Trooper Down!

by Marie Bartlett

  “He just had to see what was going on,” said his mother, Bonnie, a petite, attractive woman in her early sixties. “There were lots of times patrolmen brought him home from the hospital where he had followed them. He’d sit in their patrol car as long as they’d let him, asking dozens of questions about the radio, the equipment, the work. I know he must have driven them crazy.”

  One day Giles disappeared and Bonnie got a call from someone at the courthouse.

  “Your son is sitting in the back of the courtroom listening to a case that’s being tried,” said the caller. “And he’s hearing things he probably shouldn’t be hearing. I’m going to send him home.”

  An only child, he lived in an eighteen-room motel owned and operated by his parents. It was here where he learned how to deal with the public, and here where his early values were instilled.

  “We kept the cash register unlocked in the lobby, but he never got into it without asking me first,” said Bonnie. “And we always insisted he work around the motel. He said there wasn’t a kid in Brevard who made as many beds as he did, filled as many drink machines, or raked as many leaves.”

  A handsome boy with a sideways grin and a stocky build, Giles was adored by his parents and grew into a happy-go-lucky youth who struck an immediate rapport with almost everyone he met. Active in football, wrestling, and other sports, he maintained good grades through high school and could have been successful in a number of careers. But law enforcement remained his first choice.

  To gain some initial experience, he joined the Brevard police department, working first as a telecommunicator, then as a part-time policeman. In 1980, he graduated with a degree in criminal justice from East Tennessee University. Now twenty-one, he was eligible to apply for the job of state trooper.

  The only thing that worried him was his height (just over five foot seven) and his nearsightedness. He was afraid both would keep him out of the patrol. He’d already been turned down once because of his vision, but he persuaded a doctor to write a letter telling the patrol his eyesight was correctable by contact lenses and would not hamper his job performance.

  In August 1980, Giles learned that he had been accepted into the highway patrol. Like everyone else who entered cadet school, he found the going rough.

  “One weekend he came home and told us about using tear gas during a training exercise,” said Bonnie. “Since he wore contacts, the experience was very painful physically. But he wouldn’t think of quitting. I told him it was okay to give up if he wanted to—that he had already proven himself by getting into patrol school.”

  “‘Mother, you are kidding, aren’t you?’ he said.”

  Once out of training, he was assigned to Buncombe County, where he proved an eager, exuberant rookie.

  Patrolman Gib Clements recalls his first meeting with the irrepressible Giles.

  “I had just been transferred to Asheville. I was doing a breathalyzer test one night, getting everything set up. There were several troopers in the room.

  “‘Is this the way you do it?’ I said, off-handedly.

  “Giles jumped up. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Let me show you how we do it in Brevard.’

  “And he’d only been out of school a week! I looked at him and thought, ‘Who the hell are you?’

  “After I got to know him, I realized he was sincerely trying to help. He was the type of person you couldn’t stay mad at for long. If he had to fight a drunk while arresting him, they’d be buddies by the time they got to jail.”

  “Giles bubbled with enthusiasm,” said patrol captain Charles Long, now retired. “He’d come into a room filled with soreheads and the place would light up.”

  Such praise would normally set the stage for intense rivalry among the tightly knit troopers, but Giles—who wore a smile you couldn’t beat off with a hammer—had a way of turning people’s attitudes around.

  “He was so damned likable,” said one officer, “even when he stayed on your ass about something.

  “‘Man,’ he’d say, ‘you smoke too much.’

  “‘And you grin too much,’ I’d tell him. Which just made him grin all the more.”

  Tuesday morning, April 9, Giles slept in. Melinda had worked the night before and they had both stayed up late, talking, watching TV, and playing with their dog, a white miniature Eskimo spitz that was a gift from Bonnie.

  The couple, married two years, seldom disagreed, but when they did, it always revolved around the highway patrol.

