Trooper Down!

by Marie Bartlett

  I look forward to going to work because I know I’m “the man.”

  *

  I was chasing a guy one night and he jumped out and ran. I caught up with him and bopped him on the head with my flashlight. I didn’t think I had hurt him bad because he was still fighting. So I hit him again. I saw a pool of blood under him and he was hollering and screaming “police brutality.”

  There was no way I could take him to the courthouse in his condition, so I took him to the hospital. All the way there, he kept saying he was going to sue me.

  I told him to go right ahead.

  When we arrived I ordered him out of the car.

  “You want me out, you’ll have to get me out,” he said.

  So it was on again.

  I got a sergeant and another trooper to help me. We grabbed him and slung him out of the car. He landed against another car and left a smear of blood across the whole side panel. But he was still kicking and carrying on.

  “We’re gonna have to hog-tie him,” said the other trooper.

  The sergeant, who had been talking to him real calmly, was kicked in the ear and was cut.

  “You son of a bitch!” said the sergeant. Then he helped us tie him up.

  We finally got him on a stretcher and the nurse looked at us and said, “You can’t leave this man like this.”

  “You want him untied?” I said. “Then you untie him. But we’re not responsible for the damages when you do.”

  We left him tied until he went to X-ray, where he bucked up on us again. He had to have sixty-five stitches to close the top of his head.

  My feeling is, if people get hurt, it’s their fault. They brought it on themselves.

  *

  It surprises me how resentful people are towards the police. I enforce the law, but the public doesn’t like me for it. That used to bother me, but now it doesn’t matter. Because I’m the one who’s got the authority.

  Sometimes troopers aren’t “going bad” at all. They are simply misunderstood or unfairly treated themselves:

  I once got a complaint from a man I arrested who said I “towered” over him. He was five feet tall. I told the sergeant I’d apologize to the guy if it would make him feel better.

  *

  All troopers get complaints. But I don’t worry about them because I’m just doing my job.

  The last one I got was from a South Carolina lawyer who wrote a letter complaining that I gave his mother a ticket for going the wrong way on the interstate.

  Some people are just like that attorney—born-again complainers you can’t please no matter what. It’s part of the job.

  *

  I hate to admit it, but some troopers bring complaints upon themselves by their demeanor. We’re in the people business and we have to remember there are some fine individuals out there who don’t wear this gray uniform.

  *

  It’s like when someone files a complaint against you, you’ve already been convicted. The trooper did it, whatever it was.

  You’ve got to sit down and document everything that happened surrounding the complaint. Half the time you can’t remember it because there’s really nothing to it.

  The patrol tells us to “comply” with the complaint. But they don’t tell us what they think about it.

  Some troopers will slack up work because of complaints. They get paranoid about it—they stop working so hard so they won’t get so many complaints. Then they get tagged as “not active enough.”

  So it can be a “no-win” situation.

  *

  I investigated an accident once where a minister was hit by a man taking his wife to the hospital: The guy was in such a hurry—he thought his wife was having a heart attack—that he left the scene without stopping.

  I didn’t give him a ticket.

  A few days later, I was sitting in a restaurant and the minister came up to me and started complaining.

  “What would you have done in a similar situation?” I asked him. “Would you have stopped if that had been your wife in the car?”

  He said yes, he most certainly would have.

  “Then you’re a damn fool,” I told him.

  So he called the highway patrol and complained about that.

  But I don’t regret what I said. I still consider him a fool.

  *

  The bigger we grow, the more mistakes we’ll make in picking personnel. Part of the reason is that there’s more laxness in moral standards among the public. More is taken for granted and attitudes are more liberal.

  I don’t think troopers are as dedicated as they used to be either. Years ago, when I was a trooper, if I was scheduled to get off at midnight and got a call about a drunk driver twenty miles away, I’d turn around and spend half the night looking for him.

  Today’s trooper cuts off by the clock and goes home.

