to report Michael had severely “f****d up” a man who had been “disrespectful” to the club; this too was kept out, on the grounds of hearsay.

The “you couldn’t have beaten those odds in self-defense” argument: The prosecution pooh-poohed Lydia’s assertion she had pushed the knife away from her throat, arguing if she had done so she’d have had to push against the sharp edge and would have severely lacerated her palms. I was able to explain on the stand she had demonstrated the movement with a downward push, which would have put her palms against the flat of the blade, where it couldn’t cut her, and pointed out she did have one horizontal laceration on one finger of her left hand.

Lydia On The Stand

The defendant on the stand: I generally recommend the defendant in a self-defense case take the stand, even though it goes against conventional defense lawyer wisdom. The reason is it will be stipulated who shot (or stabbed) who, and the issue will come down to why did she do it? Who but the defendant can answer this core question?

Drew didn’t put Lydia on the stand in the first trial, for two reasons. One: her account was already in evidence, in the statement she had given police. Two: she was a gentle, emotionally fragile woman who had been horribly traumatized, and putting her in front of a skilled prosecutor known for ferocious cross-examination would be like throwing meat to a lioness. In the second trial, however, the same prosecutor — amazingly — kept out Lydia’s voluntary statement to the police, and the judge wouldn’t allow the defense to introduce it. To get the defense theory in front of the jury, putting Lydia on the stand was the only avenue left.

Lydia Salce was the last person to take the witness stand. Drew Blumenberg and his colleague Joe Hammer spent hours preparing her to withstand a withering cross. On the stand, Lydia calmly explained exactly what she had explained four years before, and went through her cross with poise and resolve. The jury “got it” this second time around, and I think they did justice. When it literally came down to “he said/she said,” Ms. Salce proved to be unshakably credible.

On the other hand, Blumenberg tore McKee apart in his cross-examination. The jury learned of the “F**k the Rules” prison tattoo on his back, and saw the “F**k Florida Department of Corrections” tats on his hands (a souvenir of nine years in prison for arson there), and the “Trust No One” prison tattoo on McKee’s forehead. In his closing argument, Blumenberg pointed out “Trust No One” had to include the wearer of the tattoo, and observed dryly McKee had literally come with a warning label. A jury’s strong suit is its collective life experience and ability to judge witness credibility.

My compliments to Drew Blumenberg and the Saratoga County Public Defender’s Office — fighting with one hand more or less handcuffed behind him, Blumenberg still got the truth across to the second and final jury. There are lessons all of us — arresting officers and potential defendants alike — can learn from Lydia Salce’s ordeal.

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By Massad Ayoob

Situation:

A victorious survivor of more than one shootout with notorious gunmen makes a mistake that will be his last.

Lesson:

Don’t turn your back on people who think they have a reason to kill you.

The tall man stood in a desolate space in rural New Mexico. He had been having a difficult, argumentative day, and being in his late fifties, the aggravation of a full bladder wasn’t helping things. At the side of the road, he undid his fly to relieve himself.

We do not know exactly what was going through the tall man’s mind, but we certainly know what suddenly went through his brain: a large caliber bullet. It entered near the base of his skull, and exited through his forehead. For all practical purposes, he was dead even before his corpse sprawled supine in the dirt. He could not have seen or heard, moments later, when someone stood at his feet and fired again, driving a bullet into his abdomen and upward through his thorax, because he was already gone.

The year was 1908. Pat Garrett, the New Mexico lawman who had become famous as the slayer of Billy the Kid, had come to the end of his trail. Exactly who killed him is a matter of debate to this day.

A Ragged Path

Born in the Deep South in 1850, Pat Garrett left home in his late teens to work variously as a buffalo hunter, cowboy, ranch owner, and law enforcement officer. Though the shooting of one of the West’s most infamous outlaws made him famous, the incident also drew criticism. Some accused Garrett of having killed Billy the Kid in a less-than-fair fashion. Others seemed to feel Garrett had been made sheriff to clean out the bad guys, and having pretty much done so, they didn’t need him anymore. In any case, he lost the next election and was out of his job as High Sheriff.

Time went on. In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt — an admirer of men like Garrett — appointed him customs collector in El Paso, Texas. Garrett blew the deal when he showed up at an important gathering with Tom Powell, a punkish gambler who had once beaten his own father into a coma, and arranged for the President to be photographed with him. When he found out who Powers was, the angry Roosevelt refused to renew Garrett’s appointment, and dropped him like the proverbial hot potato.
By 1908, Garrett’s career was on a severe downslide. He was in debt. One of his major creditors was W.W. Cox, who agreed to allow Garrett to pay off the debt by allowing a Cox associate to graze his animals on Garrett’s ranch. The ex-sheriff, apparently one of the old breed who loved cattle and despised sheep critters, was outraged to find the associate, Jesse Wayne Brazel, was grazing a huge herd of goats there.

A Gunfighting Career

It was his skill with a gun against dangerous men that earned Pat Garrett his place in history. Popular gun writer Bart Skelton apparently inherited his father Charles “Skeeter” Skelton’s penchant for meticulously researched Western history, and in the August 2012 issue of Shooting Times wrote a column titled “Pat Garrett: the Rest of the Story.” He commented, “It is said Garrett found himself in an argument with another buffalo hunter who allegedly tried to draw a gun on him, at which time he outdrew and killed the man.”

Garrett’s career was inextricably intertwined with his bete noire Billy the Kid. In 1880, Sheriff Garrett was leading a posse after the Kid and his gang, the Regulators. Writes Skelton, “Eventually, they caught the Kid at Fort Sumner, and a gunfight ensued during which Garrett shot and killed Tom O’Folliard.” O’Folliard was thought to be the Kid’s best friend. Billy escaped Garrett that night, but Garrett took him into custody later at Stinking Springs, and transported him back to jail in Lincoln, NM. Charlie Bowdre, another of the Kid’s companions, was killed at Stinking Springs by a fusillade of rifle fire from Garrett’s posse, though it is unclear whether or not Garrett himself launched any of those particular bullets.

There, William “Billy the Kid” Bonney paid Garrett back in kind for the death of his best friend. Somehow getting his hands on a revolver, he murdered Garrett’s jailer J.W. Bell, stole a shotgun from the sheriff’s office, and used it to kill another of Garrett’s deputies, Robert Olinger. Then, nonchalantly, the young gunman stole a horse and escaped from town.

It was Garrett’s turn. Months later, on July 14, 1881, Garrett caught up with the Kid in Fort Sumner, N.M. at Pete Maxwell’s ranch. The lawman was in a darkened bedroom at the ranch house when Bonney came to the door, with a Colt revolver in one hand and a large knife in the other, and asked, “Quien es? Quien es?” Here’s how Pat Garrett himself later described what happened next, in the moment that would make him notorious for the rest of his life, as told to Emerson Hough:
“There flashed over my mind at once one thought, and it was I had to shoot and shoot at once, and my shot must go to the mark the first time. I knew the Kid would kill me in a flash if I did not kill him. Just as he spoke and motioned toward me, I dropped over to the left and rather down, going after my gun with my right hand as I did so. As I fired, the Kid dropped back. I had caught him just about the heart … As I sprang back up, I fired once more, but did not hit him, and did not need to, for he was dead.”

Billy the Kid was apparently not the last man to die in front of Pat Garrett’s gun. Historian Mark Boardman has written, “(Sheriff Garrett) had tracked a wanted killer — and friend of the Cox/Rhode clan — to the Cox ranch in 1899 and killed the suspect while trying to arrest him.”

Who Killed Pat Garrett?

On the day of his death, Garrett was in the horse-drawn wagon with Carl Adamson, who Garrett hoped would buy Brazel’s troublesome sheep. Wayne Brazel was there, riding sometimes alongside and sometimes behind them on horseback. They had stopped for a roadside bladder-emptying when the gunfire erupted.

Different historians have different theories as to who ended the life of Pat Garrett. From C. F. Eckhardt in his December 9, 2008 column Charley Eckhardt’s Texas: “Garrett and two other men were in a wagon at a particularly desolate spot in Doña Ana County, either on the way to look over some sheep or on the way back from looking over some sheep Garrett was trying to buy. The stories differ. The wagon stopped and Garrett got down to relieve himself by the back wheel. As he stood, someone fired a single rifle shot. It struck Pat Garrett in the back of his head, just at the base of his skull. He was dead when he hit the ground.”

Eckhardt continues, “Wayne Brazeal (sic), who was along on the journey but was no friend of Garrett’s, rolled the dead man over and fired a single round from his pistol into Garrett’s chest. He then mounted a horse, rode into Las Cruces, confessed to murdering Garrett, and was arrested. However, he was acquitted of the crime since the third man testified Brazeal shot a corpse — Garrett was already dead from the rifle shot to his head when Brazeal shot him.”

Some believe Garrett’s death was the result of a wide-ranging conspiracy. From C. J. McElhinney, attorney and history researcher, at https://cjmlawyer.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/the-death-of-pat-garrett-self-defense-or-cold-blooded-murder-2/: “Here’s where things get interesting and, in my opinion, shows the fix he was in. Cox quickly secured Brazel’s release on bail. Albert Bacon Fall, the most notorious defense attorney in the territory and close friend of Cox, was retained to represent Brazel.

Adamson testified at the preliminary inquiry, but not at the subsequent trial, though he was available as a witness. The trial lasted one day. The prosecuting attorney did not seem to zealously present his case. He put physician William Field on the stand.”

McElhinney adds, “According to Dr. Field, who reached the site a few hours after the killing, Garrett was found lying on his back, arms outstretched to his sides and one knee drawn up, with a blanket or robe partially covering his corpse. The fly in his trousers was unbuttoned and he was wearing one riding glove, the right one, and his left hand was bare. Garrett’s Burgess shotgun was lying on the ground, disassembled and incapable of being fired, still in its leather holster a few feet from his body. Dr. Field noted no disturbance to the sand around the holster, as one might think would occur if someone suddenly dropped the weapon onto the ground. That is, unless it was placed there, which is what Dr. Field believed had really happened.”

It should be noted the Burgess was an early six-shot pump shotgun made from 1894 to 1899, which could be “folded” with a loaded magazine and carried in a huge holster. One would draw, snap it shut, and fire. It was “racked” by pulling back on its sliding trigger assembly instead of a forward pump handle. It is not made clear in the various accounts whether Garrett’s folded Burgess had a loaded magazine, but if it did, it could have been brought into action much more quickly than a conventional unloaded and “disassembled” shotgun.

It is critical to know, again from Attorney McElhinney, “Dr. Field also performed the autopsy on Garrett. Garrett had two gunshot wounds. The first and fatal shot was a bullet that had entered at the bottom rear of Garrett’s head and exited above Garrett’s right eye. The second bullet entered the front of his abdomen and was found by Dr. Field lodged in one of Garrett’s shoulders, meaning the bullet had traveled upward after entering through Garrett’s body. Interestingly enough, Field was never asked by the prosecutor to explain Garrett’s wounds or his other observations at trial. Adamson did not testify at the trial. Brazel testified he feared for his life and shot Garrett down while Garrett was going for his own weapon. The jury deliberated for about 15 minutes before pronouncing Brazel not guilty, apparently believing the self-defense claim. Cox would later purchase Garrett’s ranch from his widow, further consolidating his New Mexico land and ranch empire.”
From Mark Boardman, True West Magazine, 1/6/14: “It was a conspiracy. A contract murder. An organized crime hit … Bottom line: a number of men — powerful and successful men involved in organized criminal activities — were behind the assassination of Garrett. He had made too many enemies, and he posed too much of a threat to their lives and livelihood. All were guilty, even if they never faced a judge and jury. The crime syndicate led by Fall got its way.”

Finally, there is a contingent that believes Garrett was assassinated by James Miller, perhaps the most prolific “hit man” in the Old West. Known variously as “Killer Miller,” “Killin’ Jim Miller,” and “Deacon Jim” (the latter for his knowledge of the Bible and refusal to indulge in alcohol or tobacco), Miller claimed to have killed 51 men. His price to commit murder varied from $150 to $2,000, the latter a small fortune in turn of the 20th century money. Some speculate Garrett’s enemies put $1,500 on his head when they hired Miller to murder him. Miller was loosely related to Adamson, the man who drove the wagon and, some believe, set Garrett up for death on the lonely road.

Brazel said he himself killed Garrett, in self-defense when Garrett appeared to go for a gun. This is not consistent with the wounds reported by the doctor who did the autopsy. Garrett would have had to have been standing above him in the driver’s seat of a damn stagecoach to account for the angle of the wound track in his torso. The wounds are much more consistent with someone shot from behind while standing and looking downward when sustaining the head wound, and shot again in the abdomen while lying on his back by a man standing at his feet.

“Killer Miller”? It is said shortly before he was hanged, he confessed to pushing 51 people off the mortal coil, and conspicuously did not mention the man who would have been his most famous victim, the centerpiece of his trophy collection as it were. I’m not convinced Miller, however much of a stone killer he may have been, was the man who dropped the hammer on Garrett.

Lessons

Many who knew Garrett, particularly toward the end of his life, seem to have found him abrasive. He was said to have a quick temper. This and his gunfighter image made a lot of people afraid of him. He had accumulated many enemies. Remember the 1899 case where he had killed a homicide suspect on the Cox ranch? According to researcher Boardman, at the shooting, “Print (Rhode’s sister) was present and subsequently miscarried a baby; Print blamed Garrett. To make matters worse, Garrett arrested Rhode the next year in connection with a holdup. Rhode was acquitted, but he wanted vengeance — and he figured when it came to Garrett, it was kill or be killed.” Garrett owed a great deal of money to Print Rhode’s brother-in-law W.W. Cox, and Cox is said to have wanted both the money and the property.

Historian Boardman notes there were a great many men in the area, some of whom had been investigated by Garrett and others who perhaps feared he might investigate them, who would have been happy to see him gone. Boardman also points out, “All that brought a Democratic crime ring into direct conflict with a Democrat-turned-Republican lawman named Garrett — and set the stage for his ultimate assassination.”

The collected theories of what happened that day in 1908 could form a book. The tangled skein of people with reasons to wish Pat Garrett dead, most of them intertwined in some way, would require a large chart to lay out. For these reasons, and considering all who could have answered key questions have long been gone, the death of Pat Garrett is likely to remain an unsolved mystery.

That said, there are lessons we can learn from it.

One is, if you carry a gun, carry it all the time if possible, particularly if you know there are people who would like to see you dead, and most particularly if any of those people are in your presence.

While at least one account has Garrett on the day of his death carrying the very Colt he had used decades before to kill Billy the Kid, this is contradicted by the majority of accounts, in which Garrett’s only gun was the Burgess shotgun in its case on the wagon. Even if he had “seen it coming,” it’s unlikely Garrett could have accessed the Burgess and gotten it up and running in time to save his life.

Another lesson is, of course, the most obvious: don’t turn your back on people you know (or should know) have what they think is good reason to wish you harm. Even among rough-hewn outdoor men, it’s common courtesy to turn away from others when you urinate at the side of a lonely road. In doing so, however, Garrett turned his back on a man with whom he had just been arguing, and it turned out to be his last mistake. All he had to do was position himself with the wagon between himself and Brazel, with the wagon at least belt-high and probably chest high, and left a puddle on the ground by a wheel while keeping the other man in plain sight. He did not, and we know the result.

Within the second lesson above, we find a third. Consider the fate, before Garrett’s, of two other famous Western gunmen. On August 2, 1876 in a saloon in Deadwood, S.D., Wild Bill Hickok sat down at a poker table with his back to the door because his customary back-to-the-wall seat was occupied by someone else. Very shortly, a whacked-out loner named Jack McCall walked in, unlimbered a single action Colt, and shot Hickok in the back of the head, killing him instantly.

On April 3, 1882 in St. Joseph, Mo., the notorious Jesse James took off the gun belt holding his holstered revolvers, a Colt and a Smith & Wesson, and stood on a chair to adjust a picture on the wall. Behind him was his cousin and gang member Bob Ford, who shot Jesse James in the back of the head, killing him instantly.
Pat Garrett had to have known about those two assassinations of gunmen as or more famous than himself. He ignored history, and discovered, as George Santayana said, “Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.”

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By Massad Ayoob

Situation: Backup is racing to help you as you shoot it out with a heavily armed bank robber, but you’re alone for now and running low on ammo.

Lesson: What’s on your person may be all you’ll have to fight with, so carry enough. Solid positions and aimed fire deliver fight-stopping hits … and knowing what you’re fighting for will make you fight harder.

August 25, 2008. It’s a sunny and beautiful late afternoon in Skokie, one of the separately incorporated communities surrounding the city of Chicago, Illinois. Of Skokie Police Department’s 124 officers, about 15 are patrolling on the street during the three-to-eleven shift. Inside the Crown Vic Police Interceptor squad car of Officer Tim Gramins, the dedicated ISPERN radio — the Illinois State Police Emergency Radio Network, reserved for serious emergencies — comes to life. A bank has been robbed in nearby Northbrook. The suspect is a black male, average size, driving a white Pontiac. A witness has reported a possible plate number, from a series tracked to the city of Chicago.

This puts Skokie in between. SPD units proceed to the Edens Expressway, I-94 South, hoping to interdict. Two Skokie units pull over a man and vehicle fitting the description but quickly determine he’s not the suspect they’re looking for. It is then Gramins spots a white Grand Prix, with a lone driver who fits the description.

They make eye contact with each other, and Gramins recognizes an expression he has seen many times. He calls it “the ‘Oh, boy, here’s the police’ look.” The man floors his accelerator with a sudden lane change, and the chase is on.

In Pursuit

Hitting his lights and siren, Gramins radios in his situation. He knows other units will be responding, but has no way to determine how soon backup will catch up with him, particularly in late rush hour traffic. The suspect veers his getaway car across three lanes of traffic to hit the Touhy Avenue exit east, and then bangs a right onto Skokie Boulevard. In the powerful CVPI, Gramins expertly remains on his tail. The chase swerves onto Estes Street after a block, through the intersection of Keating, then right on Kilpatrick.
And then, the fugitive springs the trap.

Ambush!

Here, in a quiet suburban neighborhood right out of a Leave It To Beaver rerun, Gramins sees his quarry slam on his brakes and come to an abrupt stop in the street. Action beats reaction: Gramins responds quickly but by the time his squad car has stopped it is only 15 feet behind the fugitive’s vehicle.

The white car’s door pops open and out comes the suspect. Gramins sees a silver-colored auto pistol in the man’s hand as it rises over the steering wheel, coming out the door, and swinging toward him. As this is happening, training and practice send Gramins’ left hand across his torso to swiftly release his seat belt, and his right hand to unholster his GLOCK 21 service pistol. But Ray Maddox, a 37-year-old Gangster Disciple gang member who has sworn to kill the next cop who stops him rather than go back behind bars, gets the first shots off.

Bam, bam, bam, bam! Gramins can hear and even count all four of them, can see Maddox running toward him firing one-handed. Now, though, the cop’s own gun is up in both hands and he fires right through the windshield, indexed on his target, tracking the gunman as he approaches the patrol car door, still shooting.

Incredibly — perhaps, for Gramins, even miraculously — both men now run out of ammunition and go simultaneously to slidelock.

Second Magazine

Both combatants react instantly to the change in the situation. Maddox spins around and runs back to the Pontiac. Gramins explodes out the driver’s door of the squad car, seeking to escape the trap his vehicle has become, and runs between the cars to the right. He’s reloading on the run, ejecting the spent magazine, slapping in a fresh one, and closing the slide. At approximately this time in the gun battle, he is able to radio in: the suspect is out of his vehicle, shots have been fired and he (Gramins) needs help.

The gunfire has captured the attention of the residents on this quiet street. A 12-year-old boy skateboarding on the sidewalk runs into his house and tells his parents, “There’s a police officer in the street being shot at, call 9-1-1!” Gramins will later tell American Handgunner, the boy is “the bravest kid I’ve ever known.” Gramins can hear the boy’s dad yelling to him like a cheering section, “Get him! Shoot him!” In the heat of the moment, Gramins has time to take some comfort in this.

Reloaded, he charges the suspect, now on the other side of the vehicles. The officer fires as he goes. He will tell me later, “He (was moving) back toward my car. I don’t think he knew I was off to his left. I charged right at him, and ended up three feet away. I was shooting one-handed when I got close. As I ran toward him firing, I saw no effect.”

Third Magazine

Seeing his GLOCK at slide lock again, Gramins sprints to an angle where he can get his patrol car between himself and the gunman, who is still shooting at him but with a different pistol. Again the cop is reloading on the run, demoralized his gunfire has done nothing to stop his deadly attacker, and acutely aware he’s on his last magazine.

Gramins is now to the right of their two cars, and he sees Maddox is now to the left of his patrol car, using it for cover and crouching down low. An intensively trained SWAT team leader, Gramins tries to use the technique LAPD SWAT employed to successfully neutralize the machinegun-armed suspect Matasureanu in the infamous North Hollywood bank robbery shootout of 1997: he points rather than aims his G21 and fires as he moves, trying to ricochet his bullets under the car and into Maddox’s legs to bring him down. The angle isn’t right, though, and he sees his bullets hitting his own car and front right tire. Time to change the plan, he realizes.

Finale

Gramins sees a tree between the sidewalk and the cars in the street. He dives prone behind it, and — trained on the precision rifle as a SWAT cop — realizes he now has the best cover and the most solid shooting position he has had since the gunfight began. Maddox has been popping up and shooting at him like a jack-in-the-box and then crouching deep, watching Gramins from under the car. The cop sees Maddox looking at him now from under the police car.

Carefully, consciously focusing hard on his front sight, Gramins follows legendary Border Patrol shootist Bill Jordan’s advice (“Take your time, quick!”) and squeezes off three rapid but still carefully-aimed shots, holding on the would-be cop-killer’s head. On the third, Maddox collapses face down. He is no longer shooting. A large pool of blood begins to spread outward from the gunman’s head.
Gramins keeps him covered. About a minute later, the first responding officers, Detective (now Sergeant) Barnes and Detective Mendez, arrive. Both are fellow SWAT team members. Gramins feels a sense of relief as the backups kick the downed antagonist’s gun out of his reach, and handcuff him.

It’s over.

Reconstruction will show from the first shot of the gunfight to the last, 56 seconds have elapsed. During this time 54 pistol shots have been fired, 33 from Gramins’ GLOCK .45, and 21 by Maddox from two pistols.

Wound Assessment

Raymond Maddox did not survive. Autopsy showed he had been hit by 17 of Gramins’ 230-gr. Speer Gold Dot .45 hollowpoints. Some had hit extremities, including upper limbs as the officer’s bullets tracked up the gunman’s arms while he was firing at the cop. But Maddox had also been hit in one kidney, both lungs … and the heart. All three of Gramins’ last carefully braced, precisely aimed shots had indeed hit the head, but two had smashed into his face and only the last had pierced the brain and ended the fight.

Gramins did not emerge entirely unscathed. He caught a bullet fragment in one shin, and bullets going through the glass of the car had sent fragments into his face. He also suffered a significant hearing loss in his left ear, most likely due to firing 13 rounds from his .45 from inside the closed patrol car.

He, at the hospital in a room adjacent to where the medicos were trying to save Maddox’s life, also had to hear a doctor angrily cry, “Why did the cop have to shoot him so many times?” If only the physician had known …

The shooting death of Raymond Maddox at the hands of Officer Timothy Gramins was ruled a justifiable homicide. No lawsuit was filed. Gramins received multiple awards for his heroism in the encounter and was later promoted to sergeant.

Weapon Assessment

Both the would-be cop-killer and the officer who neutralized him were heavily armed. They had access to seven loaded firearms between them. Gramins deployed only one; Maddox used two.

Maddox opened fire with a stainless steel 9mm auto which Gramins first thought looked like a Taurus copy of a Beretta, but turned out to be a 16-shot S&W Model 5906. It was recovered, empty, from the front seat of Maddox’s Pontiac, its last spent casing stovepiped where Maddox had dumped it as he grabbed his second weapon. It was a Bersa .380 pistol. The .380 was apparently hit and, unknown to the cop, rendered inoperable by one of Gramins’ .45 rounds near the end of the gunfight. Also in the front seat of the gunman’s car was an SKS semiautomatic rifle, fully loaded with a 30-rd. magazine, and in a box. At least one analyst has suggested Gramins’ charging toward Maddox while emptying the second magazine in his GLOCK kept the gunman from accessing the high-powered semiautomatic rifle. Gramins was told later Maddox’s weapons were tied to four homicides in the city of Chicago.

