Trooper Down!

by Marie Bartlett

  It was, as one trooper put it, “like a military operation. We had been briefed on Shornook’s prior ambush tactics and knew he wouldn’t hesitate to fire on an officer. So the atmosphere was extremely tense. We felt like we were in a war zone.”

  Adding to the sense of uneasiness was the lack of a central law enforcement communications system which would allow one agency to talk with another without having to relay information. Troopers were at a particular disadvantage because not only were they tied to their car radios, but they had little of the proper equipment necessary for conducting an extended manhunt over rugged mountain terrain. Most of the patrolmen had to wear their slick-soled regulation shoes, totally impractical for tracking through the woods, bright-yellow rain slickers—making them perfect targets—and for firearm protection, carry what they had been issued in patrol school, a .357 Magnum and a shotgun. Neither was particularly effective against Shornook’s high-powered, long-range rifle and the other weapons he reportedly had.

  Some Sugarloaf residents were better prepared to face Shornook than the officers assigned to protect them. Those living in the area were asked to leave, but few complied.

  “We’re just keeping our eyes open and our guns loaded,” said one long-time homeowner.

  About four-thirty Monday afternoon, troopers Joey Reece and Gib Clements had parked their cruisers on a dead-end road and were sitting in the woods, watching for unusual movement. Suddenly a twig snapped.

  The two men looked at each other.

  “Did you hear that?” said Reece.

  Clements nodded.

  “You go down the road and I’ll go around the ridge,” whispered Reece. Moments later, they met up.

  “I know I heard something,” said Reece. Then he stopped, bent down, and glanced upwards. “Come here, Gib. Does that look like a man to you?”

  Fifty to sixty yards ahead, Reece had caught a glimpse of what appeared to be someone wearing a blue cap.

  “We better call in now,” said Clements

  While Clements waited, Reece returned to his patrol car and notified the command post of the sighting.

  Within minutes, the highway patrol helicopter was hovering over the area. The pilot reported that he, too, saw someone in the woods with a blue cap. It was the first good lead in the case since Shornook had disappeared into the woods Saturday night.

  Immediately, the perimeter was adjusted and Shornook’s deadly game plan—the one in which he “thumbed his nose at authority”—began in earnest.

  Around 7:00 P.M. that night, a hungry, tired Shornook walked up on Ivory Marshall’s front porch and, at gunpoint, asked for the keys to Marshall’s car.

  “He didn’t give us that much trouble,” Mrs. Marshall said later. “He wasn’t trying to kill us or anything. In fact, he talked pretty friendly.”

  Before driving away in the couple’s orange and white Jeep, he took some food, left a hundred-dollar bill on the table, then jerked the phone from the wall. Marshall reported the break-in from an extension phone in another room.

  Less than a mile away, troopers David Miller and David Gladden were manning the same dirt road at which they had been stationed all day.

  “It was getting dark and we knew someone would relieve us soon,” said Miller. “We had heard about the sighting but thought it was a good distance from us. I got in my patrol car and was preparing to leave when I caught the report on the radio that an orange and white Jeep had been stolen. That’s usually what happens during a manhunt. After the area is cordoned off, the fugitive commits a crime—breaks into a home or steals a car—in order to get away.”

  Nearby, Trooper Gary Cook had heard the same report. Assigned to patrol the road leading to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain, he had gotten hungry and stopped for something to eat at a church. A field command post had been set up on the church grounds and food brought in for the officers.

  “I was standing in the parking lot chewing on a piece of fried chicken,” said Cook, “when something came over the radio about a suspect stealing a Jeep and coming out a dirt road at Mountain Home Church. I looked around and saw a sign that said, ‘Mountain Home Church.’ I thought, ‘Wait a minute! That’s where I am! And I’m the only trooper here!’”

  Cook radioed his position to officers at another command post and was instructed by a first sergeant to block the main intersection at the church. Help, he was told, was on the way.

  Within minutes, troopers David Miller and David Gladden were pulling in. Miller positioned his patrol car nose-to-nose with Cook’s cruiser, forming a “V” to block the road.