  Yet that’s not true in every case. Sometimes a special assignment comes along that is so demanding, so attention-grabbing, and such a challenge, that it reinforces the dedication and commitment of every trooper it involves, whether he is a good, bad, or indifferent type of officer.

  That’s what happened in November 1986, on a remote mountain top in Edneyville, North Carolina.

  12. The Search for Rambo

  “He was willing to stand there toe-to-toe with us. It’s a dangerous man who’ll take as much firepower as he did and still keep going. Very few people want to confront 400 armed law enforcement officers.” —Trooper involved in Edneyville manhunt

  It started with a simple act of littering.

  Henderson County Sheriff’s Deputy Jimmy Case was patrolling U.S. 64 East about 6:30 P.M. on Saturday, November 22, 1986, when he saw a passenger throw a beer bottle out a car window. Case pulled in behind the copper-brown Buick Regal and attempted to stop it. But the driver kept going.

  The deputy continued following the car for about a mile. Suddenly the passenger leaned out the window, aimed a high-powered rifle at the cruiser, and fired. The bullet missed Deputy Case, but struck the radiator hose, crippling the patrol car’s cooling system.

  Case speeded up, but about half a mile farther on U.S. 64, his car overheated and quit. The Buick, sporting a Florida license plate and carrying two young men, took off.

  The driver was Edwin Pete Black, twenty-two, a Hendersonville resident wanted on charges of robbing a bank in Cape Carteret, North Carolina, the day before. The passenger was twenty-one-year-old Michael John Shornook (also known as “Shornock” and other aliases).

  Shornook’s brushes with the law began in May, 1985, when he stole a Jeep in Morehead City and led nearly a dozen law enforcement officers on a two-hour chase. It ended when he jumped into a river and was apprehended by state troopers who had to swim after him.

  A month later he escaped from jail, stole a boat, and was captured again. Sent back to prison, he served ten months of a three-year sentence.

  According to Shornook’s family, that’s when his dislike of law enforcement officers turned to hatred.

  “He came back different,” Ann Shornook was quoted as saying in a newspaper article about her son. “Prison changed him. He was always a kid who could see things coming, knew things. And the first night he was home, he warned me that something was going to happen, that he was never going back to jail.”

  “My brother was a hell-raiser,” said Jeff Shornook, “but he was a good guy till he went to prison. In high school, he was a bus driver. He got all these plaques on what a safe driver he was. Then he goes and gets his license taken away on some charge and that made him mad. After that, he hated cops and anything associated with them.”

  Born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, Shornook was reared in Carmel, Pennsylvania, before moving to Cape Carteret. He was a good student when he applied himself, a quick, intelligent boy skilled with his hands.

  The oldest of four children, he was also, says his mother, “the responsible one, the one I could count on to take care of the others.”

  When his parents sep
arated he moved in with Sandra Horne, a forty-six-year-old earth mother type who taught him how to thrive in the woods. At seventeen, he was showing a passionate interest in guns and becoming a crack shot.

  “He had the potential to do anything,” Horne told a reporter, “but he told me, ‘Everything is going round and round and I can’t catch it.’”

  Though portrayed by the media as a “Rambo” survivalist because of his penchant for firearms and camouflage clothes, Shornook was in reality a deeply troubled youth who refused to conform to society.

  “Even after he was released from prison,” said his mother, “he never felt free. Prison had soured him and he decided from then on to thumb his nose at authority. He felt he’d been shit on too many times by a two-faced judicial system and this was his way of paying them back. So he devoted himself to making fools out of cops. After a while, it became a game to him—a game he could have quit at any time—except that it all became too real. But he meant to finish it one way or another.”

  By fall 1986, Shornook was running from the law again.