Gramins had been carrying his primary sidearm, the 13+1 capacity GLOCK 21, with only 12 rounds per mag because he had found with his magazines, it was sometimes difficult to positively seat them loaded all the way up if the slide was forward. He had the two spare magazines on his duty belt, and also a 9mm subcompact GLOCK 26 backup gun in a holster attached to the Second Chance ballistic vest under his uniform shirt. A Remington 870 pump shotgun loaded with five 12-gauge slugs was racked above him inside the patrol car, and as a SWAT officer, he had an AR-15 in the trunk with several 30-rd. magazines. Like his opponent, he was never able to deploy any of the heavy artillery.

Lessons

There are many lessons to be learned from Tim Gramins’ incident, some more obvious than others.

Carry enough ammunition to finish a worst case scenario fight. After this event, which has been widely publicized among law enforcement, Tim Gramins put his .45 in his gun safe and went with a 9mm. He told me, “We are allowed to pick our weapon. GLOCK, S&W, Beretta and SIG are authorized, and we have our choice of 9mm, .40 S&W, or .45 ACP, all with department issue Gold Dot ammunition.” His duty pistol is now the GLOCK 17, loaded to full capacity with 17+1 rounds of 124-gr. +P 9mm, backed up by 11 rounds of the same in his GLOCK 26, which of course can feed G17 magazines. A slim-line Safariland triple magazine pouch carries three more 17-rd. mags in uniform, and he carries two 33-rd. 9mm magazines behind the trauma shield of his ballistic vest.

This adds up to 146 rounds on tap. A widely-circulated police article by our mutual friend Charles Remsberg made Tim famous in cop circles as the policeman who carries almost 150 rounds of ammo on his person. “I can carry a hundred rounds more ammo, and it only weighs a couple of pounds,” Gramins told American Handgunner. “Round count seems to be skyrocketing in police gun battles, police running out of ammunition. I don’t want to be in such position. I came close to it, with only four rounds left in my GLOCK 21.”

The dynamic movement required to escape the kill zone kept Gramins from accessing either the shotgun in the squad car’s cockpit or the AR-15 in its trunk. One lesson this taught him: what you have on your person may be all you have to fight with once a fight goes mobile.

Aggressive humans can soak up multiple lethal wounds and still continue homicidal action for surprising periods of time. People have taken multiple, massive wounds even from high powered rifles and shotguns, and stayed in the fight. Contrary to popular belief, a heart shot like the one Maddox sustained well before Gramins’ brain shot killed him does not necessarily guarantee the hoped-for “instant one-shot stop.” The medical journals devoted to treatment of trauma show multiple survivors of gunshot wounds to the heart, and forensic pathologists have recorded numerous cases of people who continued conscious, purposeful, sometimes successfully homicidal actions after being shot in the heart. Even if cardiac function is completely shut down, the recipient of the wound has up to 15 or 16 seconds of action left before blood pressure drops below the level it will no longer sustain consciousness, and not all wounds of the heart cause total shutdown. This appears to have been the case with Raymond Maddox in this shooting, who by the way had a “clean toxicology screen,” which showed no alcohol or drugs on board.

Forensic pathologists tell us there is no post-mortem artifact for adrenalin dump, and even if there was, its effect on the given person experiencing it cannot be precisely predicted. This shooting appears to be a classic example. Mortal wounds are not necessarily instantly fatal. The study of gunfights is replete with cases of “men who were dead, but didn’t know it yet.” It was not possible to reconstruct exactly when Maddox took the cardiac hit, but it is absolutely possible he was up and running for almost a minute despite a .45 caliber gunshot wound to the heart before the final bullet to the brain short-circuited his central nervous system and ended the encounter.

Training is critical! As a SWAT cop prior to this shooting, Tim had extensive experience shooting through barriers such as windshield glass, from both sides, and this stood him in good stead in the opening of the gunfight when he essentially “broke the ambush” by returning fire through the windshield from the driver’s seat. Extensive Simunitions-based “force on force” role-play had prepared him as best as possible for shooting a murderous criminal who was shooting at him.

Know what you’re fighting for! The day of this shooting was the eighth birthday of Tim Gramins’ son. Prior to hearing the emergency call over ISPERN, Tim had been pondering when he could take some break time to buy his son the Star Wars game he wanted for his birthday. Throughout the gunfight, Tim was aware of his need to survive for his son and for the rest of his family. He credits this determination for seeing him through the deadly gun battle. The very term “gunfight” is really a misnomer: the guns don’t fight, the people do, and those who know what they’re fighting for have a powerful psychological advantage.

Finally, the lost lesson of this incident seems to be the importance of aimed fire. At the end, from a solid prone position where Tim had his hardest “front sight focus” of the fight, was when three rapid shots to the head all struck the intended target, the last one “shutting off the computer” and bringing the death battle to a decisive close on the side of The Good Guy.

The author wishes to thank Sergeant Tim Gramins and the trainers of the Skokie Police Department for the outcome of this shooting, and fellow police writers Chuck Remsberg and Dave Scoville for first spreading the valuable lessons of this life-or-death battle to the law enforcement community.

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By Massad Ayoob

Situation: About a hundred different people who’ve gotten in trouble with guns come to you to solve their problem.

Lesson: Naturally, you write a book on it to help keep other people out of the same kind of trouble.

In November of 2015, I attended the inaugural Legal Eagles Firearms Law Seminar hosted in Chehalis, Wash., by old friends and students J.B. Herren and Glenda Edwards of the Northwest Safety First firearms training school (northwestsafetyfirst.com). One of the speakers, for a day of the six-day program, was Attorney James D. “Mitch” Vilos of Utah, a criminal defense lawyer who specializes in firearms cases. Introducing him, J.B. noted the original idea had been to have Vilos as the sole speaker for the whole seminar, and the concept for the conference had been born in a discussion between him and Mitch.

Mitch told us he had done about a hundred gun-related cases himself, and researched hundreds more for his 574-page book Self-Defense Laws of All 50 States, which first appeared in 2010 and came out in a second edition in 2013.

I figured anyone with this background would be very much worth listening to. Turned out, he damn sure was.

In-Home Shootings

Vilos told the dozens of attendees at the seminar, “There are three types of defense generally not prosecuted. Home defense against an uninvited stranger. Also, shooting an attempted mass murderer. The third least-likely type of shooting to be prosecuted is defending yourself against armed robbery.”

He had a case where his client was asked to go to the home of a felon who was married to his client’s sister. The sister wanted her brother to take a firearm out of the house, because it was illegal. When the client came to take the gun, an argument ensued and escalated, and he wound up having to kill his brother-in-law in self-defense. Mitch explained, “The felon said, ‘Get out of my home.’ The client said ‘Make me.’ The felon ran into the bedroom. The racking of a gun was heard. My client drew and shot the guy five times. The felon was found dead with a handgun in his lap. My client said only, ‘I had to defend myself.’”

The shooter retained Mitch. Mitch wrote a letter to the prosecutor telling him everything, subsequent to an agreement with the prosecutor, nothing Mitch said could be used against the client. The outcome? Said Mitch, “The prosecutor brought the family of the deceased into his office and told them it was justified. Under Utah law the felon having a firearm was a forcible felony. He decided not to prosecute.”

In the above case, it should be noted the potential defendant was on thin ice, having gone into another man’s home, even though he was invited by another member of the household. The ice got even thinner when the homeowner ordered him to leave and he answered, “Make me.” Mitch Vilos reminded the class it happened in gun-friendly Utah, where he estimates there are more guns than people.

Mitch also noted curtilage — those areas attached to the home and/or immediately adjacent to it — varies state to state insofar as the degree to which it shares with the residence itself the ancient and honorable Castle Doctrine, which says in essence one’s home is one’s castle, and attacked there by an intruder the resident need not retreat. He offers the following Utah case to make his point:

“There was a break-in in the West Valley. The homeowner, his wife and their two children were asleep at about 3AM when the homeowner was wakened by a loud racket. He came downstairs with his 9mm pistol and discovered an aggressor was outside the house, a split level. A guy was trying to break in through the glass back doors. The homeowner shot through the glass and hit the guy in the heart. He ran a hundred yards. The homeowner, according to the prosecutor, had the right to kill the invader and will not be charged.”

It is important to take into account what is generally called “the mood of the courts” in any given jurisdiction, and this often encompasses “the mood of the prosecutor.” This writer joins with Vilos in cautioning readers a different prosecutor’s office might take a dimmer view of shooting the home invader while he was still outside the house. Not too long ago in Michigan, under somewhat similar circumstances, a man was convicted of murder for shooting through his door and killing a woman who was pounding on the door hard enough to convince him she was trying to break in.

Vilos points out juvenile perpetrators are more likely to be seen as victims than adult criminals when the intended victims harm them in the course of defending themselves and their homes. As an example, Mitch told the class, “In another case the defendant lived in a trailer. Some early teens broke in to steal candy and pop. He shot one of them, who died. Despite strong sentiment for the shooter in the community, the guy was prosecuted. He was acquitted, however.”

Convictions

Both in his book and in his lecture, Vilos warns of things which can compromise the defendant who acted in legitimate self-defense, and make the case look like something dark and dirty and worthy of a guilty verdict. He calls each of them a “Thumbs-Down Factor,” and devotes an entire chapter of his book to listing and explaining them.

In his lecture, Mitch focused on a case he considers so instructive he devoted an entire chapter to it in Self-Defense Laws of All 50 States. Larry Harmon, 57, lived in a neighborhood of five cabins in the sparsely populated rural community of Frampton Heights, Utah. There was no official neighborhood watch program, but Larry and those who lived around him had an informal agreement to keep an eye on each other’s properties when the residents were away.

The time came when he was awakened from a nap by a knock on his door. By the time he got there to answer it, someone was loudly trying to open the locked door. Larry shouted for them to identify themselves, and then told them to leave. Through a window, he saw them wander to his driveway, where they appeared to be eyeing his vehicles. Then, they walked away.

Concerned, Larry Harmon got into his truck, where he kept a 1911 .45 auto, and having lost sight of the two men drove around to check the other cabins. He found nothing amiss, and then, spotting the two men still on foot, he drove past them, stopped his truck, and stepped out to ask them who they were and what they were doing.

Moments later, the area around Harmon’s truck was littered with five spent .45 ACP casings. One of those men — Douglas Greer, 27, with a methamphetamine conviction on his record — was dead on the ground. The other, Ray Thomas, was fleeing with a gunshot wound through one arm.

State of Utah v. Larry Harmon quickly became a case of “he said/she said.”

Harmon’s story was when he asked them to identify themselves and state their business, they didn’t answer and instead came toward him, spreading out as if to outflank him, with menacing expressions. Both were larger, younger, and stronger than he.

Harmon said they ignored his requests to stop advancing on him. With his back to the truck from which he had by now retrieved the .45, he cocked the hammer, but no one was intimidated. When the man who turned out to be Greer was almost on top of him, he said, he fired in last-ditch desperation and Greer fell. Perceiving Thomas to also be attacking him, Harmon swung the 1911 at him and fired rapidly.

Thomas, the survivor, had an entry wound in the back of his arm and an exit in the front. His story was his and Greer’s vehicle had become stuck in the mud on a nearby road, and they had knocked on Harmon’s door hoping to find help, but left when he told them to. Thomas claimed Harmon had subsequently come up behind them and pulled his truck over in front of them, and emerged brandishing the .45. According to his account, “Harmon held out the gun and asked Thomas if he knew what it was. Thomas replied he did. Harmon then told him the gun was a .45 … Thomas heard the hammer go back on the gun and saw Harmon raise it and shoot Greer in the face from a distance of six to twelve inches. Harmon then pointed the gun at Thomas and asked him if he wanted to get shot, and told him to ‘take off running.’ As Thomas was running away, he heard the gun fire and felt a bullet strike his arm. He also heard several more shots and saw dirt flying in front of him.”

Shortening a long story, Harmon was found guilty of the first degree murder of Greer, and the first degree attempted murder of Thomas. In the chapter in his book on “Thumbs-Down Factors,” Attorney Vilos explains why he thinks it turned out this way.

“1. Harmon was armed with a .45 pistol,” Vilos begins. “2. He shot at and hit Thomas while Thomas was running away. Undisputedly, he had an exit hole in the front of his arm and jacket. Was he trying to kill the witness who ultimately testified against him? 3. Harmon had been drinking. 4. Harmon gave several seemingly inconsistent versions of what he claimed happened including the 911 call and multiple statements to investigators. Giving any statement, let alone multiple statements before re-visiting the scene with your attorney is a bad idea. 5. The DA argued Harmon had time to call the police before using deadly force. From the time he kicked the two intruders off his property until he confronted them with a gun on a dirt road outside of the cabin community, they had traveled a half mile on foot. 6. Although he denied saying it, there was testimony he had told his former girlfriend the law allowed him to ‘kill’ trespassers. Chasing down and killing someone after they commit a misdemeanor is excessive force. 7. The jury may have understood him to be the initial aggressor … the more thumbs-down factors, the greater likelihood of a conviction.”

Vilos’ points are clear. What is not clear to this reviewer is whether trial counsel (this wasn’t one of Mitch’s own cases) used a disparity of force defense. Mitch did point out at the seminar that in Utah, one can expect many of the jurors to be Mormon and not especially tolerant of someone who shoots people while under the influence of intoxicating substances.

Appeal of Harmon’s conviction failed. In affirming his conviction, the Utah State Supreme Court wrote, “The record indicates sufficient evidence upon which the jury could have based its verdict. The undisputed facts indicate Harmon pursued and confronted his victims. Instead of using his cellular phone to report Greer and Thomas to the police, Harmon left his phone at his cabin and took with him his .45 caliber handgun. He then drove his truck past his victims, blocking their passage back to Fillmore. The facts also indicate Greer was shot in the face at a distance of six to twelve inches from the end of Harmon’s gun and Thomas was shot in the back of his arm. From these facts alone, the jury was justified in concluding Harmon was the aggressor and he did not shoot the victims in self-defense.”

Moreover, the same appellate court opinion held, “This case demonstrates several instances of over-zealous advocacy as well as bad judgment on the part of the prosecutor. However, we are not persuaded the errors were substantial or prejudicial to the extent Harmon was denied a fair trial.” (http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ut-supreme-court/1189484.html#sthash.0h4xeelP.dpuf).

The outcome of this shooting incident was devastating to the man who pulled the trigger. Larry Harmon was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Between the wounded man and the family of the deceased, their lawsuit against him resulted in an award of $1.5 million, which effectively took the cabin he had tried to protect, and every other asset he had.

Mitch writes, “Did the jury completely discount a legitimate concern I hear from gun owners all the time — being rushed and overpowered by multiple unarmed assailants? Harmon claimed he only fired his gun because Greer and Thomas wouldn’t stop at his commands. Assuming it happened the way he described, what was he supposed to do then? Had they disarmed him, they could have killed him with his own gun. He had a right to confront them and find out why they were going around trying to get into houses. He had a right to arm himself before approaching them. If they rushed him, he had a right to use reasonable force to defend himself … They were obviously much younger, stronger, and more agile. It seems likely they could have easily overpowered Harmon and taken his gun. Why was Greer so close to Harmon unless he refused to stop or back off? I do not recall after reading any evidence in the 1,500-page trial transcript that Harmon, after he stopped his truck, approached the boys. The evidence was the .45 casings fell fairly close to the truck.”

Vilos concludes, “These are very troubling issues for those who carry a weapon for self-defense.”

About Mitch Vilos

Vilos is not just a seasoned attorney with considerable experience in gun cases and self-defense shooting cases. The man is One Of Us. He’s a shooter and a gun collector. He participates in IDPA (International Defensive Pistol Association) and SASS (Single Action Shooting Society) competitions, and in the book recommends IDPA as excellent practice for the law-abiding armed citizen.

He is also a strong, proven advocate of Second Amendment rights, and at the Legal Eagle seminar he urged all in attendance to become directly involved with the ongoing fight to keep our rights — and our descendants’ rights — to effective self-defense.

And, he’s a thinking man. During the heavy question and answer sessions he encouraged, one attendee at the seminar asked, “What do you carry?”

The answer surprised me: a purple SIG 1911 sub-compact, cocked and locked. His rationale was he has seen something I’ve seen go to court too: the lying SOB who thinks you might be carrying a gun, and falsely claims you pulled it on him when you didn’t. Mitch’s strategy is to tell the investigators, “Ask the complainant what the gun he alleges I pulled on him looks like.” If they don’t say “purple,” well …

Frankly, it was the first really good argument for a pastel pistola I’ve run across.

You would think a book titled Self-Defense Laws of All 50 States would be dry and boring. I can tell you, it isn’t. Mitch, his son Evan Vilos, and a crew of dedicated law students and law clerks spent two years laboriously compiling it. The second edition carries the subtitle With “Plain Talk” Summaries and it ain’t kiddin’. You don’t need to be a law school graduate or a Latin major to get a lot out of this book. Vilos distills complex legal principles into plain English, better than a lot of jury instructions do.

Like any good instructor, Vilos understands you can’t go through almost 600 pages of grimness without burning out unless you get some comic relief. His book isn’t a somber treatise. Here and there, he leavens it with humor, usually channeling his SASS alter ego “Pancho Vilos.” Like any good sound bite, it sticks in the reader’s or listener’s mind not just because it might be funny, but because it makes sense.

Consider this installment of Ayoob Files to be a review of Self-Defense Laws of All 50 States and also of Mitch Vilos’ instructive lecture material. You can order the book from Guns West Publishing, Inc., PO Box 1148, Centerville, UT 84014, or by phone at 1-800-530-0222, or from Amazon in dead tree or Kindle format.

And, if I may speak Pancho Vilos’ language, this reviewer gives it a BIG “Thumbs-UP”!

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Order Your Printed Copy Of The American Handgunner May/June 2016 Issue

Download A PDF Of The American Handgunner May/June 2016 Issue Now!

By Massad Ayoob

Situation:

A senior officer personally kills 30 of the enemy on the battlefield … and some more people elsewhere.

Lesson:

Great men often have great strengths and great weaknesses … and skill at arms can be as much a life-saver in the civilian world as in the military.

“There is much to dislike about Nathan Bedford Forrest; there is also a good deal to admire,” wrote Brian Steel Wills in his introduction to A Battle From the Start (p. xix), the more acclaimed of his two biographies of the Confederate general. Another author, Jack Hurst, divided the five main parts of Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography according to what he saw as the stages of his subject’s life: Frontiersman, Slave Trader, Soldier, Klansman … and Penitent. He said, “What sort of man did all this? By most accounts, two different ones: a soft-spoken gentleman of marked placidity and an overbearing bully of homicidal wrath” (Hurst, p. 6).

Forrest being born in a log cabin, becoming man of the house and providing for his family when he was a boy, is a story better suited to Reader’s Digest than American Handgunner. That he earned great wealth young, becoming a millionaire in mid-19th century dollars in an occupation even most Southerners of the time held in low esteem, I’ll leave to Bloomberg Business. His involvement with the Ku Klux Klan in its formative years, and his vehement repudiation of what the organization had become (which consumed much of his last years) would fit better in a sociology journal than a gun magazine.

It is the middle ground, the years of the American Civil War, we’ll focus on here. In macrocosm, whether they called it The War Between the States or The War of Northern Aggression, friend and foe and impartial outside observers alike considered Forrest one of the all-time great battlefield commanders.

For our purposes here, in microcosm, we’ll focus what allowed him to survive personal combat against sometimes overwhelming odds, just as he defeated better-equipped Union forces twice or more the size of his own.

We’ll focus also on the fact he was the rare general who had been a gunfighter before he put on a uniform, and was an armed citizen not only before the war, but after, when he killed a man and was acquitted on the grounds of self-defense.

Before the War: First Blood

In 1845, a 24-year-old Bedford Forrest went to Hernando, Miss., to visit his elderly uncle, who was having trouble with a family named Matlock. In the town square near the uncle’s place of business, he encountered three of the Matlocks and one of their associates, who had plainly come to “settle the score.”

Forrest explained it was none of his affair, but he wouldn’t stand idly by while his aged relative fought a lopsided battle with four angry younger men. The opposing party drew and opened fire on Bedford Forrest, one bullet missing him and killing his uncle as he stood in the doorway of his business.

A contemporary account in the Memphis area newspaper American Eagle said the young Forrest “immediately drew a revolving pistol and set it to work as fast as possible, shooting both of the Matlocks through; the younger T.J. through the shoulder and the upper part of the breast, and the other through the arm, which has since been amputated.” By all accounts, Forrest had only two cartridges loaded in his handgun, and after scoring with both and running dry, a sympathetic bystander tossed him a Bowie knife with which he charged what remained of the Matlock group, who fled.

Not long after, he was with lawyer James Morse when one of the latter’s enemies, James Dyson, shot and killed Morse with a single blast from a double-barrel shotgun. Forrest drew and cocked a handgun and leveled on Dyson saying “two could play the game.” The man lowered his gun and surrendered to face trial for murder, later saying he gave up because he didn’t think the one charge of buckshot he had left would be enough to keep Forrest from killing him. As a result, Forrest was later elected constable of Hernando and coroner of DeSoto County.

Against The Enemy

When the war broke out, Forrest enlisted at the rank of private and quickly rose in the ranks, initially perhaps because he used his own wealth and influence to recruit and equip a body of mounted troops, though his subsequent rapid promotions seem to have been due entirely to his battlefield performance. The fact he engaged in hand-to-hand combat alongside his men won the respect of the grunts and the Confederates’ supreme commander alike. After the war, when asked who he thought was the best general on either side of the conflict, Robert E. Lee answered, “A man I have never seen, sir. His name is Forrest.”

Leading from the front can carry you into the enemy’s midst prematurely, Forrest discovered more than once, the first time on December 28, 1861 in Kentucky. Writes Wills on page 5, “Forrest suddenly became engaged in a desperate fight with three opponents — a private and two officers, Captains Bacon and Davis. As his horse carried him past, he shot the Union trooper and, leaning forward in his saddle, managed to elude the saber thrusts of the two officers. Riding on beyond them, he pulled up and swerved in the saddle.

As Forrest turned, a Confederate private, W.H. Terry, rode up to help him, drawing Davis’ attention. Terry’s action gave his colonel the precious seconds he needed, but cost Terry his life. Forrest then sped back, mortally wounding Bacon and disabling Davis when his horse collided with the Union officer’s, separating Davis’ shoulder.”

History repeated itself for the Confederate commander at the Battle of Shiloh, in April of 1862. Rushing ahead of his troops on horseback, Forrest again found himself surrounded by Union infantry. “One bold Union soldier pressed his rifle muzzle against Forrest’s side and fired. The ball penetrated Forrest’s side and lodged against his spine. But in an instant, the Confederate commander turned his horse and broke free of the pack of angry Federals. As he rode clear, he grabbed an unsuspecting opponent and hoisted him onto the horse behind him. With the soldier as a shield, Forrest rode back to his waiting men, dumping the hapless rider when he got out of range” (Wills, p. 70).

Some historians are skeptical of the claim the General swept a union soldier off his feet and used him as a human shield, though conceding every other element of the account is genuine. Others totally believe it, pointing out in all such versions of the story the Union soldier is an unusually small man, and Nathan Bedford Forrest stood a brawny six-feet-two and was described by all who knew him as being unusually strong physically, not to mention what adrenaline can do for an outnumbered combatant surrounded and under fire.

No one ever accused Nathan Bedford Forrest of being a slow learner, but even the most hard-earned lesson can be forgotten in the red haze of anger and vengeance. Early in 1864, Forrest’s beloved younger brother Jeffrey, who had ridden with him for most of the war, was killed by a Union bullet through the neck. Filled with grief and rage, Forrest galloped furiously toward enemy lines. The surgeon, Dr. J. B. Cowan, who accompanied Forrest on the battlefield, rode after him and Wills recounts, “He ‘came upon a scene which made my blood run cold.’ Forrest and part of his escort had plunged into a line of Federals who were attempting to form as a rearguard of sorts. Cowan could see them in the road ‘in a hand-to-hand fight to the death’” (p. 164). Wills continues, “according to one account (Forrest) personally dispatched three men in the few moments of close-hand fighting” (p. 165).

The final such incident occurred near the war’s end, at the Battle of Ebenezer Church, shortly before Forrest’s ultimate defeat at Selma and subsequent surrender. Biographer Hurst quotes a Confederate cavalryman, Capt. John Eaton of Forrest’s escort, on the Ebenezer Church fight: “Each of us was armed with a pair of six-shooters, and I emptied the 12 chambers of my two army-pistols … not … more than five paces from the Federal trooper at whom it was aimed.