  Almost immediately, they were joined by Trooper Keith Lovin. The men stood outside their vehicles, guns drawn, waiting in the dark.

  “The plan,” said Miller, “was to ambush Shornook as he came over the hilltop towards the church. About that time, a farmer who’d been standing in the church parking lot walked over to us and told us there was another road above the church that Shornook could turn onto. So we moved up about 500 feet where the dirt roads connected. We were just getting out of our cars when I looked up and saw a vehicle, its headlights on, coming around the curve.”

  Shornook, driving the stolen Jeep, had spotted the patrol cars straight ahead and veered to the right. He spun off the dirt road into the church cemetery and wheeled around, heading back in the direction from which he came.

  A sudden crack of gunfire split the air. Realizing they were being shot at, the officers jumped in the two patrol cars—Miller and Lovin in front, Cook and Gladden behind—and took off after the departing vehicle. In the glow from their headlights, they could tell it fit the description of the stolen Jeep.

  Instinctively, Lovin reached up and turned on the blue light and siren.

  “Turn off that goddammed siren so I can hear the radio!” snapped Miller.

  “G-437, G-437 is in pursuit with Lovin,” Miller radioed the command post. “We’re going back the way he came.”

  Each time Shornook rounded a curve on the road, he’d slow down, lean out the window, and fire from a .30-caliber carbine. He was also carrying a .223 Mini-14, two .45-caliber pistols, and a 9-mm pistol. Every few rounds, he’d alternate weapons.

  “We’ve been shot at! We’ve been shot at!” Miller yelled into the radio mike. “We’ve been hit! We’re still in pursuit!”

  One round hit the front bumper, came up through the hood, and struck the windshield wiper. Another grazed the fender, while a third bullet hit the condenser on the car’s air-conditioning unit.

  Neither Miller, intent on maneuvering the dark, narrow mountain road, nor Lovin, who was trying to get an accurate aim at the speeding car ahead, fully realized how much danger they were in.

  “Everything happened so fast,” said Miller. “We could see the flashes and smell the gunpowder but there was no real sensation of fear. We were too busy concentrating on other things.”

  Miller knew that Shornook’s history included ambush tactics.

  “To prevent him from stopping and firing on us as we got to him, I tried to stay on his tail. I thought if I could get close enough to intimidate him, he might stop.”

  In the patrol car behind Miller, Cook and Gladden had the difficult task of staying near enough to provide support for the two troopers in front, while attempting to fire at the Jeep ahead.

  “I didn’t want to crash into Miller if he had to stop suddenly,” said Cook. “But at the same time, I wanted to stay up with him. There were times I was so close my front bumper was right up against his car.”

  “My greatest fear,” said Gladden, “was that I would run out of ammunition. I couldn’t remember if I had put a live shell in the chamber of my shotgun, so I loaded and unloaded it at least four times to make sure.”

  Armed only with a shotgun and a .357 Magnum pistol, Gladden knew that neither of his weapons was an equal match for Shornook’s firepower.

  “It was like throwing rocks at an elephant,” he said.

  In the pitch-black darkness, Cook saw a flash
in the window of Miller’s cruiser, directly in front of Lovin’s head.

  A fourth bullet, fired from the Jeep, had burst through the patrol car windshield, landed on the dashboard, and exploded in front of Lovin. Shattered glass flew into Lovin’s eyes, while a piece of lead— a fragment from the bullet—settled on his coat collar.

  Unaware at first that Lovin had been hit, Miller reached up and flicked the glass from his own hair. Then he glanced at Lovin, who was falling forward.

  “I reached out and grabbed him,” said Miller. “He was talking and there was no sign of blood, so I knew he wasn’t hurt real bad. Part of me wanted to continue with the chase, but since I had slowed down to check on Lovin, we had lost sight of the Jeep. So, tactically, we were not in as good a position as we were before. We knew nothing about the road, either, where it ended, or if it was a dead end.”

  Lovin, now blinded in one eye, spoke up.

  “Let’s stop and break it off right here.”