  A pawn shop in Jacksonville, North Carolina, was robbed and he was a suspect. A boat was stolen at Emerald Isle and a logbook, believed to have been kept by Shornook, was found nearby. An armed robbery took place at Wrightsville Beach and police issued a warrant for Shornook’s arrest. Then he was caught burglarizing a houseboat in Port Orange, Florida. The next day he broke into a house, killing the owner’s dog and forcing a woman to fix him breakfast before he took her money and a motorcycle.

  On November 21, Shornook and Pete Black donned ski masks and robbed the First Citizens Bank in Cape Carteret. Twenty-four hours later, they were clear across the state in Henderson County, with Deputy Jimmy Case hot on their trail.

  Shornook’s prediction to his mother that “something is going to happen” was about to come true.

  That night, Saturday, November 22, Shornook and Pete Black were invited to a party on Sugarloaf Mountain, in Edneyville. The host was William Anthony Miller, celebrating his twenty-fifth birthday with a combination of hard liquor, beer, and barbecue. Sometime during the early part of the evening, Shornook and Black left to pick up something—possibly drugs—and were returning to the party when they passed Deputy Jimmy Case.

  Miller’s home, a white frame, tin-roofed house that sat on a ridge overlooking a huge front yard, was too small to accommodate the thirty or more people who showed up for the affair. So the group moved outside, where they built a bonfire, had a cookout, and got drunk.

  Then someone started a fight.

  In the course of the argument, twenty-five-year-old Ricky Charles Pack was beaten and his money was taken from him. Pack left, but returned a few minutes later with a carload of angry friends and relatives, all of them bent on revenge.

  That’s when things really got out of hand.

  No one knows exactly who did what, but one thing led to another and guns were drawn. As the bullets flew, the party broke up. Most of the crowd hid in a thicket of pine trees circling the house. Pack tried to escape by shepherding his girlfriend and relatives into a car, but the vehicle was riddled with gunfire and forced into a ditch. Pack got away unharmed with the help of a friend, but his uncle, Dennis Pack, was shot in the stomach. He died three days later.

  William Miller ended his birthday by getting shot in the face. Pete Black, the driver with whom Shornook had been riding earlier, loaded Miller into a white Plymouth and started down the mountain toward a hospital. By the time Black reached the main highway, Miller was dying.

  On U.S. 64 East, below Miller’s home, sheriff’s deputies and state troopers were cruising the roads looking for the two men who, a few hours before, had blasted the radiator on Deputy Case’s patrol car. They knew a boisterous party was under way on Gilliam Mountain Road because they’d had complaints about cars blocking driveways and too much late-night noise, but they had not yet established a connection between the attempted assault on Case and what was taking place at the Miller house.

  “Our intention,” said Henderson County detective Lieutenant Randy Case (no relation to Deputy Case), “was to maintain a roadblock till daylight, then get some air surveillance up so we could spot this brown Buick. We felt sure the men were still in the area. We were going up and down the road trying to locate the shell casing from the rifle used in the shooting when a white Plymouth came through our roadblock at a high rate of speed.”

  When Pete Black stopped, the state trooper who questioned him found Miller dead in the back seat. There was no sign of Shornook.

  Black told the officers about the shoot-out and said there were several injured people still at the Miller house.

  “We spent the rest of the night investigating the (Miller) murder,” said Lt. Case. “The whole time, we kept turning over in our minds that it could have something to do with the patrol car getting shot at.”

  The officers found more than 140 shell casings scattered around the Miller property, along with fifty- and hundred-dollar bills, drug paraphernalia, and assorted firearms. The few witnesses who emerged from the woods to talk with the police were so drunk their testimony was nearly worthless. But deputies learned that Shornook, who had participated in the shooting (though he was not responsible for either of the murders) was not among them. In fact, no one knew where he was. (Ricky Pack was later charged with the murder of William Miller. Dennis Pack’s assailant was never identified.)

  Late Saturday night, lawmen sealed off the area and a command post was set up at the Edneyville volunteer fire department. Another post was established farther up the mountain.