It seemed as if these fellows were bent upon killing the general, whom they recognized as an officer of high rank. I saw five or six slashing away at him
with their sabers at one time.” Lt. George Cowan said one saber slash “struck one of his pistols and knocked it from his hand. Private Phil Dodd spurred his horse to the general’s rescue, and shot the Federal soldier who was so close upon him, thus enabling General Forrest to draw his other pistol, with which he killed another of the group” (Hurst, p. 250).

In the course of that same battle on April 1, 1865, Forrest fought to the death with Union Captain James Taylor. Much later, he would tell Taylor’s commander, “A young captain of yours singled me out at Ebenezer Church and rained such a shower of saber strokes on my head and shoulders I thought he would kill me. While warding them off with my arm I feared he would give me the point of his saber instead of the edge, and had he known enough to do that, I should not have been here to tell you about it” (Wills, p. 309). Forrest killed Taylor with a one-handed shot from one of his Navy Colts. Wikipedia currently says Taylor was the last man Forrest killed, but Wills says this happened instead shortly thereafter in Selma, where “In this fighting, Forrest killed the last Federal soldier attributed to him — the 30th man he killed in personal combat during the war” (Wills, p. 310).

No serious historian disputes the count of 30 Union soldiers personally slain by Nathan Bedford Forrest, one-on-one, nor do they dispute some 29 horses were shot out from under him in heavy combat, nor that he was wounded himself several times. Rather, the number 30 — always applied to blue-clad combatants — understates the number of lives he personally ended.

At times, Nathan Bedford Forrest killed men wearing butternut gray as well as Union blue.

Killing His Own

The first authoritative biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest appears to have been written by a fellow Confederate cavalryman, and published in 1899. In That Devil Forrest, John Allen Wyeth wrote, “To his mind the killing of one of his own soldiers now and then, as an example of what a coward might expect, was a proper means to the end. At Murfreesboro, in 1864, he shot the color-bearer of one of the infantry regiments which stampeded, and thus succeeded in rallying the men to their duty. At Brentwood he did not hesitate to do the same thing in the effort to check some panic-stricken Confederates” (Wyeth, p. 571).

At the Masonic building in Columbia, Tennessee on June 13, 1863, he was shot by Confederate Lt. Andrew Willis Gould, who the previous April 30 at the battle of Sand Mountain, had left behind a cannon when forced to retreat. Forrest had considered it cowardice and ordered him transferred. (One of the general’s trademarks was “flying artillery,” a horse-drawn cannon that rode with his cavalry, and he had proven it to be a decisive battlefield strategy.) The two men argued over this in Columbia; witnesses said Gould fumbled for a gun in his pocket and it discharged, perhaps through the pocket, striking Forrest above the hip. Forrest grabbed Gould’s now-drawn gun and, with his other hand and his teeth, opened a folding pocket knife and drove it into Gould’s side. The Lieutenant fled.

Other officers hustled the general into the office of a nearby doctor, who told him an abdominal wound in the heat of summer was likely to turn mortal. Forrest was heard to shout, “No damned man shall kill me and live!” Seizing two revolvers from one or more subordinates, he tracked the badly hurt Gould to a nearby tailor shop and chased him outside, firing. He missed, and a ricochet wounded a bystander. Gould collapsed outside. Witnesses said the general contemptuously prodded the downed lieutenant with his boot, then turned and strode away. Further examination proved Forrest’s wound to be relatively minor, but Gould died of his knife wound two days later. In the interim, legend has it General Forrest went to Lieutenant Gould’s deathbed, where they tearfully apologized to one another.

In the one case, the Gould killing was clearly self-defense, and treated as such. The other? Today, an officer shooting one of his own soldiers fleeing a battle would result in a court martial, notwithstanding the fact contemporary Confederate cavalryman Wyeth seemed to feel the end justified the means. But let’s look at two other shootings imputed to Forrest. From Wills, on pages 76-77: “The record clearly indicates Forrest personally killed one black man at Murfreesboro, although his biographers have presented the story with various degrees of detail and accuracy. The earliest of these biographers, Thomas Jordan and J. P. Pryor, described the incident more clearly. According to them, as Forrest rode through the camps of the Minnesota troopers, a ‘negro camp-follower’ fired at least five times in an effort to kill the Confederate officer, before Forrest shot his assailant ‘with his pistol at the distance of 30 paces.’”

Justifiable under the circumstances? Few could argue otherwise. But consider this, from the same source: “ …Union Major General D. S. Stanley suggested to readers of the New York Times Forrest was involved in another more cold-blooded killing at Murfreesboro. Stanley attributed the story to ‘a rebel citizen of Middle Tennessee, a man of high standing in his community, who had it from his nephew, an officer serving under Forrest.” The account read, “A mulatto man, who was the servant to one of the officers in the Union forces, was brought to Forrest on horseback. The latter inquired of him, with many oaths, what he was doing there. The mulatto answered he was a free man, and came out as a servant to an officer, naming the man. Forrest, who was on horseback, deliberately put his hand to his holster, drew a pistol, and blew the man’s brains out” (Wills, pages 76-77).

If ever a set of circumstances would allow for a murder indictment, it would have been this one. Even in the 19th Century, there was no statute of limitations for murder, and Forrest being as hated as he was by victorious Northern forces, the absence of such an indictment indicates the “I heard it from a guy who heard it from his nephew” element was not taken seriously by authorities North or South.

But Forrest himself famously said “War is killing,” and we can’t talk about him and killing in the same breath, without discussing what history remembers as the Fort Pillow Massacre.

Fort Pillow

On April 12, 1864, Forrest’s forces surrounded Fort Pillow, 40 miles north of Memphis and when the Union commanders did not surrender, attacked. His men overwhelmed the fort and a massive slaughter ensued, after which Forrest himself said the river by the fort ran red with blood for 200 yards. Roughly half of the garrison was black Union troops, a disproportionate number of whom were killed, and there were claims many if not most were slain while attempting to surrender. It became a national scandal of similar proportions to the My Lai incident in Vietnam more than a century later, and blame was laid squarely on Forrest.

However, there was also credible testimony some among the slain were shooting at the Confederates when the latter returned fire, and the Union commanders had not, after all, surrendered. There was also testimony Forrest himself ordered the cessation of shooting, and at one point stood between his own forces and the Union troops with revolver in one hand and saber in the other. One account even has him shooting a Confederate soldier who disobeyed his order to cease firing. Suffice to say even though the mood of the times would have had Forrest swinging on a noose like a Nazi war criminal after the Nuremburg trials 80 years later had proof been there to convict him, he was never brought to court for anything to do with Fort Pillow.

After The War: Last Kill

At the end of the war, Forrest returned to a plantation where black subordinates were remunerated workers instead of slaves, he having freed his own slaves before the Confederacy’s surrender. It came to his attention one of those men, Thomas Edwards, was viciously beating his wife. Forrest went to Edwards’ cabin and told him such behavior would not be tolerated on his property. Edwards replied he would beat his wife whenever he wanted, and drew a knife; Forrest, apparently unarmed, grabbed a broomstick and hit Edwards with it; Edwards, according to testimony, came at him with the knife, inflicting a minor wound; and Forrest picked up an axe in the cabin and struck Edwards once in the left side of the head, killing him instantly. Forrest was tried, charged with murder, and on March 31, 1866, was acquitted on all counts by the jury. It was his last armed encounter. He died in bed of natural causes on October 29, 1877 at the age of 56.

Much later, a biographer would write, “General Richard Taylor, in his entertaining book Destruction and Reconstruction, says, ‘I doubt if any commander since the days of the lion-hearted Richard killed as many enemies with his own hand as Forrest’” (Wyeth, p. 570). We cannot help but note he was an armed citizen in his first gunfight at age 24, and an armed citizen in his last justifiable homicide once the war was over.

Lessons

We don’t learn morality lessons from a slave-trader and avowed racist, but combat survival lessons can be learned from Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Choose your weapons wisely, and develop skill with them. Albert Castel, writing the foreword for the current edition of Wyeth’s biography of Forrest, wrote on p. xxi: “Although he hacked down a large number of antagonists with his razor-sharp sword, thanks to his strength, size, and ferocity, he considered revolvers far more effective for hand-to-hand fighting and so retained sabers in his command only for officers as a badge of rank.” Wyeth himself says the General’s favorite weapons were .36 caliber “Navy sixes,” and records show on July 20, 1861 he purchased from his own pocket a large consignment of weapons and accoutrements for the troops he had assembled including “500 Colt’s navy pistols.”

His skill in wielding all of those weapons is made obvious by history. In one battle near Memphis, Forrest came upon a Union man about to kill a Confederate who had run out of ammunition, and he saved his comrade’s life by nearly decapitating the Northerner with a swing of his saber. I can find but one case in which Forrest killed an enemy with a long gun: In February of 1862, he spotted a Union sniper in a treetop and, commandeering a Maynard rifle from a nearby Confederate trooper, sent the sniper tumbling to the ground dead with a single shot.

Be armed and ready. It’s amazing a warrior like Nathan Bedford Forrest was unarmed in time of war (albeit in what he thought was a secure place) when one of his own disgruntled subordinates shot him. It is surprising when he went to confront a man he knew to be a violent wife-beater, he wasn’t carrying a gun. The bullet he took from his lieutenant and the knife wound he sustained from Edwards in his last death battle are timeless lessons for us all. The pocket knife he’d been using to pick his teeth shortly before the first such example, and the axe he was lucky enough to reach in the last, may not be there for the rest of us if and when we face such attacks.

“Get there the fustest, with the mostest.” This saying attributed to Forrest in the rural Southern dialect of the day, actually seems to track to something General Basil Duke wrote of his mentor General John Morgan’s interview with Forrest: “Morgan wanted particularly to know about his fight at Murfreesboro, where Forrest had accomplished a marked success, capturing the garrison and stores and carrying off everything, although the surrounding country was filled with Federal forces. Morgan asked how it was done. ‘Oh,’ said Forrest, ‘I just took the short cut and got there first with the most men’” (Wyeth, p. 568-9).

The opposing side got off the first shots in Forrest’s first gunfight in 1845, and it cost his beloved uncle his life. He appears to have taken the lesson to heart and adopted it in the military strategy that made him famous. In line with this …

Intimidation can prevent bloodshed, but it also has to be explainable. An older and wiser Forrest might have simply shot James Dyson instead of taking him at gunpoint in his second, early civilian encounter. As a battlefield general, Forrest’s habit of offering written terms of surrender to the enemy — stating in essence, if you give up you’ll be safe and treated with respect, but if you don’t, we’ll put you all to the sword — allowed his forces to capture more enemy personnel than they killed in many of his battles. However, the same terminology came back to haunt him after the Battle of Fort Pillow, when his men apparently did kill some helplessly surrendered troops and he spent the rest of his life accused of being a racist butcher. His explanation did, however, keep him from having to go to trial.

Be a good wizard, not a bad one. Even his enemies called Nathan Bedford Forrest a “wizard of the saddle,” but his becoming the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan would be remembered forever after his death, even though he spent the last eight years of his life disavowing the sheetheads. He’s seen today as a quintessential racist, even though the “Freedmen’s Bureau” of the post-War time chastised him for allowing blacks who worked for him after the Civil War to own and carry firearms. (See any hypocrisy there?)

The bottom line? Great men tend to have great strengths and great flaws. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s life experience tells us we should all learn from the former and assiduously avoid the latter.

Partial Bibliography:A Battle From the Start: the Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest by Brian Steel Wills, 1991, Harper-Collins, NYC; That Devil Forrest: Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest by John Allan Wyeth, first published 1899, current edition Louisiana State University Press, 1989; Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography by Jack Hurst, Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, NYC, 1993.

[Note: Correct purchase info for “Self-Defense Laws For All 50 States” (Ayoob Files, May/June 2016) should be: www.amazon.com.]

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Order Your Printed Copy Of The American Handgunner July/August 2016 Issue

Download A PDF Of The American Handgunner July/August 2016 Issue Now!

By Massad Ayoob

Situation:

One brother officer is badly wounded and down, the other is reloading, and you’re out of ammo … and the bad guy isn’t.

Lesson:

There are reasons police went to guns with more — and better — ammo. Creative thinking and commitment can pull you through seemingly hopeless situations.

In the March/April 2016 issue of Handgunner magazine, the Ayoob Files section focused on Tim Gramins’ shooting in Skokie, Ill., in which 54 shots were fired in about as many seconds, 33 of them by the officer before he finally killed his heavily armed assailant. The suspect had soaked up 17 .45 slugs before giving up the ghost. In the May/June issue we printed a letter from Ken Howard. The letter began, “When I read this story, I was transported back to 1974 when I learned a hard lesson about having sufficient ammo on your person for the fight.” This got my attention and Editor Roy Huntington’s, since both of us remembered having to carry six-shot service revolvers on duty in roughly that same time period, 3,000 miles apart.

Soon I was sitting down in Virginia with Ken, who retired in 1997 after a distinguished career beginning with DC Metro Police and ending with him as a Captain of the Alexandria, Va. PD. It turned out the 1974 incident in question was the second of three shooting incidents he experienced in his career. This is the story of the one he was talking about in his letter. Ken feels it’s the one with the most learning points.

Flashback

It was a cold, dark night in Alexandria on November 24, 1974. Then-Detective Howard was working the four to midnight tour in the Criminal Investigations Division Robbery Squad, the time when victims and witnesses were home from work and accessible for interviews. Wearing the then-mandatory coat and tie and carrying the APD-issue snub-nose .38 and six spare cartridges, Ken was driving a new unmarked Dodge to just such an interview at approximately 6 p.m. when he monitored a high-risk radio call.
We’ll let Ken set up the situation:

“A patrol unit (was) saying he had one man chasing another man with a gun a short distance from me. I headed in that direction when the dispatcher put out a call for an armed robbery at the state liquor store close to where the patrol officer had been a few moments ago. That officer, Jim Ammons, radioed he had the suspects still in the car, knew who one of them was, and asked for emergency back-up. Officer Morty Ford was assigned backup as I continued to the scene, cutting through a couple of parking lots to get there faster. At this point the radio became quiet (I was expecting to hear something from either Ammons or Ford), and as I drove into the parking lot across from the liquor store the suspect’s car was coming out, right at me.”

Shots Fired

Things go into slow motion for Ken at this point. He is the third cop to arrive — uniformed officers Ammons and Ford have gotten there ahead of him — and he sees the driver of the Dodge sedan reach out his car window and fire a large revolver at Ford. He sees his brother officer clutch at his chest, stagger backward and fall, dropping his department-issue S&W Combat Masterpiece .38.

This driver has just shot a cop, and he’s about to lead the police on a running gun battle through Alexandria’s streets during rush hour — and Howard is not going to let him do it. He aims his new unmarked unit at the front of the getaway car, braces himself, stands on the accelerator and rams the Dodge head-on.

The crash brings both vehicles to a jarring halt. The driver appears to be the only one in the getaway car. Howard flings open his own door and, a southpaw, snatches his Colt Detective Special from the holster on his left hip. He has become a creature of his training. Taking cover at the juncture of the open door, he crouches to get the engine block between him and the gunman, brings his revolver to eye level and fires.

In the darkened parking lot, there isn’t enough light to see the sights; the cars are nose to nose, and his headlights can’t illuminate his target or silhouette his sight picture. He fires anyway, as fast as he can roll the double action trigger. Ken’s “fight or flight” response has put him in a world of his own. It seems that he and his opponent are all that exist. He does not consciously see anything but the gunman bobbing and weaving in the front seat of the getaway car as his bullets punch through the windshield. Ken is aware everything has gone silent and he cannot hear his own gunfire, though he does perceive his muzzle flashes. Yet he is also aware Officer Ammons is fighting from his left, and that to his right, a heroic citizen is carrying the severely wounded Officer Ford out of the line of fire.

Though it feels as if everything has gone into slow motion, things are actually happening fast. His antagonist has ducked down beneath the cover of the dashboard and is exiting through the right front passenger door. The little Colt is empty; Ken opens the cylinder and shifts the gun to his right hand, muzzle up, as his left palm slaps the long ejector rod and clears all six empties. Still crouching behind the “V” of his open car door and his engine block, he tilts the muzzle down with his right hand as his dominant left hand snakes into his coat pocket for his speedloader. The six round-nose 158-gr. bullets seem to glide effortlessly into the chambers, and Ken peels the empty neoprene Hunt Multi-loader away and lets it fall as he closes the cylinder. His left hand wraps again around the checkered walnut stocks and the grip adapter. Ken is back in the fight.

By now the gunman has emerged through the front passenger door. He is down prone on the asphalt, belly-crawling like an infantryman under fire, his long-barreled revolver pointing toward Howard’s left in the direction of Officer Ammons. Ken extends his snubbie and fires six more shots in rapid cadence. He is certain at least some of his bullets are striking home, but the gunman is still moving with gun in hand.

And at this moment, Ken Howard is out of ammunition.

Ken knows Officer Ammons is somewhere off to his left and the suspect can shoot him at any moment, but he is equally aware that if he charges the gunman head-on he is likely to be shot himself. Ken moves back around his unmarked unit and sprints around behind the two rammed-together cars, emerging on the gunman’s blind side. On the way he somehow gets his empty Colt back in its holster, though he will have no conscious recollection of having done so. He does remember his left hand closing around the only weapon he has left, a spring-loaded blackjack in his left hip pocket.

Ken lunges at the prone gunman, crashing the blackjack’s lead tip into the back of the man’s head, and he sees the big revolver leave the man’s hands. Dropping his knee on the gunman with full body weight behind it, Ken snatches his handcuffs from his belt and manacles the suspect. Only now is he aware that the gunman is soaked with blood. He shouts to Officer Ammons, and determines the other officer is okay. Ammons, now reloaded himself, stands guard on the suspect as Ken returns to his vehicle to radio for medical and backup.

Meanwhile …

Every player only gets his own piece of the puzzle. The first stage of the gun battle had already ended by the time Ken arrived at the scene. He only saw and engaged one of what turned out to be three suspects.

The gunman he had seen shoot Officer Ford had been the driver of the getaway vehicle. Before Ken arrived on the scene, an accomplice to the robbery had jumped from the left rear seat of the getaway car and fired his revolver at Officer Ford, the .22 slug passing harmlessly through the cop’s hair. This gunman had fled the scene on foot, pursued by yet another uniformed cop. During that foot pursuit, there was gunfire and a stray bullet wounded a passing citizen in the buttocks.

And the third suspect? Minutes later at the shooting scene in the parking lot, his back to the fugitives’ wrecked Dodge, Howard saw two other detectives draw their guns and rush toward the car behind him. They had spotted a 24-year-old male emerging from the front seat of the suspects’ vehicle. Unarmed by that point, this suspect surrendered. He had been under the dashboard, unseen, throughout the entire gunfight. Such is the price of tunnel vision.

Aftermath

The gunman Howard had shot was identified as Jesse James Brewer, 48, with a long record of violent crime. He had waited in the car throughout the robbery with a Ruger Blackhawk in .45 Colt, acting as both wheelman and as “outrider,” his mission being to kill any officer who interdicted their robbery. Brewer had been shot eight times. Four of those wounds, it was determined, had been inflicted by Detective Ken Howard. Brewer died the following day in the hospital.

The second armed suspect was Michael Leon Jones, 24. Though he was able to escape the pursuing officer in the darkness, Jones was arrested when he subsequently turned up at a hospital for treatment of a gunshot wound. A former bank robber, Jones would serve time for the liquor store robbery and shootout. After his subsequent release he would shoot — and almost kill — a DC police officer.

Assigned to ride in the ambulance with the mortally wounded Brewer, Ken borrowed six rounds from another officer to reload his empty Detective Special. Later that night, returning to the station, he was met by CID commander Captain Norman Grimm. The captain told Howard he had done what he had to do, and he was behind him a hundred per cent. It was a gesture of support Ken Howard would remember gratefully for the rest of his life.

Officer Morty Ford was rushed to the same intensive care unit as the man who had shot him. Surgeons repaired his serious chest wound, but he required transfusions. Tragically, some of the blood was contaminated. “Morty wound up with hepatitis-C from that,” Ken remembers sadly. “The specialists told Morty that there was about a 98 percent chance he would die of liver cancer as a result. And it’s exactly what happened.”

Another Perspective

Officer Jim Ammons’ “piece of the puzzle” took shape sooner than Howard’s because he arrived at the scene earlier. Ammons told me in 2016:

“I had tunnel vision, for sure. I saw Jones jump out of the car, shoot at Morty and take off running. I fired three shots at him. When Brewer opened fire I thought he was shooting at me; Morty Ford was way over on my right and I couldn’t see him at all. I fired three shots at Brewer while he was still in the driver’s seat and I think the bullet that hit him in the face was one of mine. That was all six. I was reloading when Ken rammed the car, jumped out, and started shooting. I couldn’t believe how fast Ken was shooting and reloading. It seemed he got off 12 rounds at Brewer before I could blink!

“While I reloaded, I moved to the back of the patrol car so when I came back up I wouldn’t be where Brewer had last seen me. After all that shooting Brewer was still low-crawling with his gun out, trying to get at me. I was getting ready to shoot him in the head when I saw that big .45 go flying out of his hand…”

Lessons From The Fight

At the time of the shooting, Alexandria PD issued the 4″ S&W Model 15 for uniform wear, and new 2″ Model 10’s or 2″ Colt Detective Specials to plainclothes investigators. Senior men got the new guns. As a new detective, Ken got an older Colt. Regulation ammo carriers were double dump pouches for uniform, and a single 6-loop cartridge belt slide for plainclothes. Not long before the incident Ken had been carrying his personal 4″ S&W Model 19 Combat Magnum but — partly for comfort, with the S&W more than three-quarters of a pound heavier than the Detective Special, and partly because of regulations — he had gone back to the issue Colt he was wearing at the time of the incident. He had recently bought two of the Hunt speedloaders and had been carrying both in his left coat pocket. On this night, he had left one of them in his desk. Why? “Convenience,” he sighs bitterly.

All shots fired by the police that night were with department-issue .38 Special ammo: 158-gr. lead RN +P. This type of bullet was notorious for punching narrow wound channels. It was likely to exit a felon’s body with enough power to kill a bystander, but was infamous for poor “stopping power.” Brewer had taken eight hits in his face, chest, and upper and lower abdomen, and was still trying to shoot cops when Howard finished the fight by “jacking him out.” Two of the bullets fired by Ken had gone through and through Brewer sideways as he lay prone while attempting to shoot Officer Ammons.

Ken recalled what the after-effects were for his department in terms of gear:

“There was a hue and cry about ‘dum-dum bullets’ and what awful people we were for wanting hollow points, but shortly after this incident we got 158-grain lead semi-wadcutter +P hollow points, the FBI load. We also had a new chief from outside who had been told by some elements of the community that our use of shotguns intimidated them, so he took the shotguns out of the patrol cars. That’s why all we had that night was 6-shooters. There was a big kerfuffle after Morty got shot, when the union said he might not have been wounded if shotguns had been available. I told the chief the same thing to his face — if Morty and Jim had been armed with shotguns, the gunfight would have been over before I even got there. To his credit, the chief listened and gave us the shotguns back.”

Later, semiautomatic service pistols were phased in. Today, the retired captain reports, Alexandria Police are issued 14-shot Glock 23 duty pistols with .40 S&W JHP ammunition, and there are AR-15’s in most department vehicles.

Another learning point from the incident came in the form of bystander assistance. During the shootout, a man who worked at the Ye Olde Hunter firearms emporium in Alexandria ran into the line of fire to pull the wounded Morty Ford clear and apply first aid. Ken considered him forever after a “citizen hero.”

Howard’s Eventful Career

During his first two years in law enforcement on DC Metro, Ken Howard responded to a burglary with other officers. When they found the suspect and he pointed a sawed-off shotgun, Ken leveled his issue 4″ Colt .38 at the man’s chest and fired, along with other officers. They killed him before he could shoot.

In the ’80’s he was a uniformed patrol supervisor called to the scene of a possible hostage-taking in Alexandria. There he found an incoherent madman holding another man with an arm around his neck and a butcher knife in the victim’s mouth. Verbal negotiation failed, and when it was apparent the hostage taker was about to thrust the big knife up into the victim’s brain, Howard leveled the department-issue S&W Model 15 and quickly put two .38 Special “FBI Loads” into his neck and chest, causing him to fall down and away from the victim. When the downed suspect reached for a second weapon, Ken shot him in the knee and anchored him. The victim escaped with minor lacerations of the mouth. The suspect survived, though Ken felt the 158-gr. lead SWCHPs had done a much better job of “stopping” than the old RNs.