  “He wanted to be the best trooper around,” explained Melinda. “It drove me crazy because I knew he was doing so well. But it was, ‘I can do better. I can do better.’ The first year we were in Buncombe County, he topped everyone else in the number of arrests he made. After that, he began to feel the stress of having to stay on top, which in turn, made him want to try that much harder.”

  It even affected their plans for the future.

  Giles wanted to start a family, but because of his extreme attachment to the highway patrol, Melinda wanted to wait. They’d argue about it; at least Melinda argued. Giles, who hated confrontations, mostly listened.

  “It was hard arguing with Giles because he didn’t have a temper— which really bugged me. I’d get excited about something and he’d say, ‘Don’t yell! Let’s sit down and talk.’

  “He wanted everything to be perfect and smooth all the time. I think that’s why he got into so few fights on the road.”

  Nor did he seem overly concerned with the dangers inherent in his work, though he and Melinda did discuss the possibility that he could be hurt or killed on patrol.

  “If anything ever happens to me,” he said, “please don’t let anybody blame my job. Just tell them I was doing what I loved to do.”

  Gordon Conner, Giles’s training officer, was at the weigh station on Tuesday when Giles drove past on his way to the tunnel. Now in his second day on the new assignment, Giles was scheduled to report by 3:00 P.M. It was already past two-thirty and there was still a long way to go.

  “I saw him come through,” said Conner, “but he didn’t stop, and I knew he was running late.”

  Then he heard Giles’s voice come over the patrol car radio.

  “You think I’m gonna make it?” he said excitedly. “I figure just about a mile a minute!”

  Conner grinned. Knowing Giles, he’d be right on time.

  The two had met up the night before, and Conner had playfully tapped him on the chest.

  “You got that bulletproof vest on?” he said.

  “Yeah,” Giles answered.

  “Well, make sure you wear the damn thing. And be careful.”

  Assigned to work with Giles Tuesday night was Kurt Casey, a young black trooper from Haywood County who’d been on the highway patrol for five years.

  Less than a minute after Casey checked on duty, Giles was calling him on the radio.

  “Are you en route to the special assignment area?” he said.

  “I’m going by the patrol station to gas up first,” replied Casey, “and then I’ll be on down. I’ll meet you there.”

  A short time later, Casey, parked next to Giles’s patrol car, noticed a bulletproof vest sprawled across the front seat. Since there was no regulation requiring troopers to wear them during routine patrol, he gave it little thought.

  The officers had been instructed to write mostly warning tickets because of the unusual traffic situation, so both began clocking drivers going to and from the tunnel. By 5:00 P.M., Giles had stopped a car with no tag, issued a speeding ticket to a Texan, and apprehended a drunk driver.

  Later, over supper at a nearby truck stop, Giles explained his assembly-line technique to Casey.

  “He’d stop a person for a warning ticket,” said Casey, “then stay parked on the shoulder of the road with his lights out, waiting for another car with a violation. He’d catch them, give them a ticket, then wait for another one to come by. He said he wrote about twenty-five warning tickets a week. I averaged about ten, patrolling as most tro
opers do, by going up and down the highway.”

  Back on duty, Casey drove past the tunnel towards the Tennessee line while Giles patrolled the road in the opposite direction. Each time one saw the other with a stopped vehicle, he’d slow down to see if everything was all right.

  At 9:12 P.M., Giles stopped a truck driver and issued a warning ticket for a defective light. During the stop, Casey had driven past and Giles waved him on, reassuring him that all was well.

  That April ninth morning, Billy McQueen, accompanied by Charles G. Barker, set off for Statesville. Five years earlier, after his marriage fell apart, McQueen had gone to work for Barker doing odd jobs around Barker’s Kentucky farmhouse, which the two men shared. Despite McQueen’s checkered past, Barker called him “honest and hardworking.” As the two of them made their way down the highway toward Statesville, McQueen would stop along the way to phone his estranged wife.

  “I’ve got a gun and stick of dynamite and I’m ten miles closer to getting you,” he told her. Further up the road, he’d call again, saying, “Now I’m five miles closer.”