  About nine-fifteen Sunday morning, two Gilliam Mountain residents told officers they had seen a late-model Buick parked in the apple orchard behind Miller’s house. Upon investigation, the deputies determined it fit the description of the car Pete Black was driving when Shornook fired the rifle out the window. A license check showed the vehicle was a leased car, rented with a stolen credit card.

  “At the same time we were getting this background information,” said Lieutenant Case, “Carteret County officials contacted the Henderson County sheriffs department and reported an incident similar to ours (a patrol car getting shot at). In the conversation, Shornook’s name came up.”

  On Sunday afternoon, Pete Black appeared at the Henderson County sheriff’s office and turned himself in. Under intense questioning, he admitted that he knew Shornook and that the two of them had robbed a bank in Cape Carteret. They had met while both were in prison and shared the same dislike for authority figures. Their plan, said Black, was to live a quiet, peaceful life in the scenic mountains of western North Carolina, and travel elsewhere to commit their crimes—sort of like commuting to work.

  Slowly, pieces of the puzzle were falling into place.

  “We had a meeting,” said Case, “and decided there was a strong possibility Shornook was still on the mountain. One of our investigators had seen a man dressed in a black leather jacket walk into an orchard high up on Sugarloaf and then disappear. We were sure it was him.”

  A short time later, felony warrants for assault on a law enforcement officer were issued for Michael John Shornook, described as a white male, five feet eight, with medium-brown, shoulder-length hair.

  Till now, the double shootings and general ruckus at Miller’s birthday party had been Henderson County’s business, handled—and handled well—primarily by the local sheriff’s department. But as the case began to grow in scope and complexity, county law enforcement officials realized they needed help. A fugitive—heavily armed and potentially dangerous—was loose on a rnountaintop dotted with dozens of homes.

  To get him down would take a major manhunt.

  One of the first agencies called to assist was the state highway patrol.

  By Sunday night, troopers all over western North Carolina were being notified to report for duty.

  Trooper Leah Weirick had been shopping. Her phone was ringing when she walked into the house.

  “How are you?�
� said her first sergeant.

  “Fine, sir, how are you?” Weirick responded, aware that something was up. First sergeants didn’t normally call just to pass the time of day.

  “We’ve got a manhunt under way and we want you to go,” he said.

  Oh god, Weirick thought. She was scheduled to be off the next day. This would no doubt alter her plans.

  “Sure,” she said, “just tell rne where and when.”

  In Asheville, Trooper David Miller had worked a regular weekend shift and was home resting when his sergeant called and said to meet him at the Edneyville fire department at four o’clock Monday, the next morning.

  Trooper Keith Lovin, in Robbinsville, had been gone for the weekend and knew nothing about the series of events taking place in Edneyville. When his sergeant called at 10:00 P.M. and told him to report for duty within the next few hours, he began preparing for the 100-mile trip to Edneyville.

  His assignment, along with David Miller and several other patrolmen, was to stake out a gravel road just below Mountain Home Baptist Church—less than half a mile from where the party had taken place Saturday night.

  “Our job was to stand outside the patrol car and watch the bank,” said Miller. “We all decided we’d load our shotguns with buckshot and if he came out shooting, or one of us saw him, we’d shoot back.”

  Not much happened all day Monday.

  Fresh footprints and other signs had led officials to believe Shornook had returned to the car sometime during Sunday night, took food and ammunition, and slipped back into the woods. Throughout the day, six roadblocks were manned over a twenty-mile area, while twenty-five members of a tactical team combed the area on foot. Besides sheriffs department and highway patrol personnel, there were SWAT teams, fire department volunteers, state wildlife officers, State Bureau of Investigation officials, and between thirty and sixty people from the state’s Department of Correction Prison Emergency Response Team. In addition, a sheriff’s department search plane and the highway patrol’s helicopter were brought in to help scan the mountain.

  Armed guards were everywhere—even riding the school buses in case Shornook decided to hijack a busload of children.