In all three of the incidents Ken was involved in, he never heard the gunfire and he experienced tunnel vision. In the shooting outside the liquor store, between the darkness and the slow-motion effect of tachypsychia, he felt like a man swimming underwater. Still he persevered and prevailed each time. In the liquor store shooting, when his gun ran dry he went to his blackjack and finished the fight like a soldier with an empty rifle going immediately to the bayonet. There’s a lesson there as well.

Concealed soft body armor — introduced by Richard Davis of Second Chance — was available at the time of this shooting but APD had not yet adopted it. It could have defeated the bullet that went into Morty Ford’s upper torso and ultimately shortened his life.

We are also reminded night shooting sucks. Night sights were still far away from being standard equipment. Ken had hit with every shot in his prior DC incident, where the cops had flashlights for illumination, and likewise scored 100 percent hits in good indoor lighting during his final shooting, the hostage rescue incident, in which he was two arm-lengths away from the knife-wielder. Today with night sights, weaponlights and frequent training in poor light, we’re all ahead of the game. During our meeting, Ken reminded me his 33 percent hit ratio in the liquor-store gunfight stands in stark contrast to the 95 percent-plus he averaged over the years on the range during qualification.
A huge lesson from this is the importance of sustaining fire. Ken believes that Morty Ford had emptied his gun, reloaded laboriously one cartridge at a time from his dump pouches, and had just closed the cylinder at the time he was shot down. If he’d had a gun that held more rounds … if he’d had a speedloader as Ken did … well, you do the math.

Retired from a career spanning three decades, Ken still carries a semiauto. And a spare magazine.

Note to readers: Years after this incident, when Alexandria PD switched to autoloaders, the department’s service revolvers were traded in and while officers were allowed to purchase the handguns they had used to protect the public, Ken’s was in evidence and was traded before he could buy it. Ever since, he’s yearned to recover the gun he used that night. If you should run across a 2nd generation Colt Detective Special with an unshrouded ejector rod and 2″ barrel (SN 689642), please let me know and we’ll see if we can reunite a retired public servant with the instrument he used to “protect and serve.”

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By Massad Ayoob

Situation: You watch in horror as a routine arrest turns into a cop-killing. The police are all down or out of ammo … but there’s a dropped gun where you can reach it.

Lesson: This young man was not the first citizen to save police lives with a gun, nor the last.

More than 80 years after his death, John Dillinger remains a household name, the most famous “celebrity criminal” of the 20th century. Long since lost to the radar screen, though, are his many criminal accomplices … and the good guys with guns who took them down. Buried even more deeply is the fact some of Dillinger’s cohorts fell to the guns of law-abiding armed citizens. This is the story of one of them, whose name was Herbert Youngblood, Dillinger’s partner in the infamous Crown Point, Indiana jailbreak.

Breakout

Law enforcement thought Dillinger had reached the end of his long criminal trail when he was and locked up in the Lake County jail in Crown Point, under the supervision of Sheriff Lillian Holley. Photos of the time show the authorities took the infamous Public Enemy Number One quite seriously: the jail was surrounded by law officers with shotguns and Thompson submachine guns and even militiamen, the latter armed with Springfield rifles.

On March 3, 1934, John Dillinger pulled off the most notorious of the many jailbreaks he was involved in over the years. Historians still debate whether he used a real gun, or a fake one carved of wood or soap — Dillinger bragged it was the latter — but he was able to convince jail personnel it was real, and that was enough. One by one, he cornered them at gunpoint, assisted by fellow inmate Herbert Youngblood.

There is no indication Dillinger knew Youngblood, a 29-year-old African-American, until he met him at the Crown Point jail, but Youngblood was one of three active henchmen during the break. At one point using a toilet plunger as a club to cow the intimidated jailers, Youngblood switched to a loaded Thompson submachine gun as soon as he and Dillinger raided the armory. I’ve never seen the exact inventory of what guns they “liberated” that day, but by all accounts the two former inmates were heavily armed when they took Sheriff Holley’s personal Ford V-8, the most powerful sedan in the sheriff’s department garage, and quietly drove away unchallenged with two hostages: Deputy Sheriff Ernest Blunk and mechanic Edward Saager. The other two inmates who had been in on the escape had second thoughts, and went no farther than the sheriff’s garage. Dillinger and Youngblood later released the hostages unharmed.

Youngblood apparently left the Thompson with Dillinger when they parted company, the latter allegedly dropping him off near a streetcar stop on Chicago’s Western Avenue. The legend says Dillinger left him with a “thanks” and a hundred dollar bill.

There is no solid evidence the two escapees ever had contact with one another again. Dillinger went along on his own violent path, which ended in a pool of blood outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater on the night of July 22, 1934.

Herbert Youngblood didn’t last nearly as long.

Brief Freedom

Youngblood made his way to Port Huron, Michigan, roughly 350 miles from Chicago. It was a good choice for a fugitive. Until the Volstead Act ended Prohibition a few months earlier, this area of the Great Lakes had been a funnel for bootleg booze and a wanted fugitive might have considered it a place where criminals might be winked at instead of stared at. Advertised as a “gateway to Canada,” Port Huron put someone in Youngblood’s situation close to a border across which to escape if he sensed the police too close on his trail. Finally, Port Huron at that time had a small but growing African-American community in which a black man could inconspicuously blend.

Unfortunately for Herbert Youngblood, being inconspicuous was not in his nature. We do not know what Youngblood was doing to get money for the almost two weeks he remained at large, but newspapers said later he was drinking heavily in local bars during that period, flashing a large roll of bills and bragging about his friendship with the notorious Dillinger to all who would listen. On March 16, 1934, a Friday morning, his behavior backfired on him.

Final Confrontation

Youngblood turns up that morning at a tiny Port Huron grocery store owned by Mrs. Pearl Abraham. He is armed with two semi-automatic pistols, a “.38 automatic” according to reports and a ten-shot Savage .32 ACP. Both are concealed.

He is drunk and obstreperous. Loudly proclaiming himself a “badman,” he takes a pack of cigarettes and refuses to pay for them. Making an ass of oneself is not a crime, but petty theft is, and that’s what causes the owner’s son to call the Sheriff’s Department.

Three lawmen arrive. One is the Sheriff himself, William van Antwerp. With him are his second in command, Undersheriff Charles Cavanaugh, and a deputy, Howard Lohr.

They accost Youngblood and pat him down. Cavanaugh relieves him of the .38. It appears everything is copacetic and this is going to be a routine arrest.

But they’ve stopped their search when they found the first gun. And now, Herbert Youngblood’s hand dives into his pocket and comes out with the second pistol.

Shootout

The tiny store explodes into a short but savage death duel. Youngblood fires first. Multiple bullets tear through Cavanaugh’s chest, piercing both lungs. Cavanaugh draws and returns fire, even as he is falling. The other cops draw and fire too and Youngblood is hit, but he still keeps shooting. The Sheriff is wounded in the upper body. Deputy Lohr sustains a severe chest wound.

Both are pumping bullets into Youngblood, but Youngblood is still up and shooting.

Caught up in this horror is Eugene Fields, the storeowner’s son. Suddenly, he sees a dropped police service revolver on the floor.
He picks it up, brings it to bear on Herbert Youngblood, and shoots him twice.

And at last, Youngblood collapses to the floor, and the gunfight is over.

Aftermath

Undersheriff Cavanaugh did not survive the multiple bullets Youngblood pumped into his chest. Dead at age 47, he left behind a widow and a child.

Deputy Lohr was gravely wounded, but survived, as did Sheriff van Antwerp. Fields had sustained a superficial wound to one shoulder.

Accounts vary, but Herbert Youngblood sustained at least six and perhaps as many as 10 gunshot wounds before he went down. He died in a local hospital four hours later. He had apparently been hit by all four men who had shot at him. Before he succumbed, he claimed he had been partying with Dillinger a matter of hours before. There is no evidence to support that, and it is generally believed he made that statement in hopes of sending police on a fruitless false trail.

Lessons

For police, the lessons are stark, and you’ve probably heard them all before. Cops aren’t the only ones who carry backup guns. When you find and remove one weapon from a suspect, don’t assume that’s all he has. Go with the “plus one” rule: each time you find one weapon on him, there’s a damn good chance he has another.

There’s a reason for “cuff first, then search.” Youngblood was able to make the first move. He might or might not have been able to get the hidden gun out with his hands manacled behind his back, but he certainly could not have fired from that position with the deadly accuracy he delivered that terrible day.

There’s no such thing as a routine call. What seemed at first to be just another loud-mouth drunk turned into a cop-killer in an instant.
Never give up! The heroic Undersheriff Cavanaugh overcame both surprise and mortal wounds to return fire even as he fell, buying time for brother officers to unlimber their guns and shoot the cop-killer. That may have been the difference between two wounded cops and a wounded citizen who survived and what might well have otherwise been three murdered policemen and a dead citizen.

For citizens, note that Eugene Fields was apparently known to the police officers as the owner’s son, a complaining witness instead of a potential accomplice of the suspect. Under other circumstances, in a situation as dire as a shootout such as this one, an unknown person picking up a gun and firing could have been perceived by the embattled officers as another attacker instead of a rescuer, with tragic results.

That said, Fields’ action was obviously the right one. He could have simply run to safety while cops and thug were shooting it out. Instead, he executed a “battlefield pickup” of a dropped gun and, it seems, fired the final shots that ended the deadly danger Youngblood presented. Amidst the cacophony of what the local newspaper described as a “gun battle which filled the tiny store with dense smoke,” Fields stopped Youngblood from inflicting further death and destruction. There was certainly an element of enlightened self-interest: a witness to the shooting of the cops, and the man who had called them in the first place, Fields had every reason to believe he might be the next to die if Youngblood stayed on his feet. Yet that does not detract from his heroism in shooting the killer down.

What had Youngblood been in jail for at Crown Point in the first place? He had been there awaiting trial for … murder. His bragging to all who would listen in the Port Huron bars, and describing himself as a “badman,” are good indicators. Once he broke out of jail with Dillinger, his self-image was apparently conjoined with that of the nation’s most famous criminal. Though apologists say John Dillinger never killed anyone, the witnesses were sure it was Dillinger who machine-gunned East Chicago, Indiana policeman Patrick O’Malley to death during a bank robbery in January of 1934, and that’s how Dillinger was seen by the public and, we must assume, the now hero-worshipping Youngblood.

Michael Bentt was the man who played Herbert Youngblood in the recent Dillinger movie, “Public Enemies.” Preparing for the role, he studied Dillinger, and came to respect him. Timesherald.com, the website of the Port Huron Times Herald, quotes the actor: “Think about it, 1934? You know relationships between blacks and whites were not as they are now. And for John Dillinger to embrace this black man back then … and for John to embrace that, it just speaks about the guy’s character.” Bentt’s viewpoint could explain why Youngblood’s dying words were a lie to misdirect the authorities away from the master criminal who had gotten him out of jail, and who, history would later show, was in Chicago at the time of Youngblood’s death. Perhaps it was just that rare case of “honor among thieves.”

Not The Only One

Eugene Fields was not the only citizen to pick up a gun and fight back against Dillinger minions during the years those men terrorized the Midwest. On June 30, 1934, the John Dillinger/Baby Face Nelson gang hit a bank in South Bend, Indiana. In the shootout that followed, Dillinger’s fellow traveler Homer Van Meter shot and killed police officer Harold Wagner with a customized .351 Winchester semi-automatic rifle. Armed citizen Harry Berg stepped out of his nearby jewelry store and shot Baby Face Nelson in the back with his .22 caliber target revolver, and ducked back behind cover before Nelson’s return fire from a Thompson submachine gun could reach him: the tiny bullet had stopped on Nelson’s bullet-proof vest.

Moments later, Berg re-emerged, and this time his sights were on the cop-killer Van Meter. As the jeweler fired, the criminal’s knees were seen to buckle: he had scored a head shot on Van Meter. Dillinger caught his cohort and threw him into the getaway car, and the gang fled, successfully escaping.

It was later learned the armed citizen’s .22 slug had glanced off the murderer’s head, temporarily stunning and disabling him but not penetrating the brain. Accomplices confessed to police much later that at their hideout, the psychopath Nelson was in a mouth-foaming tizzy that he had almost been killed by a potential victim, and Van Meter had to be placated by Dillinger himself to keep him from returning to South Bend to murder the armed citizen who had nearly killed him.

Lesson

As much as everyone likes to say shot placement trumps ballistic power level, we have to recognize that if citizen Berg had been armed with something more powerful, the outcome might have been different. Had he been using, say the .38 Super that Colt introduced in 1929 expressly to defeat body armor of the time, his shot to Nelson’s back might have proven fatal and his hit to Van Meter’s forehead at the hairline might, instead of carving a groove out of his skull, have penetrated and pierced the brain. Had that been the case, neither of those vicious criminals would have gone on to commit more murders, as both apparently did.

Earlier, on October 13, 1933, the Dillinger gang robbed a bank in Mason City, Iowa and once again had reason to regret the existence of armed American citizens. In his office in an upper floor of a building across the street, elderly Judge John Shipley saw what was happening and took umbrage at the band of heavily armed bandits who were not only looting a bank but terrorizing the citizenry. He unlimbered what the newspapers of the time called an antique revolver from the Frontier era, and opened fire.

One of his bullets hit Dillinger Gang member John Hamilton, and another burrowed into John Dillinger himself. The judge ducked away from the window he fired from and got behind cover as Dillinger’s vengeful return burst of fully automatic gunfire merely chewed up the outer walls of the building. The gang made their escape. Both Dillinger and Hamilton had been hit in their right shoulders. Was the judge being merciful, and merely aiming to “wing” them … or did his ancient six-shooter just tend to hit off from point of aim? This, history does not record.

Bottom Line

Contrary to the modern narrative of the gun prohibitionists, history is replete with cases of armed citizens helping cops and even saving cops in deadly force situations.

It is sad to see two wedges driven between natural allies, the armed citizens and America’s police. One wedge came from the gun prohibitionists, when anti-gun mayors turned some of their appointed municipal police chiefs into puppets who mouthed their bosses’ sentiments. Another, perhaps more sadly, came from a minority in the pro-Second Amendment community who strangely decided that to be pro-individual rights must automatically make them anti-police.

This case shows a more real paradigm. The police came to that little store to help the staff deal with a belligerent customer. They didn’t know they were dealing with a homicide suspect more deeply invested than ever in his criminal identity. When Herbert Youngblood opened fire on them, those cops bravely fought back, to protect not only themselves but the citizens in the store. When all three of them had been shot, one of those citizens picked up a dropped police handgun and ended the threat, saving the cops in turn.

Such things should not have to happen. But when they do, they should end with the murderer neutralized. Thanks to three courageous law enforcement officers and one brave armed citizen, that’s exactly how this incident ended.

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By Massad Ayoob

Situation:

A family’s morning is shattered when a big, enraged man kicks in the front door and violently enters the home. The man of the family grabs his pistol, and …

Lesson:

Danger threatens sometimes at the least opportune moments. Even when the criminal justice system handles a justifiable homicide by the book, some in the community just don’t understand.

January 5, 2015, Austin, Texas. It is approximately 6:15 a.m. at the home of John Daub in a nice suburban neighborhood. The teenage sons and daughter are getting up and about, John’s wife is ready to sit down with her morning coffee, and John, 42, is a few hours ahead of them all. A mobile software engineer who owns his own company, he’s also a firearms instructor and martial artist who teaches part-time for Karl Rehn’s well-known local school, KR Training. Up at 3:30 a.m., he has been to the gym and back, and preparatory to his morning shower is sitting on the toilet with his smartphone, absorbed in reading his email.

When danger unpredictably strikes, it can find you in an awkward situation.

John hears a loud male voice outside, and shouts to his wife wondering what’s going on. In the main living area of the home, John’s wife is startled: first by what sounds like a human imitating a coyote’s howl, and then by loud, angry shouts outside. There is a violent shaking of the doorknob, and then a heavy banging on the front door. She can see it actually moving from the impact. She realizes someone is trying to kick down the door.

She screams to John.

Sudden Action

Tunneled in on his iPhone, John has heard a loud male voice, but not the howling or the impacts against the door. What he does hear is his wife’s voice, filled with a tone of absolute terror he has never heard in the 20 years they’ve been married.

He will remember jumping up and pulling up his gym shorts. He will not remember reflexively pocketing the iPhone as he dashes into the bedroom where he has left his carry pistol in his gym bag. The Smith & Wesson Military & Police Compact 9mm is swiftly in his hand, fully loaded with Speer Gold Dot 124-gr. +P hollow points. Now, he sprints down the hall.

He’s so focused on putting himself between the danger and his loved ones that when he passes two people in the hall running in the other direction, he doesn’t actually recognize they are his wife and daughter, only that they are members of the family. His training has engaged. He is looking for the threat.

And now, in the living room, he finds that threat. Suddenly, he is facing a powerfully-built man he has never seen before. Daub can see his front door is wide open, the door-frame broken and the intruder is already well into the living room.

He takes the big man at gunpoint and yells, “Get the fuck out of my house!” There is no reaction. John repeats the command.
The man moves aggressively toward him.

John Daub is a tall, strong man himself, and is thoroughly trained in hand-to-hand as well as with guns. His training has taught him a criminal intruder moving toward a homeowner legally holding a gun on him should be assumed to consider himself capable of disarming the homeowner and killing him and his family with his own gun. With his wife and three children behind him, this is a chance John Daub cannot take.

He opens fire.

Shots Fired

Unlike some in this situation, Daub heard his shots, and will remember the incident as having happened in real time, not in the commonly perceived slow motion effect known as “tachypsychia” nor as “it happened so fast.”

He perceives the big man turning away from him, back toward the door, and instantly stops shooting. He sees the man take two or three wobbly steps, reach the doorway, and then collapse just outside, his feet at the doorsill.

With his free hand, Daub gropes reflexively for his phone and finds it in his pocket somewhat to his surprise since he cannot remember placing it there. He dials 9-1-1 to report and request police and ambulance, and realizes he can hear his wife, elsewhere in the house now, calling the same number.

As he is talking to dispatch, he can hear the last, rasping breath of the downed intruder just outside the still-open door, and it is over. He sets down the pistol. Austin Police and paramedics arrive quickly.

The intruder will be pronounced dead where he lies.

Legal Aftermath

John Daub was (and still is) a member of the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network (armedcitizensnetwork.org). He called ACLDN founder and director Marty Hayes, who told us, “I got a call from John while the police were there. John asked me to call Attorney Gene Anthes, a network-affiliated attorney. I gave him John’s phone number and had Gene call him direct. I explained to both it was John’s responsibility to retain counsel; he did, and Gene and I were on the phone within an hour. Gene was at the Daub residence already, and speaking to the press. We got $10,000 to Gene immediately.”

Daub found the police to be polite and professional. Police press conferences informed the public that the deceased — Jared James, 24 — had been diagnosed as autistic and had a history of being committed to mental institutions due to his behavior. He had been living in a residential care facility a short distance from the Daub home. Investigation determined shortly before the incident, James had become agitated at the group home, began acting out, and then as one news source put it, “escaped.” A staff person at the facility had followed James a short distance, but returned when James refused to come back, and neglected to call authorities. James had gone on to pound on several neighborhood doors, and then to violently break the front door of the Daub home out of its frame and make entry. It was then the shooting occurred.

Between the shooting and the case being sent to the grand jury, as all homicide cases routinely are in Texas, the mental health facility in question was shut down and surrendered its license. On June 2, 2015, the Grand Jury after reviewing the evidence returned No True Bill, effectively determining no crime had been committed by John Daub. No lawsuit has been filed at this writing.

Details

Few people are able to recall how many shots they fired in self-defense when the matter goes beyond two or three rounds. John was no exception. What we have with him, however, is the rare case of a man who was a deeply trained firearms instructor becoming involved in a shooting. It’s rather like an oncologist who is diagnosed with cancer himself: an uncommon opportunity for someone heavily experienced in the thing from the outside, to experience it from the inside. Here are some of John’s recollections.

“I know I fired with a two-handed grip. I don’t recall seeing the sights, nor do I recall not seeing — I just don’t recall either way. I do know I brought the gun up into a ‘proper isosceles’ stance (i.e. I wasn’t hip shooting or anything), and at least was sighting/indexing off something … if not the sights properly, at least off the slide, etc. This was all happening at about two to three yards.

“I cannot swear to this, but I believe I was target fixated … focused more at the threat. Probably trying to figure things out, being able to observe what was happening (e.g. expression on his face, etc.). Again, no conscious decisions at the time — it’s just looking back on what I remember and in hindsight trying to add some possible explanation to things.

“I am pretty sure I ran the trigger and fired as fast as I’d normally run it, but I can run .20-splits (.15’s if I really crank) so it just felt “normal” to me. I don’t recall it feeling faster than normal, nor slower. I had no idea how many shots I fired — it was just keep shooting until the threat isn’t a threat any more (as per all my training). As soon as I realized he was turning to leave (i.e. threat was ceasing to be a threat), I stopped shooting. Of course, that’s part of why there was one shot that landed behind the lateral midline, but of course it was only one shot. Turns out it was five shots, five hits; four bullets recovered (we assume one must have passed through and is probably somewhere in my front garden somewhere).

“One interesting thing is after it happened, on the phone with 9-1-1 … I fell back as far as I could in the house that would get me as far away as I could be yet still able to see things (my belief was we were being robbed and likely the dude had friends). While I was on the phone, there was a time I realized I had shifted the gun to my weak hand (so I could be on the phone with my strong hand). I distinctly recall realizing this and thinking how STUPID it was to have the gun in my weak hand, in case something else did happen. But I didn’t shift it back because I’d have to do this fumble/shuffle between gun and active-phone, and I was not about to do this since I was actively engaged with 9-1-1 — my plan then was if shit started to fly again, I will drop the phone and get to work. Of course I didn’t have to use it, but yeah … would I do something different? I’d not shift the gun to my weak hand,” John concludes.

Personal Aftermath

The after-effects of a deadly force action are many, and John Daub went through a range of them. He told us, “I experienced a sense of exhaustion. When your brain has been going a million miles an hour, it leaves you feeling exhausted. I know for a fact I lost six pounds that day because I was in the midst of a weight loss regimen and weighed myself daily. It takes many, many, many hours to get the taste of adrenalin out of your mouth. I was constantly thirsty and never really felt it was quenched. There were no crazy nightmares, however. Hundreds of hours of training, along with teaching every weekend at KR Training definitely helped. There was a lot of stress inoculation, and that was huge.”

“Training,” John concludes, “gives you more than skills.”

Family Aftermath

“Our family on the whole handled it decently,” John told American Handgunner a year-and-a-half after the shooting. “A lot of this came from the fact everyone was inoculated. They know what I do and teach, and we had talked about it. The possibility of it happening and how to handle it was not a completely foreign concept. Everyone was able to handle it. My wife and daughter were hit hardest: for my wife, hardest thing was realizing she could have lost her husband. When it was going down, she had sequestered herself and two of the kids in the master bedroom and when she heard me yelling and heard gunshots, was thinking the worst until she heard me shouting to call 9-1-1, which was a massive relief for her. For my daughter, it was just the whole shock of it to a teenage girl. She likes to sleep on the couch in the living room, and that night she had decided not to. There was the reality of ‘Gee, I could have been right there in the thick of it.’ Both of my sons were largely unaffected by it. Our older son has done some training with us at KR. They were raised with a protector, defender mind-set. He was ready to grab a rifle and start fighting.”

He adds, “What affected all of us was a bit of hypervigilance, jumping when someone knocked at the door. A few days later there was a bit of red nail polish on the dining room table, and the resemblance to blood startled us for a moment. That eventually went away. Not ’til the grand jury no bill came through, in June 2015, did things really start to return to normal.”

One inevitable result of such an incident is what the great police psychologist Dr. Walter Gorski called “Mark of Cain” syndrome: Your having killed someone changes the way you and your family are seen — and treated — by others. This certainly appeared after John’s shooting. He told American Handgunner, “There were a lot of interesting reactions. At the beginning, in both the neighborhood and the community there was confusion as to what happened. The Austin PD spokesperson said all the right things, but one word they used, ‘threshold,’ made a lot of people think it happened at the front door or I let him in or shot through the door. He collapsed on the front porch, so some neighbors got the impression it had happened there, though he was six to 10 feet inside the house when I shot him. It was definitely not an instant collapse. He took at least two steps after being shot before he went down.”