  “I followed another car, stopped it,” recalled Trooper Casey, “and gave him a verbal warning. Then I clocked another car—not running all that fast—but thought I’d follow it. So I turned around and went back through the tunnel going west. As I came out the other side, I rounded a curve and spotted Giles’s patrol car on the eastbound side of the highway. It was still running, with the headlights and the blue light going. There was traffic backed up behind it, I saw someone lying in the emergency lane, almost on the white line, in front of the patrol car. I didn’t think it was Giles but I didn’t see him anywhere else.

  “Then I got closer and realized it was Giles. Knowing what a cut-up he was, I first thought, ‘What is he doing? Is he acting or what?’ I knew it wasn’t anything to joke about, but I couldn’t believe it was for real.”

  Casey parked in the westbound lane, jumped out of his patrol car, and bounded over the three-foot concrete barrier that divided the highway. Giles lay flat on his back, arms and legs outstretched, his black summer hat still in place.

  “He wasn’t moving so I bent down and called his name. I felt his neck and arm for a pulse, but there was nothing. His eyes were open and he had a staring, puzzled look I’ll never forget—almost as though his last thought was ‘Why?’

  “There were people standing around, and I asked them what happened. Maybe I was in shock and couldn’t hear their response, but it seems like no one said anything.”

  Casey ran back to his patrol car and grabbed the radio.

  Manning the Asheville telecommunications center that night were Cecil Pettit and Eddie Masters.

  “I had my feet up on the desk,” recalled Pettit, “and Eddie and I had just commented how quiet it was. As soon as we heard the emergency signal, we reached over and hit the transmitter at the same time. Mine opened up first.”

  “Ten-four, go ahead,” Pettit said.

  “This is G-541, Asheville. 10-33, 10-33! (Help me quick!) I need a rescue squad at the three-mile marker on Interstate 40. G-444 is down. Trooper is down!”

  “What’s the problem?” Pettit asked Casey.

  “I don’t know. He’s not moving at all, I don’t think he’s conscious and I need a rescue squad as quick as possible.”

  To Casey, it appeared that Giles may have died instantly.

  “I got a blanket out of the back of my car and covered him. It was the most helpless feeling I’ve ever experienced. I wanted to go after whoever had done this, but I didn’t want to leave Giles.”

  With no policy to follow (the highway patrol had not yet developed a procedure for dealing with trooper slayings), Casey fell back on the training he’d had in cadet school.

  “I knew my first responsibility was to take care of the injured or deceased, then get everyone away from the scene in order to preserve the evidence. I told people to move back and not touch anything. Then I got traffic moving again.”

  An emergency medical technician stopped and asked if there was anything he could do to assist.

  Casey took him to where Giles lay. The technician checked for vital signs, stood up, and shook his head.

  “That confirmed what I thought,” said Casey. “I realized then that Giles was dead.”

  Afterwards, he questioned several witnesses, trying to piece together what had occurred. A couple traveling from Tennessee said they saw the trooper bend over the window of a vehicle he had stopped, then stagger backwards as though he were attempting to return to his car. Someone else noticed that Giles’s flashlight had fallen out of his hand and rolled under his patrol car. It was retrieved and brought to Casey.

  Casey also questioned Gene Mull, a fifty-year-old trucker, who told him he was driving an eastbound tractor trailer near the blocked tunnel about 9:20 P.M. when he came upon a trooper standing in front of a car.

  “I seen the trooper turn around,” Mull stated later in a press interview. “Then he staggered, like he had tripped over something. I was afraid he was going to fall under my wheels so I hit my brakes. There was another trucker in front of me and he got on his CB radio and said a trooper had been shot.”

  Mull was the first person to reach Giles.

  “I stopped in the road, ran to him, and unbuttoned his shirt. He was gasping and his lips were moving. That lasted a minute or two and that was the end of it. In my opinion, he never knew what hit him. The worst thing about it was that there was nothing I could do.”

