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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