John continues, “There was a lot of misunderstanding, so with my lawyer we released photos of the broken door, and the court of public opinion changed back toward reality. Not a heroic thing with a dead scumbag, not a vigilante who shot a young man, just a tragic thing for all concerned, though there are still a few neighbors who seem to think I’m a murderer. A lot of what we got was sympathy and support, people who wanted to do something but didn’t know what to do, but we knew there was a lot of care and love. Some were more curious than others about details. Some neighbors didn’t want to talk or interact. There’s still one neighbor who turns coldly away when we say hello to her. No anonymous death threats or anything like that. We did see some negative things in news commentary section, Facebook, all of that. There were some people who behaved in an ugly manner, fueled by their own biases or just didn’t have the correct information. We just shrugged it off.”

Lessons

John is still carrying same kind of ammo, in a full-size M&P usually but sometimes in the compact, depending on the day’s wardrobe. Having committed to the platform some years before, then and now he’s had multiple M&Ps in both sizes.

Would he have been able to deliver an armed reaction sooner if he had been “home carrying”? Of course, and he knew that. “I always carried at the house,” he told us, “and still do.” At the time of the home invasion, however, he had stripped off everything but the gym shorts and was on the toilet and about to take a shower. Hence, the rush for the pistol in the master bedroom.

“There was one change we did make afterward,” John reports. “We got a big, heavy storm door for the front, security style with shatterproof laminated glass. It gives my wife more peace of mind.”

He wishes he could have known the mental health facility so near his home contained people with a propensity toward violence, and at least one of its residents was dangerous. However, the group home had kept a very low profile, and HIPPA regulations would probably have prevented the organization from giving such warnings to residents.

John feels much of the credit for his family surviving without any physical harm can be attributed to his training. He was so focused on what he knew he had to do, that there was no time to become terrified. Prior to the incident, his training had taught him he might experience perceptual distortion during such an encounter. Thus, he was not distracted or disoriented when he realized “some things were a bit of a blur.” This included not actually recognizing his wife and daughter as they raced past each other in the hallway.

The family knew what to do in an emergency. Each ran to safety, and the older son was about to access a rifle to join in the home defense when John fired the shots to end the invasion.

Let us end with another lesson John would like us to pass on: “Being able to sleep at night for the rest of your life is really important.” Having since been called both hero and villain over this incident, John Daub considers himself neither. He was simply a devoted husband and father doing what he had to do to protect his wife and children.

He would say when it was over, “I don’t believe any person would want such a thing to happen to them, no matter the context, no matter the circumstance. It’s an unfortunate and tragic situation for all involved. My heart breaks for his family. I ask you to please pray for the repose of his soul and for peace for his family.”

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By Massad Ayoob

Situation: In a bullet-pocked chase, the gunman has killed one victim and tried to murder many more. Now, 80 or more yards away, you’re the only one positioned to stop him … and all you have is your carry pistol.

Lesson: Shooting skill is based on solid marksmanship fundamentals. It’s critical to be aware of shooting backdrop and to fight tunnel vision. What you have immediately at hand is probably what you’ll finish the fight with, and when you’ve made shooting under pressure the norm, this will be on your side when it’s life or death.

In August of 2016, 35-year-old Nathan Terault was sentenced to 51 years and eight months in prison, the maximum under the jurisdiction’s sentencing guidelines, for a vicious shooting spree leaving a 71-year-old grandfather dead. It provided closure to the community of Puyallup, Washington which had been horrified by Terault’s meth-fueled shooting spree a year before in which he had attempted to murder several victims including multiple police officers.

On the day in question, the murderer — already a convicted felon, with multiple assaults and a drive-by shooting on his record — had strapped on a black shoulder rig and armed himself with a near-twin pair of GLOCK’s: a G32 in .357 SIG and a G23 in .40 S&W. At least one of the pistols was stolen.

The rampage had begun when the murder victim, Richard Johnson, caught Terault on his property rifling through Johnson’s pickup truck. He tried to run when Terault pulled the .357 on him, but was shot multiple times. Terault fled from the murder scene, carjacked an SUV and led police on a decidedly un-merry chase. During the course of the pursuit that followed, said the area newspaper The News Tribune, Terault “fired more shots at grade school children, teachers home for the summer, passersby and police.” Thirteen houses had been hit by bullets.

The closure of Terault’s adjudication also opened the door for American Handgunner to be the first publication to get the inside story from Puyallup Detective Scott Bramhall, the man who ended the terror when he shot the still-armed killer down.

Enter Scott Bramhall

Says Bramhall, “On August 11, 2015 I was on the phone at my desk getting ready to drive to interview a suspect in an out-of-area jail. I had 33 years on, my application for my new retirement job was in and I was waiting to hear about my job application. I was intending to submit my two weeks’ notice and two weeks of vacation together and retire. I was thinking this suspect interview in an out-of-area jail could be the last case of my career. A radio call of an active shooter went out over the air. Dispatch relayed reports from multiple 911 calls of a ‘white male walking down the street actively shooting on 13th St. SW and 6th Ave. The suspect is a white male dressed in blue flannel shirt and jeans shooting a handgun. Man down.’”

Bramhall continues, “I grabbed my portable radio. I was dressed in plain clothes as per my assignment in general investigations/fraud financial crimes. As soon as the call went out I heard Officer Kowalski radio he was in the area. Officer Kowalski radioed citizens were pointing south of his location, he heard gunshots and he was ‘out.’ I know Mike Kowalski very well, we were on the SWAT team together for 10 years, we have been hunting together, we are good friends and if I were asked to pick one employee of the Puyallup Police Dept. who I would want to go through a door with, Mike Kowalski would be my first choice of over 50 commissioned officers.

“He would be the last Puyallup PD officer an active shooter would want to have come after him. When Mike Kowalski said he was ‘out’ I knew he had grabbed his rifle and was on foot going after the active shooter. I got in my unmarked police car thinking this would be over before I got there; coming from the police station at 2:30 p.m. the short route to the location of the incident would take about five minutes with lights and siren in traffic in an unmarked vehicle.

I figured I’d be arriving and taking the statements of witnesses. Of course multiple officers answered up immediately, giving their locations as closer than mine.”

Reaching The Scene

Those who say ordinary citizens don’t need guns because they just have to call 911 and the Starship Enterprise will instantly beam down some cops, simply don’t understand the laws of time and space. Cops do, and on that sunny August afternoon Bramhall confronted it: traffic was maddeningly heavy, and the meth-head killer was driving — and shooting — wildly and unpredictably. As the pursuit changed directions, in the time it took officers to radio information in and other officers to respond accordingly, the criminal had time to change directions yet again.

At one point, as the chase turned toward Bramhall’s location, he realized he might be in position to meet the fugitive vehicle head-on. Bramhall’s unmarked unit was a Chevy Impala, a vehicle not as big as Impalas used to be, and as soon as he considered ramming the stolen SUV from the front, he discarded the thought. He didn’t think his smaller vehicle could stop the larger one. Moreover, if the driver was not disabled in a head-on and came out shooting, he and the officers behind the fleeing SUV would be in a crossfire with one another. Bramhall was prepared to reluctantly let him go past and then join in the pursuit — but then, a wild card turned up in the game.

Confrontation

Relates Bramhall, “I see the suspect coming north on Fairview, then I see the suspect vehicle stop. Later I learned he had collided with a citizen’s vehicle; however, I did not see this. I observe the suspect with his entire torso sticking out of the driver’s door window and I witness the suspect fire about five shots into the front of the marked police car behind the white SUV he is in. I hope for the best for the officer. The offender is wearing a blue flannel shirt and has a black handgun. Then as I watch, the offender gets out of the white SUV and trots north to a vehicle stopped in the roadway and fires about five shots at the citizen driver from the vehicle’s driver’s side rear wheel. I figure I just witnessed a homicide, if not two homicides.

“I can’t shoot because of all the citizens in cars stopped in the intersection in my line of fire. The offender trots obliquely from my right to left. I find myself as perimeter unmarked police unit where the suspect has broken out of primary containment putting me, a perimeter unit, in a primary contact position.”

Time To Shoot

It’s known to Detective Bramhall this man is a deadly threat. Bramhall, 57, has been shooting since he was a kid and winning trophies in shooting competitions since the early 1980’s. He shoots with such famed Pacific Northwest firearms experts as multiple gunfight winner John Solheim and master trainer Bill Burris, and Bramhall has spent many years as a firearms instructor and SWAT operator. He has trained at Thunder Ranch with Clint Smith, and through the Washington State Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors Association, has taken training with Jeff Cooper, me and many others.

Around his waist in plainclothes he wears a matched set of hip holster, single mag pouch, and dress gunbelt, all in horsehide by ace leather-smith Greg Kramer. Bramhall carries a privately owned, department-approved Colt Lightweight Government Model with aluminum frame and 5″ barrel, with Novak sights, a front post he has colored yellow and a forged stainless barrel bushing. The pistol has a factory standard trigger pull.

And now, he has stopped the Impala, flung open the driver’s door, and set his left foot on the pavement as he reflexively draws, goes into his familiar two-hand hold and braces his Colt on the windshield frame. Bramhall holds his fire until he sees he has a clear firing path: no one is between him and the armed offender, and the gunman is walking in front of a solid fence made of 2″ square steel posts. Amidst the heavy city traffic, he at last has a clear shot with a good backstop.

As he has done countless times before in preparing for such a moment, Bramhall presses the trigger rearward. The pistol discharges. There is no reaction downrange. Miss! He presses again.

The gunman drops like a bag of rocks.

And then, two things happen almost simultaneously. Bramhall sees a marked Puyallup Police Department Chevy Tahoe roll atop the downed gunman, pinning him to the ground, and another police vehicle pulls up between Bramhall and the suspect. Bramhall’s finger instantly comes off the trigger, and his muzzle moves into a safe direction.

Nathan Terault’s deadly rampage is over. It has lasted for eight terrifying minutes from first shot to last. The murderer’s illegally possessed GLOCK 23 will be recovered from him where he fell; the stolen GLOCK 32 will be recovered from the scene of the Johnson murder.

Detective Bramhall has only gotten one thing wrong. He has estimated the distance to be about 40 yards.

Investigation will show conclusively Detective Scott Bramhall has shot down the killer and ended the deadly fight from a distance of between 80 and 84 yards.

Perceptions

Dr. Alexis Artwohl and many other authorities have documented altered perceptions in people involved in fighting for their lives. Things like tunnel vision, auditory exclusion and tachypsychia — the sense of things happening in slow motion — can all occur. Detective Bramhall’s experiences in this regard are fascinating and instructive.

He recalls it happening in real time, not slow motion. However, he remembers thinking when he fired the first shot, which sounded to him like a “poof,” that he was mentally processing such: he consciously looked to see his hammer was back and his slide forward and that no, he didn’t have a squib.

“I heard the spent shell case ‘tink’ across my windshield so I knew my gun has at least completed the ejection cycle,” he wrote later. Scott told me, “I had expected to hear the second shot, but I heard another ‘poof’ and I remember thinking at the moment, ‘This is bizarre.’ I had thought things like auditory exclusion came from stress, but throughout the shooting I had no awareness of accelerated heartbeat or anything similar.” When our brain goes into survival mode, it seems to screen out things that distract us from survival imperatives; some in the medical world call it “cortical perception.”

It appears Scott Bramhall defeated tunnel vision as well, because he was consciously, deliberately looking at his shooting background and the periphery of the situation. He knew officers were chasing this man and could at any moment appear in his line of fire. He was watching for this, saw it in time and ceased fire in time.

Another reality in such matters is different people perceive things differently. Some witnesses, who had not heard Bramhall’s shots, thought Officer Micah Wilson had run down Terault with his patrol Tahoe. Wilson himself, also not hearing Bramhall’s gunfire, thought Terault had tripped and fallen, and he was simply driving his vehicle onto the man to hold the killer down.

And Bramhall? When he saw the killer fall at his second shot, he thought he must have hit the spine, because he didn’t expect even his Federal HST 230 grain +P ammo to drop a man with anything less than a central nervous system hit. It turned out the bullet had struck Terault in the thigh and shattered his femur, resulting in Terault’s immediate collapse.

Lessons

A quiet career isn’t quiet ’til it’s over. Scott Bramhall was counting the days to his retirement on the day he had to use his gun to stop an armed murderer. Prior to then, the closest he had come to shooting a man was using bean-bag rounds against a suspect when he worked on the SWAT team. (He wasn’t impressed with the effect of the bean bags, but that’s another story.) However, he had a full-size fighting pistol and more important, awareness and training in both tactics and defensive shooting, and still made a point of shooting weekly. All this allowed him to successfully perform what Jeff Cooper would likely have called “a feat of arms” ending a deadly threat to the community Bramhall had sworn an oath to protect.

What you have on your person is very likely all you’ll have to fight with. On that particular day, Bramhall’s personal Colt AR15 was not in his unmarked unit. It’s not likely in the fast-breaking circumstances, he would have had time to deploy it from a locked rack or rifle case anyway. He also did not have time to access the body armor in the trunk of the unmarked Impala.

If you are trained to recognize altered perceptions which may occur in such circumstances, they won’t alarm or distract you if and when they do take place. Note Bramhall was actually able to cognitively process and analyze the fact he was experiencing auditory exclusion in the course of the fight and this awareness did not get in the way of his getting the necessary job done.

Consciously scanning the danger zone can beat the tunnel vision effect. Bramhall was acutely aware of everything in the “shooting backdrop” from even before he un-holstered his Colt .45. This allowed him to take advantage when he briefly had a clear line of fire and a solid, safe backstop. It also allowed him to see two different police vehicles coming into his line of fire, in time to get his finger off the trigger of his weapon and divert his muzzle to a safe direction.

When life is on the line, it helps if shooting under pressure has become “the norm” for you instead of, “This is it!” Scott Bramhall joins a long line of Good Guys (Wyatt Earp, Jelly Bryce, Col. Charles Askins, Jr., Jim Cirillo, Bill Allard and many more) who in the course of trophy-winning competitive shooting conditioned themselves to later successfully running a gun when the stakes were much, much higher than trophies.

Know thy weapon (and its trajectory). A life-long shooter, Bramhall often used his handguns at extended ranges, out to 200 yards. He was known to get 4″ 5-shot groups at a hundred yards with carefully crafted handloads from his pet Colt Single Action Army revolvers. With that experience, it’s no surprise he was able to hit a moving gunman at 80 to 84 yards, using a service pistol with which he was intimately familiar.

It’s hits that count. Scott Bramhall retired from the Puyallup Police Department on schedule, a matter of weeks after the shooting. He, Wilson and two other officers earned medals for their performance that day. Today, in retirement, Bramhall describes himself as a “revolver guy” who is perfectly happy carrying a 6-shooter or even a 5-shooter launching big bullets to where they are aimed.

It ain’t over ’til it’s over! Detective Bramhall did not immediately get on his radio after the shooting. The reason was, the incident wasn’t over. He knew a “suspect down” broadcast might falsely lull other officers now arriving closer to the suspect into the belief the man was out, when in fact all that was known was for this moment, the suspect was down. It turned out Terault was indeed out of the fight after Bramhall’s .45 slug dropped him, but Bramhall was wise in maintaining radio silence at the moment of what the Supreme Court, in its Graham v. Connor decision called “tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving” circumstances.

SCOTUS, and indeed all our courts, take into account “the totality of the circumstances.” This incident is a classic example of how those rapidly evolving circumstances must be just as rapidly processed by the first responders in situations of deadly danger such as this one. American Handgunner wishes to thank Scott Bramhall for allowing us to be the first publication to share his detailed perceptions of the incident in which he became one of the life-saving heroes of the Puyallup Police Department.

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By Massad Ayoob

Situation:

A prize-rich shooting match sponsored by a successful armed citizen brings many violence survivors together, allowing them to share the lessons they’ve learned.

Lesson:

Being practiced and ready — and being armed to begin with — allow you to apply your hard-earned skills quickly enough to win, whether the venue for the gunfire is an alley or a firing range.

In September of 2016, I received a most welcome phone call from an old friend, Richard Davis. He had called to say, after an 18-year layoff, he was once again going to hold his famous Pin Shoot in 2017. Let me offer some background, to explain why this is relevant here in this particular corner of American Handgunner.

Davis is “the man who bulletproofed America’s police,” having come up with the first practical, concealable soft body armor wearable all day under a uniform shirt. His life-saving product came out in the early 1970’s. To show a cop would be able to absorb a bullet’s impact on a soft vest and not only survive but still be able to return fire, he came up with a dynamic demonstration. Before the eyes of assembled cops, he would shoot himself on the vest, then spin and blast some bowling pins off a table with the same revolver.

Son of an Iwo Jima combat vet and a former Marine like his dad, Rich was a lifelong shooter. It occurred to him a shooting match with good prizes might be an appropriate way to thank his customers. In 1975, while shooting a commercial video for his Second Chance brand body armor, he invited some cops he knew to join him and the five “Second Chance saves” who re-enacted the incidents in which Davis’ vest had preserved their lives. Those 30 folks on the informal range on Davis’ property in scenic Central Lake, Michigan comprised the first Second Chance Shoot. The rules were simple: whoever shoots the bowling pins off the table fastest, wins. Everyone had fun.

The following year, Richard announced the match publicly, and hundreds of cops attended; one more year later, he opened it to law-abiding citizens and the crowds were bigger still. From a shooter’s perspective, I thought it was the most fun of anything on the shooting match circuit. I’ve always said if shooting tournaments were rock concerts, Second Chance would be Woodstock. But from a researcher’s point of view, Richard had established something else: a reservoir of knowledge.

Think about it: in that very first event, one out of six contestants had stopped gunfire on their vest, fought back and prevailed, and some of the other invited cops were gunfight survivors, too. The ratio might have changed over the years, but one thing remained constant: the folks at Richard Davis’ Pin Shoot were a rich source of experience in armed survival in real world encounters.

Jim Vollink’s Shooting

One of the regulars at what was then called the Second Chance Shoot was Jim Vollink. Not every shootout survivor at the match was a cop. While Jim Vollink had worn a badge in the past, he was a private citizen when he had to use the very same pistol he competed with at the pin shoot to save his life. He was in a drive-through at a Burger King when a man rammed his vehicle from behind. When Jim got out the other driver menaced him with a Browning 9mm. Jim grabbed his own .45, and when the road rage guy shot at him, Jim shot back. Three rounds of Remington 185-grain JHP put the opponent down, fatally.

Police investigation determined it to be a justifiable homicide. However, the family of the deceased filed a lawsuit. Jim’s .45 — a military surplus Ithaca 1911A1 with extended thumb safety and S&W adjustable sights added — became a focus. Here’s how I wrote about it in Ayoob Files appearing in the Nov/Dec, 1989 issue of American Handgunner:

“When they found out the man who killed the deceased was a gun owner, IPSC shooter and NRA member, the lawyers must have licked their chops. They asked him, he said, the following question: ‘Wasn’t that your favorite pistol?’ ‘Well,’ the citizen answered, ‘it’s the one I had the longest.’ ‘No,’ the lawyer sneered, ‘I mean, isn’t that your favorite pistol?’ The citizen paused for only a moment before he answered, ‘It is now. Strike that from the record,’ cried the attorney for the plaintiff.”

Meet Some Saves

One of Richard’s Guests of Honor was Skip Beijen (pronounced “Bain”), a New York State Trooper. At the time of his incident, NYSP issued a K-Frame .357 Magnum revolver with full power 158-grain magnum loads. S&W had made a special run of fixed-sight heavy barrel Model 10’s with longer cylinders and chambered for .357, especially for that agency; the company subsequently introduced the exact gun as the Model 13. Skip and a brother trooper had pulled over multiple bad guys, who were more than reluctant to be arrested. In the midst of the fray, Beijen heard his partner scream, “Skip, he’s got my gun!”

If you can feel your blood pressure go up a little just reading that, imagine how the adrenaline must have been surging through Skip’s system as he heard it at the scene. Turning reflexively toward the threat, the trooper was facing the man who had overpowered his brother officer — when the fireball bloomed from the muzzle of the snatched .357. The bullet hit Skip Beijen right over the heart — stopping on the Second Chance vest. Beijen told me it felt like a strong man poking him in the center of the chest with a stiff index finger.

And now Skip was shooting back with his own .357 which, suffice to say, instantly solved the problem. Lessons: always return fire no matter how bad you think you may be hurt, and remember the norepiniphrine and endorphins releasing instantly, along with adrenaline, have a pain-killing effect.

Another Guest of Honor was John Solheim, from the Pierce County, Washington Sheriff’s Department. Retired today after multiple gunfights, Solheim is an outstanding instructor. He had been chasing an armed robbery suspect when the suspect stood on his brakes and John had to do the same or crash into him. Action beats reaction; by the time Solheim came to a stop, flung open his door, and began to step out of his cruiser, the other man was already running toward him with a stolen Colt Python in his hand.

A 110-grain .357 Magnum hollow point crashed into John’s center chest, at the edge of his sternum. He said later it felt like getting hit with “a ball peen hammer on a good wind-up swing.” The would-be cop killer stood there grinning, knowing he had scored a heart shot on the deputy with his .357, waiting to watch him fall and die.

Instead, he saw — and felt — Deputy Solheim empty his Smith & Wesson .41 Magnum into him. At this point, John’s K9 was out of the car and keeping the screaming gunman occupied while John sprinted to cover and reloaded. He had won the fight. Amazingly, the suspect survived multiple hits from full power 210-grain soft nose .41 Mag that had gone through and through him, and wound up sentenced to a very long term in prison.

Lessons John shared? Today, he would have simply shot through the windshield before the other man could shoot at all. Not having been trained to do that, he didn’t. He lived to teach other cops to learn this survival lesson. John soon switched to a .45 auto as a duty weapon for more firepower. Solheim trained other rookies not to make the mistake that this time had worked for a cop. Don’t take a shot, and stand there grinning expecting your opponent to fall down. And, of course, Solheim has been a proponent of concealed soft body armor from that day forward.

Another “Save” at one of Richard’s first shoots is a municipal police officer I won’t name, because there are some who might take it wrong when they learn his first thought after he stopped a bullet was “You hit my vest, you son of a bitch, and now it’s my turn.” I documented the case, though. He was in foot pursuit of a burglary suspect and when he got close enough to grab him, the suspect turned on him and shot him square amidships with a stolen Colt .45 automatic. The full power 230-grain hardball felt, he said, like a very hard and focused punch. Before the thug could fire again, the cop cleared leather and instantly emptied his 4″ Model 66 .357 Combat Magnum into his antagonist. The wanna-be cop-killer died in his tracks. The cop went home to his family.

Lessons: Again, the importance of swift and devastating retaliation. Reacting, not with horror or shock, but with righteous anger being channeled instantly to the appropriate response with sufficient force to extinguish the deadly threat.

Genesis

People thought “the man who bullet-proofed the cops” — Richard Davis, the real inventor of concealable soft body armor with his Second Chance product — must have been an inspired supercop. In fact, he was an armed citizen and his inspiration was a shootout he experienced with armed robbers, prevailing against three-to-one odds.

It was 1969, and Davis was a pizzeria owner in crime-plagued Detroit. It had become popular for small-time thugs to call for pizzas and then rob the delivery person at the point of knife or gun. One busy night when he was short of deliverymen, Richard’s fiancée had volunteered to do deliveries and been robbed and terrorized at gunpoint by a trio of punks.

Eight months later, the pizzeria got a call for a delivery to the same address. Davis decided he would handle this delivery himself, and he took the only handgun he owned, a 6-shot Harrington & Richardson .22 revolver. He held it beneath an empty pizza box below the real ones. His fiancée had been robbed by three men. If this went down the same, he made a plan: two shots on each.

Arriving, Davis had to walk down an alley to reach the address. Three men loomed out of the darkness, fitting the description of the trio who had so terrified his beloved. One of them pointed a chrome-plated pistol at Davis’ head, and perceiving the man’s finger to be tightening on the trigger, Rich Davis knew he had run out of time.

He opened fire, point shooting from under the pizza box. He saw one bullet hit the gunman on the point of the chin, and perceived the other had struck him in the chest, and saw him sprawl backwards. His third shot missed the second perpetrator but the fourth connected, and the man whirled, his hands going toward his waistband as if going for a gun, so Davis fired again. He saw the man’s shirt pluck up at mid-back as the bullet hit, and saw him instantly collapse. Knowing only one round remained in his revolver, Rich fired it at the third man, who snapped his head as if he’d been hit, and ran into the darkness. His gun now empty, it occurred to Richard that a run into the darkness would be a good idea for him, too.

The enemy was in disarray, but not helpless. One of the thugs fired on Richard and he felt it strike him in the head. A .25 auto slug had deflected off the bow of his eyeglasses, knocking them off, skidded along his skull, and lodged under his scalp. He felt a stinging slap as another .25 slug caught him in the back of the leg. Richard kept running, made it to his car, and raced to the hospital.