  The trucker in front of Mull who had reported the incident tried to block the car as it sped away. But the driver stopped on one side of the truck, spun around the other side, and disappeared into the darkness.

  Rescue-squad personnel arrived at the scene only to learn that it was too late to do anything to save Giles. One of them asked if Casey had started cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), and he said no.

  “It was like getting slapped in the face,” said the trooper. “I was sure Giles was dead—and later the State Bureau of Investigation said he was probably gone before he hit the ground—but it made me wonder if I could have done something. I didn’t realize it, but the rescue squad’s policy is to start CPR even if the person is dead.”

  By now, the scene was beginning to look like a TV drama. Flashing blue and red lights lined the highway as patrol officers, ambulance crews, a State Bureau of Investigation team, and media crews converged.

  For the next five hours, Sergeant Mike Overcash, Casey’s supervisor, along with other officers called in to help, sealed off the area so the state crime lab could gather evidence. Then they directed traffic and set up a perimeter for the manhunt already under way. Television crews moved in and filmed Giles’s inert body (the crime lab didn’t want it moved until all possible evidence had been secured), whereupon the news began to spread.

  Melinda Harmon was on duty as a dispatcher for the sheriff’s department in Buncombe County.

  “I was sitting in the office taking phone calls when I heard one of the deputies from Haywood County come over the radio and say a trooper had been shot in Haywood. I thought, ‘My god, that’s terrible,’ but I really didn’t connect it to Giles. A few minutes later, I got real shaky and this bad feeling came over me. I started to cry. One of my friends, a deputy, took me to a back room and sat down with me.

  “‘What’s wrong?’ he said.

  “‘I don’t know, Steve. But I’m all to pieces.’

  “He calmed me down and I went back to try and answer the phones. We sent a message on our computer asking for more information and received a message back telling us the shooting took place near the Tennessee state line.

  “I looked at Steve and said, ‘Where’s the Tennessee state line?’

  “‘Right near the blocked tunnel,’ he replied.

  “‘Oh my lord, Giles is working up there tonight!’

  “I think I was in shock because I just remember sitting there and then looking up and seeing Sergeant Christopher from the highway patrol wal
king down the hall towards me. He didn’t have to say anything. I knew by the look on his face that something had happened to Giles.”

  “I was contacted shortly after the shooting took place,” said Christopher, “and told to go to the Buncombe County sheriffs department and stay with Melinda in case she needed anything. I didn’t know then how bad it was.

  “When I walked in, she was behind a desk. She stood up, looked at me, and said, ‘Is Giles all right?’ She was visibly upset but still composed.

  “I explained to her Giles had been shot and we didn’t know any more than that, but I would relay any information to her that I received. Then I proceeded to find out who Giles’s parents were, and called someone from the Brevard police department to ask them to relay the news.”

  Bonnie Harmon had already gone to bed but was still awake in the upstairs apartment at the motel. Frank was in the office closing up for the night when the doorbell rang.

  Immediately Bonnie sat up in bed, sensing something wrong.

  “I heard them tell Frank, ‘Do you want us to go up with you?’”

  “Oh god!” she cried, as they were coming up the stairs. “Don’t let it be Giles!”

  Giles’s best friend, Joey Reece, was at home, half-dozing in an easy chair, when the phone rang.

  Two years older than Giles, Reece had joined the patrol in 1978 and shared Giles’s enthusiasm for patrolling. There were other similarities as well. Both were small, well-built men, with the same kind of clean-cut good looks. Both worked out religiously to keep themselves in shape. And both loved the highway patrol. Before long, they had become nearly inseparable, with Giles changing his days off to accommodate Reece’s schedule. To Giles, Reece was a more experienced, low-key version of himself. To Reece, Giles represented the brother he never had.

  The collect call came from Trooper David Miller, attending in-service training at the patrol school in Garner. Miller had heard through radio reports that Harmon was down, but wasn’t sure how serious it was.