All the thugs were subsequently arrested. He later learned the one who had jerked his head did so because Davis’ last .22 bullet had passed through his Afro. The second, who had fallen, had taken Richard’s bullets in the shoulder and spine. The first man, despite hits center chest and head, survived too. The little .22 slug hitting his chin on course for the central nervous system had glanced off the mandible and exited near his ear, never reaching the brain. The .22 LR striking center chest had deflected off the sternum, missing the heart by an inch and exiting the back. The gunman had fallen, but apparently returned to the gunfight and shot Richard Davis twice.

There were multiple lessons. Davis would forever after be an advocate of powerful self-defense handguns: .45’s, magnums, 10mm’s. What he learned later in studying countless gunfights involving his vest customers only reinforced the belief. One reason he chose a format of shooting heavy bowling pins two-and-a-half to three feet back off a table was to enforce the use of potent handguns. Having become a friend of Jeff Cooper by then, Davis believed in Cooper’s mantra of DVC: Diligencia (accuracy, or precision), Vis (power) and Celeritas (speed). Whoever shot the pins off fastest won the event, but they needed power to blast the pins backward and accuracy to channel the power to where it was needed.

Six shots and four hits had been a good performance, but not having more than six may have been what got him shot twice. You are far more likely to find Richard Davis carrying an auto pistol today than a revolver, even though the little H&R .22 6-shooter saved his life. Davis, by the way, was the first gunfight survivor I met who was able to count his shots when they went past three or four. All these decades later, I can still count on my fingers the number who were able to do so. Each time, there was some compelling reason why. In Richard’s case, it was the acute awareness his plan for two-two-two had gone off synch after his third shot missed. “Four! Five! Six! Oh, crap ….”

Davis also learned getting shot sucked and there had to be something better to stop bullets with than one’s own body. It was in the emergency room that night his idea for soft, concealable body armor was born. Within a very few years, Richard Davis had revolutionized officer safety. His Second Chance Body Armor was the first such product to be sold to American police. By the beginning of 2016, well over 3,000 lives had been documented as “saves” by Davis’ invention, encompassing not only his brand — but the many copies that sprang up thereafter by various manufacturers.

You can read the full details on the incident in the Ayoob Files archives available at www.americanhandgunner.com/ayoob-files-archive/. It was in the Jan/Feb 1987 issue.

And Into The Future

The fabulous Second Chance Shoot ended in 1998 and a few years later, Richard Davis retired. His Second Chance Body Armor company was bought by Safariland. Richard’s son, Matt, opened Armor Express in Central Lake, Michigan, and following in his dad’s footsteps makes some of the best body armor available today, the brand I personally wear now. Armor Express products have already saved many lives.

One Armor Express save scheduled to be at the Pin Shoot in June of 2017 is Lt. Brian Murphy. On August 5, 2012, a mad dog killer murdered half-a-dozen people and wounded four more at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. One of the latter was Lt. Murphy. As he pulled up and saw the gunman, he attempted to deploy his AR15 but its tactical sling hung up on his mobile data terminal. Drawing his service pistol to engage, Murphy came under fire and one bullet destroyed his thumb, taking the gun out of his hand. He didn’t have a backup handgun at the time.

Lt. Murphy was shot 15 times with 147-grain 9mm Hydra-Shoks. In one of the great stories of human resilience ever, he survived. The bullets that would have killed him stopped on his Armor Express vest. The gunman was put down by Oak Creek PD firearms instructor Sam Lenda, firing from some 60 yards away with an AR15. His guts blown out, dying, the mass murderer put his Springfield XD(M) to his head and gave himself his own coup de grace.

Meeting Lt. Murphy will be worth the trip in and of itself. I caught his talk at a conference of ILEETA, the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers, where I’ve served for many years on the advisory board. I can tell you there were tears in the eyes of many of the hundreds of cops in the audience. Murphy’s story of survival and determination is not to be missed and is the sort of learning experience you can get at The Pin Shoot.

Like I said, it isn’t just a shooting match.

And One More Thing …

In the spirit of total disclosure, let me share one more point. In the early 1970’s, I was a young patrolman writing for police magazines and spotted the first Second Chance ad in one of the police journals I wrote for, Law and Order. I got one, wrote it up, and wore armor ever since. Over the years, as the saves accumulated, I saw almost half of them were vehicle crashes. Living and working in Northern New England and knowing how many fatal or crippling crashes were caused by folks who didn’t know how to drive on ice and snow, it occurred to me if I had to dress in layers in winter anyway, I might as well have a layer that stopped more than the cold. I got into the habit of wearing the concealed vest on my own time. It was warm, and a great windbreaker. I could wear a flannel shirt and duck-down vest instead of a heavy mackinaw if I had the ballistic vest on underneath, and have more mobility and range of movement.

Long story short: on a bitter cold day in fourth quarter 1996, I was so attired when I couldn’t avoid a crash with a vehicle that blew a stop sign in front of me. I was stupid enough not to be wearing my seat belt. The air bag did not deploy.

Richard Davis’ Super FeatherLight vest did.

I wound up with a major concussion, long term post-concussion syndrome, and some hearing loss from that. The doctor told me without the vest, I would probably have died from a flailed chest when my thorax hit the steering wheel. And without the vest slowing down body and head momentum, the closed head trauma would likely have been an open skull fracture with brain matter spattered all over the windshield. I became Second Chance Save #682 and Kevlar Survivors Club member #1946. Not a great war story, but you can understand why I’m a very satisfied customer of the Davis family’s products nonetheless.

Remember www.pinshoot.com, June 9–17, 2017. One of the all time great shooting matches is back, and you might, like me, also find it a treasure trove of life-saving advice from gunfight survivors.

Read More The Ayoob Files

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By Ayoob Massad

Situation: The armed robber turns on you with his gun coming up, obviously intending to shoot. The only chance left is to shoot first.

Lesson: Use enough gun. Understand intervening obstacles may stop your bullets, and gang members don’t appreciate you killing their homies. Realize some bureaucracies don’t quite grasp the necessity for self-defense.

It was an ordinary Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant on the corner of 25th Street and Florin Road on the south side of Sacramento, California. Shortly after seven o’clock on a Saturday evening, owner/manager Wayne Johnson, 40, was in the back office assembling a deposit bag to be dropped off later in the night deposit slot at the nearby Bank of America.

He didn’t realize that, one wall away, a man with a gun had entered the KFC with an intent to take that money for himself.

Armed Robbery In Progress

Wayne’s 13-year-old daughter Karin rushed into his office and told him there was a robber up front in the lobby. Much later, Wayne would recall, “I told her to find a safe hiding place. I walked up through the cooking area to observe the masked perp crouched down behind the sales counter getting money from the cash registers at gun point.” He could see the man was holding a silver-colored revolver and wearing blue coveralls and a ski mask.
He continues, “I motioned to my other employees to not do anything in hopes the perp would get the cash register money and leave.

“He didn’t.”

Wayne narrates, “The perp then yelled he wanted the manager. I stepped out and said I was the manager. He said he ‘wanted the safe.’ I led him back to the office with him poking me in the back with his firearm. I loaded a B of A night deposit lock bag with the contents of the safe. The safe didn’t have much money due to the fact I had just emptied the contents of the day’s receipts into another deposit bag on my desk ready to be dropped into the B of A night drop later. I packed the bag with rolls of nickels, dimes, quarters, ones and five dollar bills which is what we kept in the safe for the registers.”

Wayne Johnson wasn’t particularly concerned with the money. He was worried about something else. He later told American Handgunner, “I had learned a few weeks earlier of another KFC manager who was shot execution-style after being robbed. That really bothered me.”

Approaching The Exit

Stolen money in one hand, loaded gun in the other, the masked man darts out of the office. Wayne Johnson sees an opening: he decides if this one wants to murder people after stealing from them, he’s not going to get the chance. Johnson’s hand flashes to the shelf above his desk where he has hidden a pistol. His hand closes around a Walther PPK/s. It’s loaded with six rounds of Super Vel .380 ACP in the magazine and a seventh in the firing chamber, hammer safely down in the double action position, thumb safety already set to “fire.”

As he is doing so, he hears a thud outside. Moving too fast, the robber has slipped and fallen on a floor wet from just being washed. Walther in hand, Johnson steps cautiously out of the office to see the gunman, still holding the silver-colored revolver, rising angrily from the floor. He’s in a short hallway in the act of opening the spring-loaded steel rear exit door.

Johnson shouts a command to the gunman. It happens so fast he will never be able to remember the exact words.
The robber turns toward him, swinging his revolver up at Johnson. At that moment, time has run out and there is only one effective course open to the armed citizen.

Shots Fired

The world seems to go into slow motion as Wayne Johnson fires. He is experiencing tunnel vision, focused on the threat, as he fires his first shot a split second before the thug triggers his first round.

Neither man stops shooting. Aware the criminal is still firing at him, Wayne keeps pulling his own trigger. He sees sparks of burning powder particles fly from the muzzle of the opponent’s revolver to his left, past Wayne’s face at eye level. Moving backward away from him, the gunman is now through the heavy spring-loaded steel door, which quickly closes between them. Hoping to shoot through the door before the gunman can, Wayne keeps firing.
Suddenly, the narrow hallway goes silent. There is nothing left to shoot at, and no more bullets are coming his way. The slide has not yet locked back, so Johnson figures there must be at least one round left in the chamber, but he has lost count of how many shots he has fired.

Johnson’s young daughter comes rushing up to him and says, “Dad, you’re bleeding!” She is looking at the floor. He follows her gaze and sees blood on his boot and the floor, and only then realizes he has been shot. He had not felt the bullet strike him.

A customer in the KFC, a nurse, has now run to the shooting scene. She takes Wayne’s KFC string tie and fashions it into a tourniquet around his wounded arm.
In the distance, he can hear sirens.
It’s over.

Reconstruction

Police investigation showed eight shots had been fired in the narrow hallway, with the men no farther apart than six or seven feet.

The Sacramento Bee reported, “The robber…ran out the rear and through a field. He collapsed about 150 yards away at the base of a flagpole at a Bank of America parking lot and died a few minutes later.”

The dead man’s gun turned out to be an old nickel-plated top-break Smith & Wesson, caliber .38 S&W. He had gotten off two shots at Wayne. It is believed his first round-nose lead bullet is the one that hit Wayne’s extended support arm a few inches above the elbow, and tracked up into his shoulder. The other shot fired by the gunman went high and wide, striking a bag of salt on an upper shelf.

At the time of the incident, Wayne Johnson’s hobby was bullseye pistol shooting, and he had earned Master rank. In that shooting sport, the closest distances from shooter to target are 50 feet indoors and 25 yards outdoors, up to 50 yards on the outdoor “long line,” all fired one-hand-only. The distance in this shooting was seven feet, and Johnson remembers firing from a two-handed Isosceles stance.

Investigators who examined Johnson’s .380 found an empty magazine and one last .380 Super Vel round in the chamber. He had fired six shots. His opponent’s body bore evidence of only one hit, a penetrating gunshot wound to the heart.

Obstacle Factor

What would account for an 83 percent miss rate by a Master shooter under these circumstances? Stress? No…in the last analysis, those five bullets fired by Johnson didn’t miss — they were blocked.
Of the three shots fired before the spring-loaded steel door swung closed, one had gone straight into the gunman’s heart, and two had been stopped by the deposit bag full of metal coinage he had been clutching to his chest with his non-gun hand. Even at the time Johnson fired his last three shots, he was aware the door was closing between them, and hoping his bullets would pierce through. They did not; .380 hollow points aren’t constructed to pass through steel doors.

Aftermath

Detective Sean Padovan, since retired, led the investigation by the Sacramento Police Department. It was quickly determined the death of King Charles Brown, a known street gang leader, was a justifiable homicide. Neither criminal charges nor lawsuits against Wayne Johnson or KFC resulted. Johnson would later learn there were several warrants out for the man he had killed, who had a reputation for teaching his thug underlings how to rob banks.

Even so, there were life-changing reverberations from the shooting. Police warned Johnson other gang members were likely to seek revenge, and suggested he go into hiding. For a month, Johnson and his family moved to a cabin in the Sierras owned by the parents of one of his employees, who were grateful to him for stopping the gunman’s threat to their daughter’s life. When both the swelling in his arm and the danger to his family went down, they returned to Sacramento. The bullet would be removed from its lodging point some two months after the shooting. There would be no lasting injury, and the scar from the surgery would be larger than the tiny, puckered entry wound.

The street-wise detectives who investigated the shooting understood what had happened. The bureaucracy at headquarters, perhaps not so much. The shooting went down on January 7, 1978. On the 39th anniversary of the deadly gunfight, Wayne Johnson told Handgunner what happened when he applied for a concealed carry permit after the incident.

“At the time, I learned there were only eight carry permits out from the Sacramento Police Department. After applying for the carry permit, they rejected me, and I asked for an interview with the chief. He said my reasons for applying weren’t good enough even though there was cause to believe a gang was after me. I replied my lawyer is going to have a heyday suing your department after we get hurt by these people, who you already know want to kill me.

“The next morning I got a phone call from headquarters: ‘Mr. Johnson, go down to the Center and take a 16-hour course, you’ve been granted a permit.’ I guess I won the bluff. The County was much easier as far as getting a permit when I moved there three years later.” (Author’s note: under the current administration, Sacramento County is virtually a shall-issue jurisdiction, as are some other counties in Northern California.)

Johnson had another bureaucracy to deal with: the KFC establishment itself, which apparently had a “no guns at the franchise” policy even then. “The company asked me not to have a gun in the store after the shooting,” Wayne remembers. He acknowledged being advised of the company policy, but somehow a WWII-vintage Ithaca 1911A1 .45 auto found its way into his office for the duration of his time there. It was his perception the parent company might care more about liability than the safety of an owner/manager and his employees. By the following September, Wayne had sold his franchise and made a career change. He still has the Ithaca .45.

Lessons

We’ve already discussed the effects of intermediate barriers on bullets, stopping five of Wayne’s six, and noted he finished the encounter with only one round left if the exchange of shots had continued. Less than impressed with the effectiveness of the .380 he switched to a .45. Today, almost four decades later, Wayne’s everyday carry gun is a compact Elite ’98 series Kahr, chambered for .40 S&W, loaded with 180-grain Winchester PDX-1 bonded jacketed hollow point, and carried with two spare magazines.

Should he have engaged at all, since it appeared the robber had obtained what he came for, and was leaving? Remember, Wayne was acutely conscious of the fairly recent case of another KFC robbery in which the perpetrator had finished with the execution murder of the manager. Arming himself at the first safe opportunity and particularly knowing that his 13-year old daughter was among the employees and customers he felt a duty to protect, I cannot fault him for placing himself between those potential victims and the bad guy, should the latter decide to double back. Once the suspect turned on him with the .38, it was the perpetrator whose actions were the proximate cause of the shooting.

Wayne experienced not only tunnel vision and tachypsychia, the sense of things happening in slow motion, but also auditory exclusion on that “two-way range.” The short hallway where the shootout took place was only five feet wide and the gunfire should have reverberated deafeningly, but he only heard the shots as dull thuds. Wayne’s Walther was at eye level, dialed in by thousands of competition shots fired with careful aim, and while he wasn’t consciously aiming his alignment was true. Had it not been for the money bag the robber was carrying and the spring-loaded steel door that rapidly closed between them, all six shots the good guy fired would have hit the bad guy in the chest area.

With almost four decades to think about it, knowing what he knows now, what would Wayne have done differently? “I would have taken cover,” he answers. “I was one sliding step from the corner of the wall. I had been shooting bullseye matches since 1967, and seriously for about five years. My bullseye competition had given me good trigger control, and I’m glad that stayed with me in the fight, but I’d had zero tactics training at that time and cover simply didn’t occur to me.”

Why didn’t he avail himself of the pistol before he first stepped out of his office? “I knew if I faced him then, customers would be behind him and employees might be between us; he’d be able to shoot at me but I couldn’t return fire without hitting others,” Wayne explains. “But once he went out my office door heading for the rear exit, I knew I’d have a safe backdrop if it came to shooting.”

Moving On

I met Wayne and learned of his incident long after it happened. He told me about the training odyssey to which it led him. He said, “After my incident, I dedicated myself to self-defense knowledge and not just NRA bullseye target shooting. I took many schools from Gabe Suarez, Jeff Gonzales (Trident Concepts), Benny Cooley, Max Joseph, Larry Vickers, Blackwater International, and now you. I also took classes from Lt. Col. Dave Grossman … Each class I took was similar in the shooting techniques but what I really learned was the teaching skills and nuggets of information I passed along to my students in IDPA.”

 Wayne continued, “I took all these classes to learn and finetune my shooting skills, mindset and also to learn teaching skills from all my instructors because when I got into IDPA (International Defensive Pistol Association) in 1999, I soon became a Safety Officer (SO) and then a Safety Officer Instructor (SOI) and then did a stint as the IDPA Area Coordinator for California and Nevada. I was President of my Sacramento IDPA club from 2001 to 2011. Because of my incident, I had a better understanding of what real life shooting scenarios were like and had studied many incidents and the lessons learned. I would always stress to my IDPA students that IDPA teaches you only three things: gun handling, marksmanship and the use of cover and to then take as many other self-defense classes (as possible) to develop mind-set and a broader sense of self-defense shooting situations and techniques.”

Traveling that long path, Wayne Johnson won many titles and awards in IDPA shooting, but his focus was always on teaching others to survive the sort of encounter in which he himself had prevailed. It was in that spirit he shared his incident with us, and we here at American Handgunner appreciate that very much.

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By Massad Ayoob

Situation: Designed by and for good guys, the masterpiece jointly created by John Moses Browning and Dieudonne Saive continues to serve to this day.

Lesson: Firepower counts. Ballistic potency counts. Ergonomics and “shootability” may count even more.

In the first quarter of 2017, a source at Browning confirmed the rumor the company was discontinuing their Hi-Power pistol, a flagship of the Browning/FN marques since 1935. In discussing this with editor Huntington, we decided a homage to this classic pistol’s time “in action” would be appropriate for the Ayoob Files section.

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Blake Hubbard

In 1996, Blake Hubbard was a young officer with the Grand Prairie, Texas Police Department. GPPD had a broad personal weapons policy, and Blake had chosen to buy his own Browning Hi-Power. Col. Jeff Cooper had once said of the Hi-Power that no pistol had ever fit his hand better, but it was a shame it wasn’t made in a more consequential caliber than 9mm or .30 Luger. Browning had brought out a beefed-up version with a heavier slide and chambered it in .40 S&W, and that’s what Blake was carrying.

The day came when Blake had to back up a brother officer, Barry Fletcher, in response to a man who had been menacing people with a big Buck folding knife. The cops’ shouts of “Drop the knife, drop the knife” had failed. So had Fletcher’s pepper spray and blows to the knife-wielder’s thigh with his ASP baton.

When the man let out a wordless roar of rage, brought the knife to stabbing position, and lunged at Officer Fletcher, Officer Hubbard fired a “double tap” from his Browning. The assailant instantly collapsed. Both 180-gr. .40 Hydra-Shoks had struck center chest and expanded, destroying the heart.

The shooting was cross-racial. The two officers were the only white people on the scene. It was instantly spun into a cause celebre of racially motivated murder, with Johnny Cochran flying in from Los Angeles to lead marches in the streets in Texas. Blake Hubbard was indicted for murder.

I was on the defense team led by Attorney John Read of Dallas. Gary Goudge, Blake’s tactics and SWAT instructor, testified his actions were exactly in keeping with his training under state standards. My testimony was the same from the national standards perspective, and Dr. Vincent DiMaio, the leading authority on gunshot wounds, testified both wound tracks were exactly consistent with the decedent’s assaultive posture toward Fletcher when shot by Hubbard.

I was able to show, given the short distance between the assailant and Fletcher, he could have stabbed the officer in three-quarters of one second if Hubbard had held his fire, as the prosecutors insisted he should have. Instead, Hubbard had delivered two center hits in two shots in approximately half a second. At the end of three-quarters of a second, the attacker was collapsing to the ground at the officer’s feet, not stabbing him in the throat as he likely would have been if Hubbard had not fired. As I said when I first wrote about this case (Ayoob Files, American Handgunner, Jan/Feb 1998), “The jury was out for about an hour and 40 minutes before they returned their verdict and found Blake Hubbard not guilty. One juror said later they’d reached the acquittal verdict unanimously during the first five minutes of deliberation.”

In 1996, Blake Hubbard was a young officer with the Grand Prairie, Texas Police Department. GPPD had a broad personal weapons policy, and Blake had chosen to buy his own Browning Hi-Power. Col. Jeff Cooper had once said of the Hi-Power that no pistol had ever fit his hand better, but it was a shame it wasn’t made in a more consequential caliber than 9mm or .30 Luger. Browning had brought out a beefed-up version with a heavier slide and chambered it in .40 S&W, and that’s what Blake was carrying.

The day came when Blake had to back up a brother officer, Barry Fletcher, in response to a man who had been menacing people with a big Buck folding knife. The cops’ shouts of “Drop the knife, drop the knife” had failed. So had Fletcher’s pepper spray and blows to the knife-wielder’s thigh with his ASP baton.

When the man let out a wordless roar of rage, brought the knife to stabbing position, and lunged at Officer Fletcher, Officer Hubbard fired a “double tap” from his Browning. The assailant instantly collapsed. Both 180-gr. .40 Hydra-Shoks had struck center chest and expanded, destroying the heart.

The shooting was cross-racial. The two officers were the only white people on the scene. It was instantly spun into a cause celebre of racially motivated murder, with Johnny Cochran flying in from Los Angeles to lead marches in the streets in Texas. Blake Hubbard was indicted for murder.

I was on the defense team led by Attorney John Read of Dallas. Gary Goudge, Blake’s tactics and SWAT instructor, testified his actions were exactly in keeping with his training under state standards. My testimony was the same from the national standards perspective, and Dr. Vincent DiMaio, the leading authority on gunshot wounds, testified both wound tracks were exactly consistent with the decedent’s assaultive posture toward Fletcher when shot by Hubbard.

I was able to show, given the short distance between the assailant and Fletcher, he could have stabbed the officer in three-quarters of one second if Hubbard had held his fire, as the prosecutors insisted he should have. Instead, Hubbard had delivered two center hits in two shots in approximately half a second. At the end of three-quarters of a second, the attacker was collapsing to the ground at the officer’s feet, not stabbing him in the throat as he likely would have been if Hubbard had not fired. As I said when I first wrote about this case (Ayoob Files, American Handgunner, Jan/Feb 1998), “The jury was out for about an hour and 40 minutes before they returned their verdict and found Blake Hubbard not guilty. One juror said later they’d reached the acquittal verdict unanimously during the first five minutes of deliberation.”

And what does all this have to do with the Browning Hi-Power? Only this: Blake didn’t see himself as a “gun guy,” just a cop who took pride in being skilled with all his tools, of which the pistol was one. His skill, built by fine instructors like Gary Goudge, got him through. But it certainly helps to have an extremely pointable, extremely controllable pistol when you have to fire two shots perfectly to save a brother’s life in one-half of one second. The Browning had definitely come through for Blake Hubbard.

Tony Long

In 1987 I met Tony Long for a chat in a pub in London. Tony worked for the London Metropolitan Police in their armed unit. England had evolved two types of armed police. AFO’s, Authorized Firearms Officers, would be issued a Smith & Wesson Model 10 .38 Special revolver drawn from the armory as the need arose, and were trained with guns roughly on a par with American patrolmen. The firearms unit — which switched its designation from D11 to PT17 in 1987, and would soon have its name changed again to SO19 — at the time used the 9mm Browning Hi-Power as its standard sidearm. Issue ammo, as I recall, was a 100-gr. jacketed softnose, because hollow points were seen as politically incorrect “dum-dum bullets.” This is not a dig against the Brits: In the year 1987, neither NYPD nor LAPD had hollow points yet, either.

Receiving a tip of an armored car robbery planned to take place when it delivered a payroll to a meat-packing plant in South London, the Met sent Tony and other officers there to stake it out. Perhaps there weren’t enough personnel, but when it went down Tony was the only one in position to see it happen. Three armed robbers in effect had a security man hostage. And the thugs were well armed. Two had semiautomatic shotguns, a Remington and a Browning as I recall, and the other a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum.
Long raised his Browning 9mm and snapped, “Armed Police!” The gunmen spun on him.
Long was faster than they were.

His first double tap caught one of the shotgunners in the thorax before he completed his turn and sent him to the ground, dying. The second pair of 9mm’s hit the second shotgunner in the chest and arm, and he too dropped his weapon and collapsed.

Long swung the Browning to the third man, cracked his first shot, and amazingly was able to stop before firing the second half of the double-tap when he saw his target duck behind the guard. Wounded and having just seen his two friends killed, the third man released his weapon and surrendered. He was the only criminal of the trio who would survive.

Jeff Cooper would have called it a Feat of Arms. Outnumbered by three-to-one odds, armed with the least powerful weapon at the scene, Long had scored with each of the five rounds he fired. Perhaps most incredibly, he had the reflexes and control to hold the second shot of his last double tap as he saw the situation change in front of the gunsights.

The man, not the gun? This is just about always true, but Tony Long left me with the impression he felt the ergonomics and “shootability” of his Browning Hi-Power were working in his favor in those short but savage moments.

Fernando Arcaya

When teaching in Caracas with Ray Chapman at host Freddy Boulton’s fabulous Galleria Magnum range, I met and worked with Fernando Arcaya. Fernando was a most memorable individual. Well over 6′, about 220 lbs. of solid muscle, and reportedly the highest ranked Shotokan karate black belt in Venezuela, he was a man you wanted to have on your side of the fight. The gun he chose to have on his side of a fight was — you guessed it — the Browning P35.

Mexico might be 1911 country, but on the South American continent for a very long time, the Browning Hi-Power was the most popular overall choice of the good guys. Argentina made their own version of the P35, and it was popular among the country’s police and standard for its military. During the Falklands War of 1982, both sides fielded soldiers armed with Brownings. The Brits had gone to them at the end of World War II.

In Venezuela, the Browning was pretty much standard issue for most cops I saw there back then, including DISIP, the elite Internal Security Police. Standard issue was Venezuelan military CAVIM, loaded hot with steely jackets. The savvier cops didn’t like the icepick wounds the ball ammo produced, and during the time I was there elite units were issued Geco Action Safety rounds from Germany. These were solid copper cup-shaped bullets with plastic nose tips guiding them into the chambers of mil-spec Brownings and the popular open-bolt Uzis and Mini-Uzis proliferating in this country. This was the same high performance ammo Phil Engeldrum imported to the US under the BAT (Blitz Action Trauma) name.

Fernando and his Browning dominated more than one armed citizen shooting incident. One afternoon, going to his car in a parking lot, he was accosted by a knife-armed mugger who announced in Spanish, “This is a stickup!” Fernando’s response was swift and decisive. Drawing from appendix carry inside his waistband, he stitched three fast Geco rounds up the centerline of the blade man, who promptly toppled backward, probably dead before his back hit the asphalt.

On another occasion, Fernando and his lovely fiancée Elita were in a bank depositing their paychecks when a trio of armed robbers hit the place. They followed a typical pattern of terrorist robbery that had evolved during the period in Caracas: They fired shots into the ceiling to terrify the victims and gain compliance, and then often after the robbery, female victims were raped and males stomped and humiliated.

These three never even got as far as the robbery part, because after their explosive opening, Arcaya’s Browning was out and speaking for him. In seconds, two of the gunmen were down and dead, the third horizontal with empty hands and begging not to be shot again. The Geco Action Safety rounds had fulfilled expectations.

Elsewhere In Venezuela

Ray Chapman and I trained a lot of cops in Venezuela. The great majority carried the Browning, and swore by it. One such officer had reason to be grateful for his Browning and its large-capacity magazine, if not for the effectiveness of a 9mm hardball.

He was the first through the door on a raid, and was shot by the target offender, who had been waiting inside in ambush. The gunman’s Ruger .357 Magnum revolver was, fortunately, loaded only with round nose lead .38 Special, but when the bullet broke our officer’s hip it was still enough to drop him to the floor. As he fell, he saw the man look away from him toward the officers behind him as if to say, “This is it for you, who else can I shoot now?”

It was the gunman’s last mistake. From the floor, the downed Venezuelan cop opened fire with his Browning. He told us he saw the man shudder as the FMJ bullets hit him and look around as if to say, “Where is this coming from?” The man fell halfway through the fusillade, still trying to shoot, but the cop was still pumping bullets into him. When the bad guy realized who was shooting him and tried to swing his revolver to finish him, it was too late: our cop was still shooting, and by the time he went to slide-lock the gunman was dead, hit by every shot the wounded officer had fired from his 14-shot Browning. The cop recovered to return to full duty, with a slight limp.

And, Around The World …

In its time, the Browning was the most popular service pistol of the NATO/free world countries. Pictures show Britain’s Prince Harry during his combat tour with a 9mm Browning prominently affixed to his chest plate. Though more modern designs are supplanting it throughout the former British Empire, including Canada, Brownings remain in service with English and Canadian militaries alike.

The Hi-Power was the standard weapon of Britain’s fabled SAS, often carried with an extended 20-round magazine. These were seen in action in the many photos of the successful re-taking of the embassy at Prince’s Gate by SAS.

The FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team trained with SAS and modeled on them in some ways. One of those ways was their adoption of the Browning Hi-Power as the standard pistol of HRT for many years. The HRT Brownings were all customized by Wayne Novak, whose shop is still famous for its exquisite work on these pistols.

There were other American cops who carried Brownings, though I don’t know of any US law enforcement agencies which issued them as standard equipment to their armed rank and file. Departments with broad personal weapons policies, however, would generally see some Brownings here and there among the street cops.

One such was the late Steve Camp, the quintessential fan of this pistol. We lost him far too soon, but his treasure trove of experience with the P35 remains available online at his website www.hipowersandhandguns.com where you can also order his excellent book on the topic. Another authoritative text on the gun under discussion is The Browning Hi-Power Automatic Pistol by R. Blake Stevens. Each of these books have “must read” status among Hi-Power fans of today.

What Made It Better

John Browning’s original concept of the Hi-Power was an ungainly beast, and after his death it was largely Dieudonne Saive who shaped it into the sleek, ergonomic pistol it became. Both Saive and Browning apparently had access to the post-WWI surveys of American troops who used the 1911 .45 in battle that led to the 1911-A1 improvements of the 1920’s, and incorporated them into the Hi-Power. Trigger reach, for example, is ideal: short enough for short fingers, no impediment for longer digits.

The Browning evolved. The early versions with burred hammer tended to bite the web of all but the smallest hands in firing. The thumb safety was small and mushy, with no positive “click” to tell the thumb if it was on or off, and no ambidextrous lever. The sights were tiny and hard to aim with, particularly under stress and in poor light. To keep a reasonably sized grip frame wrapped around a 13-shot double stack 9mm magazine, Saive had to channel Rube Goldberg and design a trigger system that actually went up into the slide, creating so many contact points it earned a reputation for mediocre trigger pull among serious marksmen. And, it was not 100 percent safe to carry with a round in the chamber if dropped. From Britain to Venezuela, it was discovered lots of shooting with hot NATO ammo, such as Radway Green ZZ in England and Venezuela’s CAVIM, wore Brownings to the point of breakage.

By the end of the P35’s epoch, Browning/FN had fixed all those things. A recent Browning will have a very positive ambidextrous thumb safety, good sights, a workable trigger and a hammer that does not bite the hand that feeds (and shoots) it. Great pistolsmiths like the aforementioned Novak, Jim Garthwaite and Bill Laughridge at Cylinder & Slide Shop proved the Hi-Power’s trigger could be improved to satisfy the most serious real-world professionals.

And, through it all, the gun had its reputation for reliability, the perfect “feel” Jeff Cooper had spoken of, and good “pointability.”

Good Guns & Bad People

Unfortunately, the smarter bad guys of the world are savvy enough to pick up on the best weapons the good guys have created. There were Colt single-action revolvers on both sides of the O.K. Corral gunfight in 1881, and the bandits of the Depression years such as John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and Bonnie and Clyde favored Colt .45 and .38 Super pistols proportionally more than the G-Men who hunted them. So it was with the Browning Hi-Power.

Many pictures of the Nazi forces in WWII show them holding or wearing Brownings made at the Fabrique Nationale factory the Germans took over after their early conquest of Belgium. So many, in fact, one gets the impression many preferred this pistol to their own Walther P-38’s and Lugers.

Mehmet Ali Agca, the would-be assassin who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, did it with a 9mm Hi-Power.

Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze, the leader of the terrorist bandit cult calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army that kidnapped Patty Hearst, used the 9mm Hi-Power as his trademark pistol.

Twymon Meyers, of the cop-killing Black Liberation Army, died with a 9mm Browning in his hand when a police task force cut him down in a wild gunfight on a city street. Ironically, the bullet that dropped him was a 158-grain .38 Special in the heart, fired from the snub-nosed revolver of an NYPD detective with a very steady hand.

In a 1986 shootout, a young NYPD officer named Scott Gadell emptied his 6-shot .38 revolver at a punk who had fired nine rounds of 9mm at him. He was reloading when the punk ran up and fatally shot him in the head. The cop-killer was said to be armed with a 14-shot Browning. This incident, perhaps more than any other, subsequently led to NYPD’s “better late than never” adoption of 16-shot 9mm’s.

For all this, though, history will see the Browning Hi-Power as much more a symbol of the good guys than of the bad guys they fought.

What Makes A Classic

Time has marched on. Tony Long has retired from the London Met, which now uses the GLOCK 9mm for armed work. The GLOCK has become predominant in Venezuela as well. Only a few years after we met, Fernando Arcaya had become an early adopter of the GLOCK 17. This said, the Browning Hi-Power remains a part of the Good Guys’ armory for the foreseeable future, long since proven on the street and the battlefield alike.

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Situation:

You’re coming up against a thug who’s known for skill at arms, hates armed citizens and cops, and has murdered the latter. This time, though, you’re ready for him.

Lesson:

It’s like the old saying — If you know you’re heading into a gunfight, bring a long gun, and friends with long guns.

The man stepping out of the new Chevrolet is carrying enough cash in his money belt and the brownish briefcase under his arm to buy a fleet of such vehicles. He’s there to do business, and is dressed like a businessman. His blue serge suit is impeccable, like his blue tie with subtle white dots and his polished oxfords. The suit-coat hides a cocked and locked Colt auto pistol in his waistband, and no one can tell just to look at him he is praised by his peers for his skill with it, having won his most recent shooting match.

He is technically a citizen of the United States, and he is armed, but he is a far cry from our concept of “armed citizen.” In fact, he hates them, because one honest armed citizen shot him and almost killed him during one of his many bank robberies. He hates them as much as he hates the police, and he’s a cop-killer who once did a happy dance in the street after using his custom-made “assault rifle” to murder a policeman.

And now, as the Chevy that dropped him off pulls away, he hears a shouted command: “Stick ’em up!” His reflexes are fast: he explodes into a sprint as he draws his Colt, blindly firing two shots over his shoulder as he cuts into a nearby alley.

His chosen path is an allegory to his life: a blind alley, with nowhere left to go. And now the thunder of police shotguns and submachine guns erupts behind him, the lead sleet-storm seeming to literally lift him into the air before he falls, his still-loaded pistol landing some ten feet away. He has sworn in the past he wouldn’t die in some filthy alley.

He was wrong.

A crowd soon gathers to gape at the blood-soaked corpse. Homer Van Meter, dead at 28, had been John Dillinger’s closest henchman, his right-hand man. It was August 23, 1934, near the corner of Marion Street and University Avenue in the city of St. Paul, only a couple of blocks from the Minnesota State Capitol building.

Background

Born in Indiana, Homer Van Meter ran away from home to Chicago at the age of 11. He worked as a waiter and as a bellhop, and soon gravitated to crime. His arrests as a teenager escalated from drunk and disorderly to petty theft and then grand theft auto. By the time he turned 20 he had been convicted of robbing passengers on a train in northern Indiana and sentenced to a long term in Pendleton Reformatory, where he first met John Dillinger and another man who was destined to be a key member of the Dillinger gang, Harry Pierpont.

Then as now, parole boards were known to sometimes make unfortunate judgments. Van Meter and Dillinger were paroled about a month apart from each other. They hooked up. The infamous Dillinger Gang was born.

An Ugly Path

It soon became clear Homer Van Meter was a sociopath ready to unleash lethal violence at a moment’s notice. With a long, horse-like face and sagging lips, Van Meter was seen as stupid by some at first glance, but he possessed a native animal cunning Dillinger, a natural leader, appreciated. He lacked Dillinger’s ability to charm others though, from accomplices to victims.

When they first met in Pendleton, Van Meter and Pierpont were at each other’s throats, and as time went on and the Dillinger Gang and the Baby Face Nelson Gang became a blended crime family, Van Meter and Nelson quickly developed a vehement dislike for one another also. Where Nelson was a psychopathic killer who seemed to delight in committing murder, Van Meter was more of a sociopath who would kill for money, revenge, or anything else that served him, and not so much for the act itself.

Dillinger biographer G. Russell Girardin would later write, “… it was his quarreling with ‘Baby Face’ Nelson that resulted in Van Meter’s undoing. A feud existed between the two men. Their dispute had been discussed at a meeting of Dillinger, Van Meter, and (Dillinger cohort Arthur) O’Leary in Chicago, and Dillinger had mentioned it again after leaving the conference. ‘I hope Van and Nelson don’t meet,’ Dillinger remarked to O’Leary. ‘If they ever come face to face again, they’ll kill each other.’” (1)
We’ll see shortly how prophetic those words may have been.

Van Meter joined Dillinger and his assorted minions in multiple armed robberies, including raids on police stations where they stole weapons and body armor. In one of those, Van Meter savagely pistol-whipped a cop who was helplessly at gunpoint.

Three Lawmen Murdered

The first police officer Homer Van Meter is known to have murdered was a member of the South Bend, Indiana Police Department. In 1934, Van Meter and Nelson and other members of the gang, led by Dillinger himself, hit the Merchants National Bank in South Bend. Van Meter was outside the bank on the outer perimeter of the meticulously planned heist when he observed Officer Harold Wagner approaching. Van Meter shouldered a customized Winchester .351 and fired, and Officer Wagner fell, mortally wounded.

Dillinger biographer Dary Matera would write in 2004, “… a small group of clerks and customers gathered near the display windows of Ries Furniture store to catch the action. Aside from the disturbing image of Officer Wagner going down, they watched in horror as Van Meter did a crazed jig as he sprayed the area with slugs to keep the police at bay.” (2)

Moments later, Van Meter’s hatred for an armed citizen would be born. In the course of this high volume firefight, while Baby Face Nelson was also outside the bank guarding the rest of the gang’s perimeter, a South Bend jeweler named Harry Berg had taken aim with a .22 target handgun and shot Nelson in the center of the back. Nelson, however, had been wearing a steel vest under his clothing, and absorbed the bullet without injury. The killer spun and hosed a burst from his Thompson submachine gun at Berg, who ducked quickly back into the cover of his shop and escaped the bullets, though a pedestrian was wounded by one of Nelson’s stray .45 slugs.

As the gang was escaping the scene at last, and Van Meter was getting into the driver’s seat of the getaway car, Harry Berg leaned out from his shop, carefully aimed, and squeezed off one more shot. Blood splashed from Homer Van Meter’s head, and he crumpled. Dillinger shoved him into the car, and the gang took off, successfully escaping.

Later, a subsequently captured gang member would tell of how the thugs licked their wounds when they gathered at their hideout. He described Nelson as being in a spazzed-out state from his near-death experience; the man who delighted in killing others had no stomach for stopping a bullet himself, even if his steel vest kept it from hurting him.

And Van Meter? Once the gang was safely away, examination showed the .22 slug fired by the jeweler had indeed struck Van Meter in the head, but had skidded off his skull digging a groove in the outer table of bone and creating a nasty flesh wound. Van Meter was reported to have been in a babbling, homicidal rage. (Some historians would suggest later it was a police bullet that “grazed Van Meter’s skull” and temporarily incapacitated him. However, the thugs were there, and in the best position to know who shot who. Most historians agree it was Berg who shot Van Meter).

Historian Bryan Burrough, later poring through the recollections of captured Dillinger gang members who finally spilled their guts, pieced together the following account from the post-South Bend dialogue at the criminals’ hideout, where Dillinger associate Jimmy Probasco gave Van Meter first aid before rogue anesthetist Harold Cassidy could get there to administer professional medical treatment:

“Van Meter was sitting on a couch, recovering nicely. ‘I saved your life, didn’t I?’ Probasco asked him. ‘Why, I was up all night picking hairs out of that wound.’ A little later Cassidy arrived. As Probasco and Van Meter cursed him, he cleaned the wound and re-bandaged it. Dillinger regaled the group with the story of the wild shoot-out, dwelling on the story of the Jewish jeweler who had brazenly fired on Nelson. ‘You know, Johnnie,’ Van Meter said at one point. ‘We’ll have to go back to South Bend in the next few days and take care of that little Jew.’

“‘Sure we will, Van,’ Dillinger said, laughing. ‘Sure we will.’”

With a huge number of witnesses to the South Bend bank robbery and shootout, we can safely say beyond a reasonable doubt Homer Van Meter murdered Officer Harold Wagner. There was apparently only one witness to the other two policemen Homer Van Meter is believed to have shot to death, and this witness would have been John Dillinger himself.

Two More

On May 24, 1934, two detectives from the East Chicago, Indiana Police Department were found dead in their vehicle, which had been riddled from the front by fully automatic fire. Lloyd Mulvihill and Martin O’Brien died of multiple gunshot wounds to the head and neck. It’s generally believed the detectives had pulled over a red panel truck being driven by Dillinger when Van Meter threw the rear doors open and hosed them on full auto through their windshield.

Per Gerardin and Helmer: “Statements by Dillinger and Van Meter throw light on the events of this dark night. Dillinger was driving the red truck when Mulvihill and O’Brien drove alongside and ordered him to pull over. In the rear of the truck was Homer Van Meter with his ever-ready machine gun. He realized it was a case either of their being captured and confronting the electric chair, or shooting their way out. Before the detectives had a chance to step out of their car, Van Meter expressed his decision in a spray of machine-gun bullets. Dillinger placed the blame for these killings on Sergeant Martin Zarkovich. Zarkovich was a hoodlum in police officer’s clothing. Dillinger had been in contact with the East Chicago people while sojourning in the red truck, and they, including Zarkovich, knew he was in the area.”

The account continues, “‘Those two police should never have been bumped off,’ Dillinger later told O’Leary. ‘They were just trying to do their job and there’s nothing wrong about that. The trouble was they were getting to know too much and Zark was getting antsy. They were sent off to shake down a couple of suspicious characters who were driving around in a red truck. I think Van felt bad about it, too, but there was nothing else that he could do, and Zark knew what was going to happen. If we would have given ourselves up we both would have got the hot seat.’”(3)

If Van Meter didn’t kill any more cops than he did, it wasn’t for want of trying. He shot it out with a Federal agent at the notorious Little Bohemia shootout in Wisconsin. In the dark, neither man scored a hit. Some historians believe Van Meter was the Dillinger Gang triggerman who shot Fostoria, Ohio Police Chief Frank Culp during a bank robbery in that community in May of 1934.

And, in a prior St. Paul shootout a few months before his death, Van Meter was hanging out with Dillinger in an apartment house when investigators came. On a pretext, Van Meter led the officers down a stairway, then turned and opened fire with a 1911 .45, fortunately missing his target. At about that time, Dillinger opened fire through his door with a Thompson at other lawmen, and in the ensuing confusion, both fugitives escaped.

Guns Of Van Meter

Colt semiautomatic pistols in calibers .45 ACP, .380 ACP and the recently introduced .38 Super were the preferred handguns of Dillinger, Nelson and Van Meter. Dillinger was pulling a 1908 Pocket Model .380 from his side trouser pocket when he was shot and killed outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago a month to the day before Van Meter’s death. It is generally agreed Nelson was carrying a .38 Super when he was killed in Barrington, Illinois. It’s not surprising Van Meter died with a Colt auto in his hand.

The gang’s pet “outlaw gunsmith” was Hyman Lebman. He built them Colt Government Model .45’s and Super .38’s with extended magazines, full auto capability, Cutts compensators and Thompson foregrips. He’s also believed to have sold them tricked-out 1907 Winchester .351 autoloaders, at least some of them in full auto. Van Meter supposedly used a Lebman-modified .351 to murder Officer Wagner in South Bend.

In Baby Face Nelson: Portrait of a Public Enemy, Steven Nickel and William J. Helmer write of a gang sojourn to Texas, “In the midst of all the rest and recreation, the gang managed to squeeze in some business at Lebman’s shop. Nelson purchased a .38 machine-gun pistol for Dillinger and selected a pair of .380 automatics for himself … Van Meter decided he, too, wanted one of the gunsmith’s specially crafted baby machine guns. When Lebman said he had sold his last available model to Nelson … Lebman agreed but said it would take time. Van Meter said there was no hurry; he would return for it in the spring.” (4)

Homer Van Meter knew how to shoot. In the days when the Dillinger/Nelson gang members were resting at the Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin before their ill-fated shootout there with Melvin Purvis and his Federal agents in the spring of 1934, lodge owner Emil Wanatka told of an informal shooting match between the gang members on his property in which Van Meter was the winner.

Just what Colt automatic was in Van Meter’s hands when police gunfire ended his life is a matter of dispute among historians. Some say .45, some say .38 Super, some say .380, and some just say “.38.” With this last, bear in mind it was common in yesteryear for .380 pistols to be referred to as “.38 automatics.”

The Set-Up

It was no secret St. Paul was one of Van Meter’s favorite stomping grounds, but how did St. Paul Police know to be there waiting when Homer Van Meter stepped out of the Chevrolet? One theory is Van Meter’s girlfriend, Marie (aka Mickey) Conforti had caught him cheating on her with one Opal Milligan, and punished him by turning him in to the cops. A second theory is Baby Face Nelson knew Van Meter was in St. Paul and tipped off the cops to get his hated fellow gang member killed by proxy.

A third theory is the “business” Van Meter was in town for was to pick up loot he’d stashed with a St. Paul gangster, who tipped the cops so he could keep the cash. A fourth is corrupt cops of the period set him up for a kill so they could take the cash for themselves. A fifth theory is the local underworld thought Van Meter’s presence in the city was bringing too much scrutiny upon them, so they dropped the dime on him to take the heat off themselves.

Death Of Van Meter

The four officers who engaged and killed Homer Van Meter were led by the St. Paul Chief of Police himself, Frank Cullen, and Detective Tom Brown, both armed with 12-gauge shotguns. With them were Detectives Thomas McMahon and Jeff Dittrich, both carrying Thompson submachine guns. When the challenge was given and Homer Van Meter simultaneously ran and drew his Colt and shot at them, all apparently opened fire. Van Meter’s body was so chewed up reporting on the wounds varied wildly, from him being hit “by 50 or more bullets” to the fatal wounds involving two buckshot charges and a single .45 ACP round.

Multiple witnesses described Van Meter as being blasted two feet off the ground or otherwise being lifted into mid-air by the fusillade that hit him. While some would consider this impossible on the theory such a “knock-down” would, by the laws of physics, require the recoil to knock the shooter backwards, don’t forget many people have been knocked off their feet by the recoil of a 12-gauge if they were leaning away from the gun when it was fired. If Van Meter was running away from the gunfire with his upper body forward, or trying to shoot at the cops when he was hit and leaning over backwards, this would be exactly consistent with those laws of physics and would explain the witness statements he appeared to be blasted off his feet by the impact. Other possible explanations for the phenomenon include violent body alarm reaction, or spasmodic neuromuscular reaction.

Lessons

Don’t presume your opponent will be merciful. Don’t presume he’ll have a cheap junk gun he doesn’t know how to shoot well. There’s truth in the old saying “If you think there’s going to be a gunfight, bring a long gun, and bring lots of friends with long guns.”

Those lessons worked for the cops that long-ago afternoon in St. Paul, and neutralized a vicious criminal before he could claim any more victims.

Notes: (1) Girardin, C. Russell and Helmer, William J.: Dillinger: The Untold Story, Indiana University Press, 1994, P. 239 (2) Matera, Dary: John Dillinger: The Life and Death of America’s First Celebrity Criminal, Carroll & Graf, 2004, P. 312; (3) Gerardin, op. cit., Pp. 162-163; (4) Nickel, Steven and Helmer, William J.: Baby Face Nelson: Portrait of a Public Enemy, Cumberland House, 2002, P. 136.

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By Massad Ayoob

Situation: An unintended discharge due to startle response results in tragedy.

Lesson: Hand-on-holstered-weapon is better than drawn gun for some danger levels. “Finger outside triggerguard” is not sufficiently specific

Suddenly, a shot rang out. This sounds like the beginning of a bad novel. In this case, it was the start signal of a tragic sequence of events ending one man’s life and ruining another’s.

November 20, 2014, Brooklyn, New York. Rookie NYPD officer Peter Liang and his partner, rookie Shaun Landau, are working vertical patrols in the Pink Houses. The terminology bears explanation. The Louis J. Pink Houses are low-income housing projects, some of the most dangerous and crime-ridden in the NYPD’s jurisdiction, resulting in extra attention from police. In the vertical patrol strategy, a pair of patrol officers takes an elevator to the top of the building. They check out the roof first, because a lot of bad stuff goes down there, and then they enter the stairwells, checking out hallways floor by floor as they descend.

Liang has a bit less than a year on the job. By now, he’s done a few hundred vertical patrols. He’s learned from the veterans, in the dangerous stairwells — often darkened by criminals who break or unscrew light bulbs — the risk is often enough to justify having your pistol drawn when you enter the area.

And now, at the Pink House at 2724 Linden Boulevard, he and his partner Landau are about to enter the stairwell from the eighth floor. The inside of the stairwell is pitch black. Left-handed, Liang takes his flashlight in his right hand as his dominant hand goes to the GLOCK 19 in his Safariland uniform holster.
Tragedy is about to strike.

“A Quick Sound”

Liang, positioned slightly ahead of his partner, draws his GLOCK 19, his trigger finger “in-register” on the frame, as he will testify later. To enter the stairwell landing from the hallway, he turns the doorknob with his support hand, and finds the heavy door difficult to open. He pushes harder, and the door moves quickly, swinging open, hitting the wall. At this moment, Liang hears a sudden sound to his left and feels his body turning toward it, all his muscles tightening in startled response.
He’s surprised and shocked when the pistol discharges.

Immediate Aftermath

Stunned, Liang steps back into the hall. As he does, running feet are heard from below in the stairwell. Liang holsters his pistol. It doesn’t occur to him or his partner the unexpected shot may have hit someone. Still on probation, Liang fears he will be fired for having the unintentional discharge. He asks Landau to call it in. Landau replies since Liang has fired the shot, it’s Liang’s duty to make the call. Should they call their sergeant by cell phone, so it won’t be misinterpreted as a shooting and bring officers racing to the scene, risking their lives? Or should they call it in over the radio?

They decide to look for where the bullet went before they call it in. As Liang enters the stairwell, he hears the sound of someone sobbing below. The officers move cautiously down the stairs. Down on the fifth floor landing, they find the source of the sound.

Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old father, is sprawled supine. He’s covered with blood and his open eyes stare sightlessly upward. The crying has come from Gurley’s companion, Melissa Butler, who’s desperately performing CPR on the shooting victim. Liang calls in.

Neither officer assists. Both will later testify they didn’t think they could perform cardio-pulmonary resuscitation better than the woman who was already doing it.
Liang walks past the tragic tableau, and slumps into tears.

Akai Gurley will not survive.

Outrage

The shooting becomes national news and triggers an outrage, particularly in New York City. The fact the shooting is cross-racial adds fuel to the fire: The dead man is African-American and the officer whose bullet killed him is the son of Chinese immigrants who grew up in NYC’s Chinatown. The Black Lives Matter movement leads the demand for arrest and trial of the cop. The Chinese-American community in the city sees it as Liang being targeted because of his ethnicity and vocally bands together on the officer’s behalf. Adding more fuel to the fire is the ongoing controversy over the death of Eric Garner, a physically huge misdemeanor suspect who died the previous July 17 when he resisted arrest and a much smaller police officer took him down to a prone position with a neck hold widely mistaken for a choke hold.

On February 10, 2015, the grand jury indicted Peter Liang for Manslaughter in the Second Degree and Criminally Negligent Homicide along with assorted Assault, Official Misconduct and Reckless Endangerment charges.

The Trial

Trial began January 25, 2016. Liang had retained as his defense attorney Robert Brown, who began his trial law career after 16 distinguished years on the NYPD, retiring as a captain in the 5th Precinct. Second chair for the defense was Rae Downes Koshetz.

Reconstruction showed the path of the +P 124-grain Gold Dot 9mm bullet had been down the stairwell, striking the concrete wall at a sufficiently acute angle that it glanced. Akai Gurley was just stepping into the stairwell at the seventh floor level and headed downstairs when the ricocheting bullet entered his chest and pierced his heart. He had run down two flights of stairs before he collapsed.

Of the three 9mm service pistols approved by NYPD at the time — the GLOCK 19, the S&W 5946 and the double-action-only version of the SIG P226 — Liang had chosen the most popular, the G19. Like all NYPD GLOCK’s, it was fitted with the NY-2 trigger system and at the crime lab was found to have an 11.5-pound pull. No defects were found in the handgun.

The jury heard Brown elicit testimony from multiple officers on the witness stand it was common custom and practice for officers on dangerous vertical patrol to draw their pistols in circumstances such as Liang’s. But the jury was not allowed to learn a graphic example of how risky vertical patrol was. It was kept from them that during the trial itself, NYPD Officers Diara Cruz and Patrick Espiut were shot and wounded by an armed robber while doing vertical patrol in a stairwell in a Bronx housing project.

It was incontestable from the evidence only Liang’s finger could have triggered the shot, but Brown scored strong points for the defense when he cross-examined the state’s experts, called in from the Police Academy. On 2/2/17, the New York Times reported, “… Detective Joe Agosto, a firearms instructor with the New York Police Academy, said accidental gun discharges in the Police Department occurred about 20 times a year. Few, Detective Agosto said, were a result of malfunctions of the guns or triggers. ‘The finger may gravitate toward it in certain circumstances,’ he said under cross-examination by Mr. Brown. ‘There is a belief there is a tendency to reassure yourself the trigger is there,’ he added. ‘Comparable to touching your wallet.’”

When Peter Liang took the stand in his own defense, he testified, “I turned the knob with my right hand when I opened it first. I wasn’t sure, because I had a flashlight in my hand, so I turn it, push it, and it didn’t open so I open the door, push it on my right shoulder and when I — and as soon as I got in, I heard something on my left side, quick sound, and it just startled me. And the gun just went off after my body tensed up.”

The prosecution put great emphasis on neither officer having found Gurley sooner, and neither having rendered first aid. Both officers testified the woman they saw giving CPR was doing it at least as well as they could, because they weren’t confident in the skill. Landau testified he had spent only a couple of minutes on the CPR manikin at the academy and he had been given most of the answers to the written test by the instructor; Liang testified there had been nine such dummies for the 300 students in his Academy class, and he did not recall ever touching the manikin in training.

The prosecution had put forth a new theory during the trial: Liang had intentionally fired the shot.

On February 11, 2016, a year and a day after his indictment, the jury found Peter Liang guilty of Manslaughter and Official Misconduct. Under the New York sentencing guidelines Liang, now a convicted felon, was looking at 15 years of hard time.

Post Conviction

Defense attorney Brown immediately reached out for every remedy. In the defense motion to overturn the verdict he wrote, “The prosecution advanced a new theory in summation stating the defendant intentionally ‘fired a shot near towards where Akai Gurley stood,’ which is not supported by the record of the case.”

A torrent of mail in favor of leniency for Liang poured in. Robert Brown later told American Handgunner, some 40,000 letters flooded the office of Judge Danny Chun. Approximately a hundred of them, including one from me, went into technical detail.

Judge Chun subsequently wrote in his decision, “Wherefore, for the reasons stated above, the defendant’s motions for a trial order of dismissal and to set aside the jury’s guilty verdict are granted in part and denied in part. They are granted in part to the extent the guilty verdict of Manslaughter in the Second Degree (PL § 125.15[lj) is modified by this court and reduced to a guilty verdict of Criminally Negligent Homicide (PL § 125.10). In addition, this court denies the defendant’s motion to set aside the guilty verdict of Official Misconduct (PL § 195.00[21). The foregoing constitutes the decision and order of this court.”

Why were the guilty verdicts not overturned entirely? The judge wrote, “The evidence further showed at least six minutes had passed from the time the defendant fired the shot until the defendant first radioed there had been ‘an accidental discharge’ and a male had been shot (Police Radio Transmissions Transcript at 2-3). The totality of all this evidence showed the defendant deprived Mr. Gurley of the benefit of prompt emergency medical assistance from a person trained in first aid and he acted with the intent to deprive Mr. Gurley of such benefit. This type of emergency medical aid is clearly inherent in the nature of the defendant’s job.” Attorney Brown maintains Liang called it in earlier than alleged, but was in a radio dead zone.

Officer Shaun Landau was terminated from the New York City Police Department, as of course was Peter Liang. Liang was sentenced to five years probation and 800 hours of community service, and has already completed the latter, working at a senior citizen center in NYC’s Chinese community. He has been unable to obtain gainful employment since the conviction. The City of New York paid more than four million dollars in settlement to the family of Akai Gurley.

Lessons

It’s clear the officers not having given medical attention to Gurley led to a conviction for Official Misconduct. As early as the 1970’s, I sat in on training at the NYPD Firearms and Tactics Unit on City Island where it was emphasized if an officer had to shoot an offender, he or she was forbidden to approach for first aid, but instead would keep the suspect at gunpoint until responding officers arrived and cleared the person of weapons. It has long since been standard practice among emergency medical personnel not to approach a criminal suspect shot by police until the police have searched the patient for weapons. It’s a policy born in the blood of cops, EMT’s, paramedics and even Emergency Room personnel who were violently attacked and injured by wounded suspects who revived in a state of rage, or perhaps were playing possum. Obviously, however, this does not apply to shooting victims in situations like this one. I’m sure the NYPD has moved to remedy any first aid training deficiencies by now, in the wake of the Liang/Gurley incident.

Let’s talk about the shooting itself. My own involvement in this case began on January 13, 2016, when firearms instructor and author David Kenik put me in touch with Robert Brown, who was searching for an expert witness. The Liang trial dates conflicted with a murder trial I was scheduled to testify at in Montana, and I referred Brown to Dr. Roger Enoka, the leading physiologist in the field of accidental shootings. Enoka also had scheduling conflicts and could not attend the Liang trial. Enoka is the expert who defined startle response, interlimb response and postural disturbance as three main factors in unintentional discharge.

Startle response is such as might be caused by a sudden sound from one’s left. Sympathetic hand movements can be as when the right hand turns a knob while also awkwardly holding a flashlight, and has to push hard, and the left hand holding a pistol reflexively tightens as well. Postural disturbance, or loss of balance, can be consistent with pushing against a heavy door, which suddenly “gives” and the door swings hard enough to crash into a wall, as Akai Gurley’s girlfriend Melissa Butler testified happened in the instant before the shot.

The prosecution hammered home to the jury the safety standard is the finger will not enter the triggerguard unless you intend to fire. Liang was certain his trigger finger was up on the side of the frame when he drew his GLOCK 19. However, Brown elicited witness testimony among rank and file cops like Liang, finger “alongside” trigger was considered sufficient.
If the finger is properly in-register on the frame, it is above the trigger. To be alongside the trigger is for the finger to rest precariously at the front edge of the triggerguard, where any of the effects described by Dr. Enoka can cause the now-taut finger to snap back straight to the trigger. This can have an impact on the trigger of 20 pounds or more, easily defeating even the 11.5-pound NY-2 set-up or a double-action-only revolver. The heavier trigger can certainly be a safety net against unintended discharges, but it’s not by any means a 100 percent guarantee of such.

In my letter to the judge, I pointed out Liang had in fact obeyed the classic “Four Rules” of Col. Jeff Cooper. Rule One: All guns are always loaded. Liang treated his as such, muzzle down and toward the concrete wall. Rule Two: Don’t point at anything you are not prepared to see destroyed. Liang pointed the gun at a concrete wall, and this is just what the bullet hit; the cop could not have reasonably anticipated a ricochet at the exact moment someone unexpectedly walked into the path of the projectile. Rule Three: Keep your finger out of the triggerguard until you intend to fire. Liang testified he tried to do this. Perhaps “finger alongside trigger” led to his finger hitting the trigger due to the factors described above, or perhaps his finger entered the triggerguard in the subconscious trigger verification NYPD Instructor Agosto described when Robert Brown cross-examined him. Rule Four: Be certain of your target and what is behind it. Liang, the evidence proves, was in fact pointing at the concrete wall, the single safest place a drawn gun could be pointed in the stairwell.

I wish to commend Attorneys Robert Brown and Rae Downes Koshetz for their dedicated work on a very difficult case and Judge Danny Chun for his wisdom in reducing the conviction and his realistic compassion in sentencing. Peter Liang has indicated through his lawyer he does not wish to speak to the press, and respecting those wishes, I was unable to interview him for this article. He leaves us with a legacy of lessons, however, and he has my sympathy, as do the survivors of Akai Gurley.

Read More Ayoob Files

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By Massad Ayoob

Situation:

Shot 15 times by a mass murderer, you survive to become a role model and helper for other shooting incident survivors.

Lesson:

There are no guarantees of routine, easy days. Efficiency trumps comfort. Carry backup, and wear body armor when you know you may be in harm’s way.

The city of Oak Creek, Wisconsin, sits on the southern edge of Milwaukee. Now with a population of some 34,000 residents and as many as 1.5 million passers-through daily due to its location on an Interstate, its police department still has the same complement of 58 sworn officers it had in 1990 when the population was 14,000 and Brian Murphy was sworn in as a cop there.

On August 5, 2012, a white supremacist entered the gurdwara — or Sikh temple — in the heart of the city, and shot 10 innocent people before a police bullet took him down. Only four of the victims survived. One was Lieutenant Brian Murphy. This is his story.

The Mass Murderer

Wade Michael Page, 40, seemed like an ordinary middle-class Joe until he went in the service, but alcoholism and related problems ended his military career and sent him on a downward spiral. He embraced a white supremacist group, the Hammerskins, and found the only real bonding of his life with them and related white power bands. When it was discovered he’d had a two-year affair with a Native American woman, the neo-Nazis made it clear he was no longer one of them. Some theorize this is what drove him to mass murder people of color.

Twice in the week before the cowardly slaughter, Page had visited the temple and been warmly welcomed, and given a tour of the building. Only later would it become apparent he was reconnoitering his chosen killing ground.

The Massacre

Late mid-morning on the Sunday in question, Page drove into the parking lot of the gurdwara and parked in a position giving him strategic command of the parking lot and main entrance. Exiting his vehicle, he walked toward the entrance. Two Sikhs who had just arrived to worship encountered him in the parking lot. One said, “Welcome, sir. Please come inside.”

Page drew a pistol and shot them both dead, then strode past their corpses to the entryway. Two children who had seen the murders ran inside and shouted a warning. Soon an adult was on the phone to 9-1-1.

The interval between the first call and the arrival of the first responding officer was only two minutes, one of the fastest police responses in the history of mass murders. But when no one present is armed and capable of stopping the killer, a lot of carnage can take place in that time.

Deadly Spree Continues

One woman entering is warned by another member. She replies she is going in to pray. She kneels. Page spots her, and shoots her dead.

One man gives his wife keys to a door at the end of a hallway and tells her to hide there. Page sees him on the phone calling 9-1-1, and shoots him down while he is talking. The killer slides a door open, sees an octogenarian man on his knees praying, and shoots him in the chest. The victim falls, suffers a massive stroke, and will survive but only be capable of communicating by blinking.

Some people have taken refuge in a room off the prayer area. The crafty Page knocks softly on the door; a compassionate member of the temple, thinking it’s a victim seeking sanctuary, opens the door a crack and is shot through the eye. In the back of the room is Satwant Singh Kaleka, the founder and leader of the temple. He bravely approaches Page and beseeches, “Please, you don’t have to do this.” Page shoots another man in the stomach; the victim runs out of the room and across the parking lot, where he’ll collapse on a neighbor’s lawn. The lawn belongs to a retired 32-year firefighter/paramedic and decorated Vietnam vet, who treats the wound and gets the victim to the hospital 20 minutes before anyone else, saving his life.

Mr. Kaleka is not so lucky. Page is on him. He fires, and the spiritual leader falls, mortally wounded. Dying, Kaleka draws his kirpan, the small, dull knife that is a ceremonial token among Sikh men; he grabs Page by the leg and starts stabbing him in the leg. Brian Murphy will later say in a tone of wonder, “Mr. Kaleka was never military or LE, but this mid-60s man knew he needed to protect his people. He finally dropped the kirpan and wrapped his hands so tightly into the pant legs of Page, his fingernails peeled off when Page finally broke free from him.” Kaleka doesn’t survive.

Page emerges from this latest murder scene walking straight south. His path takes him to the kitchen adjacent to the prayer area, where temple members have been cooking a traditional communal meal. There is a little pantry room where a cluster of helpless victims have taken refuge. Three women have left the pantry to walk across the kitchen to shut off the stove for fear it would start a fire if left unattended. Page comes around the corner and fires, somehow missing all three at a distance of 18 feet. They freeze momentarily, then run back to the tiny pantry. The killer follows them, still shooting, still missing. They close the door, which is hollow core with no lock.

They wait, bracing for the bullets they know will soon tear through their flimsy barricade and end their lives. But, suddenly, the shooting stops.

Looking through the window, Page has seen the first police car, driven by Lt. Brian Murphy, arrive.

Enter Brian Murphy

Murphy had not been scheduled to work that day, but the shift was short of supervisors and he volunteered to come in. A back injury incurred a year-and-a-half before in training had required surgery and almost taken him off the job, and expecting a slow and easy day, he didn’t put on the backup Walther PPK he often carried to supplement his HK USP .45 duty pistol. For the same reason, when he got to the PD and discovered only two patrol vehicles available — a comfortable new SUV and an old, clapped-out squad car — he chose the former. Inspecting it as he always did, he discovered the new dash rack that held a shotgun and patrol rifle didn’t release as it should. In a decision he would ever after regret, he chose the more comfortable vehicle to go easier on his back.

The call had come in from the temple at 10:26 A.M., and Murphy was the first to arrive, two minutes later. The layout was such there was no way to make a surreptitious approach and work his way in with good cover. Seeing the bloody results of Page’s opening slaughter, he radioed for Emergency Medical Services and mentioned he didn’t see a suspect. Moments later, this changed.
Witnesses calling 9-1-1 had described a big, bald Caucasian with eyeglasses wearing a white shirt. Suddenly, Murphy saw a man fitting the description. The cars he rapidly trotted behind hid the man’s hands, but Murphy saw something on his belt that was either a holster or a cell phone holder. Not enough reason to shoot yet, but reason enough to reach for his service pistol and shout, “POLICE! STOP!”

At a distance of 30 to 40 yards, the jogging man raised his arm toward Murphy, and now the cop could see the gun in the man’s hand. Without breaking stride, Page fired, and so did Murphy.

Murphy’s shot missed. Page’s didn’t. The 147-gr. Federal 9mm hollow point struck Murphy in the face, on the left of the chin, like a very hard punch. Murphy didn’t realize the bullet had deflected downward, destroying his voice-box, bouncing off his spinal column, and lodging three millimeters behind his carotid artery. Murphy, a plank-holding member of the department’s SWAT team, became a creature of his training. He reflexively moved to cover, losing sight of his antagonist.

Lt. Murphy would relate later, “I went behind the car for cover. Unknown to me he has stopped, come around behind, while I’m down behind, looking over and under the car, no shots coming. Then there’s boom, boom, boom as I rose; he came up from behind me, when I bring my gun up he shoots, he takes the top half of my left thumb off and shoots the gun out of my hand. He covered that ground in 10 seconds.”

Murphy remembers seeing his left thumb explode, in slow motion, in a spray of blood and tissue. Dr. Alexis Artwohl, a police psychologist who has done deep research with gunfight survivors, notes a number of them experience extraneous thoughts at such moments. Brian Murphy has one now: “That’s gonna leave a mark.”

Murphy continues his recollection: “He’s going boom, boom, boom. We are now about 10 feet apart, my squad is on the other side of him. I can hear my guys coming. I am thinking of cover. He walks by, boom boom, shoots me in the vest a couple of times. There’s all this shooting and noise.

“Then I’m down, lying there thinking no one is shooting me right now, I can stay here. Then I see my wife Ann’s face, and my kids, and I think, ‘I’m not going out in this parking lot.’ One way or another, I am going to get back to the vehicle.

“I thought he had taken off. Then I realized he had just been reloading. I heard the sound of the slide chambering a round from a fresh magazine. Me and him, looking at each other. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I’m moving back. We’re staring at each other. I’m not giving him anything, not begging. Bullets are hot metal, getting shot burns more than anything else. I was thinking, get to the car. I’m just mad at this point. Around my body (I find out later) are 26 shell casings. I rolled over, started low crawling, shots kept coming. He shot me back of left arm through front; I saw the spray of red fog.

“The last shot. I’m on my hands and knees, elbows and knees, crawling, not fast. I’ve been shot 14 times at this point, he’s just walking me down. The last shot, I’m leaned over, he’s eight feet back shooting down. That last shot hits the top corner of my vest by the shoulder, comes out, skimming off top edge; it went between the top layer and the next layer, just one layer of the material. The bullet squirted out and went to the back of my skull and that shot just knocked me flat. So loud, so white, it pounds me flat.”

It was then the first backup officer, Sam Lenda, arrived.

Enter Sam Lenda

Widely considered to be the best shot on the force, Oak Creek Officer and firearms instructor Sam Lenda pulled up and quickly assessed the situation. He stepped out of the vehicle with his patrol rifle. Taking careful aim at a range of 60 yards, he fired. On the second shot, Wade Michael Page dropped like the proverbial rock: Lenda’s .223 bullet had smashed his hip, taking out the cross section of skeletal support, and gone into his abdomen, shredding his guts.

Doctors would say later the wound was mortal, but the mad dog killer wasn’t dead yet. Page raised the pistol and fired his final shot into his own head. The murders were over.

When brother officers got to the downed and bleeding Lt. Murphy, he told them, rasping through his wounded throat, to get inside and take care of the innocent victims first.

Aftermath

Twelve hours of surgery saved Brian Murphy’s life. So, of course, did the Level III Armor Express vest that had defeated three bullets that would have killed him. The slug that skidded off the vest into the back of his head was slowed sufficiently by the Twaron aramid it stopped without penetrating the skull. The other dozen had hit his face into throat, and in both hands, both arms, and both legs. He never lost consciousness. Many surgeries would follow. There are probably more to come.

Sam Lenda and Brian Murphy were both awarded the Medal of Valor for their actions on August 5, 2012. The Sikh community has been particularly appreciative. Murphy would comment later the Sikh ethos was much like his own lifelong profession, “to protect and serve.”

Hero cop and role model Sam Lenda has since retired with distinction from the Oak Creek Police Department. Retired from police work due to his injuries, Brian Murphy is now the Save Program Manager for Armor Express in Central Lake, Michigan. He works with other officers whose lives have been saved by the company’s product, and helps them and their families adjust to the aftermath of the near-death experience.

And, of course, he shares his learning experience with cops everywhere.

Lessons

I’ve heard Brian tell his compelling story at ILEETA, the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association, and at The Pin Shoot, the match for cops and armed citizens sponsored by soft body armor inventor Richard Davis and his son Matt, who runs Armor Express. I can say with confidence no one knows the lessons of this incident better than Brian himself. Here is his take:

Wear body armor when there is a risk. A drive to church on Sunday morning still requires a seat belt; so, Brian found out, a cop working a quiet Sunday morning and responding to a bad thing at a house of worship needs a vest on. Brian says, unequivocally, the Armor Express vest he wore at work daily saved his life.

Carry backup. If he’d had his usual backup gun on after his service pistol was shot out of his hand, Brian might well have been able to neutralize his mad dog antagonist after the first few hits. Instead, he was unarmed against the firestorm of 9mm bullets following.

Don’t let comfort trump capability. Brian knows if he took the crappy old patrol car where the dashboard long-gun rack worked, he would likely have come out of the fight much better than he did with the new car whose gun lock would not yield the patrol rifle.

Danger doesn’t make appointments. A basic tenet of officer survival, Brian reminds fellow cops, is “There is no such thing as ‘routine’ in police work.”

Don’t give up! Brian kept the killer occupied, buying time for the rest of the officers to get there and end the fight. A year later, at a memorial, a Sikh woman approached Brian and thanked him for saving so many lives. He replied modestly he didn’t think he had done much. She replied she was one of the women and children who were huddled in the pantry about to be murdered by Page when he was distracted by Murphy’s arrival. “How many times were you shot?” she asked. “It was 15,” he answered.

She smiled at him gently and said, “There were 15 of us in that pantry. He would have killed us all. You took a bullet for each of us.”

We wish to thank retired Lt. Brian Murphy, and Armor Express CEO Matt Davis, for making this article possible. You can hear Brian’s compelling story in his own voice, made permanently gravelly by the throat wound, at proarmspodcast.com.

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