  Miller, frustrated at losing Shornook, continued on.

  “Stop, David. I need to stop!” he said. Miller braked and Lovin rolled out of the passenger’s side and onto the ground.

  “I didn’t think my eyes were hurt too bad,” Lovin recalled, “but every time I’d blink, I could feel the glass grinding. It was very, very painful.”

  Cook, who had pulled in behind Miller, believed Lovin had been killed. His first reaction was anger.

  “We’ve got another man dead,” he thought. “What are we doing out here chasing this outlaw? He’s doesn’t know us, and we don’t know him, yet he’s trying to kill us. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  All three troopers rushed over to Lovin and asked if he was all right. Despite his intense pain, he assured them that he was.

  Concerned that Shornook might come back shooting, the officers left Miller’s patrol car sitting with the headlights on while they retreated to Cook’s cruiser. Their first priority was getting some help— both medical attention for Lovin and backup support for themselves.

  By radio, Miller notified the command post of their location. The combination of rugged terrain, heavy darkness, and unfamiliarity with the region led to more than a little confusion in getting other officers to the scene.

  “It’s the dirt road that leads from the church going back to wherever the Jeep was stopped,” Miller said. “We’re northwest from the church. We’re out of sight of him now. We’ve lost sight of the vehicle.”

  “Keep us advised,” said the telecommunicator. “We’ll get you some help on the way.”

  “Whoever’s got a map,” Cook interjected, “look for Mountain Home Church. You’ll see two roads that go up by the church. Come up and turn left. He saw us there, spun around, and took off. We’ve exchanged gunfire with him and don’t know if we hit him or not.”

  “We didn’t,” added Miller.

  Unhurt by the barrage of gunfire, Shornook had driven to the end of the gravel road, crashed through a gate, abandoned the Jeep, then fled into the woods on foot.

  By the time the backup officers arrived at the scene where Miller and the other troopers were waiting, Shornook was long gone—at least for the night.

  Lovin was taken to a local hospital where he was treated and released. Though his eyes would remain sensitive for two to three months, miraculously there was no permanent damage.

  “I didn’t need anyone to tell me how lucky I was,” he said. “I knew that if the bullet had struck a little higher up the windshield I would have been hit in the brain. It was all a matter of chance.”

  That night, he went home and had a long discussion with his wife about the merits of being a highway patrolman. Two days later, he was back on the job.

  After the shoot-out, David Miller had trouble sleeping.

  “I don’t remember any specific nightmares,” he said, “but I do recall twisting and turning a lot. I’d wake up with my clothes so wet with sweat I’d have to change. After that, I refused to think much about it.”

  Gary Cook says the incident didn’t begin to affect him until it was over and he was safely at home with his family.

  “That’s the time you look around and wonder if being involved in this kind of work is really worth it,” he said.

  David Gladden maintains the shooting ruined his diet.

  “I’ve been eating junk food ever since,” he said. “And I started smoking again. That was the first time I’d been shot at and have it come so close to hitting me. It was not the kind of sensation I expected. In fact, it was the most exhilarating feeling I’ve ever had—because he missed.”

  Monday night, a short time after the shooting, the weather took a turn for the worse. By dark, a cloud cover had moved in and thick fog was rolling into every crevice and ridge on Sugarloaf Mountain.

  Trooper Leah Weirick, instructed to report for duty on her day off, was among those officers who had to man a lookout post during the night.

  “They put me on the road where Shornook had been sighted,” she said. “It was cold and rainy. We couldn’t sit in our cruisers because we had heard that Shornook would kill a trooper in order to get a car.”

  For the next twelve hours, Weirick and two fellow troopers sat back to back, Indian-style, around a tree, waiting, watching, and listening.

  “We couldn’t talk,” she said, “because we weren’t supposed to make any noise. So in a situation like that, you just think. The first two or three hours, I was convinced I was gonna die. I thought, ‘This is crazy. I have a fifty-yard-range shotgun and he has a 500-yard-range, high-powered rifle. He can pick me off from anywhere.’

  “About the fifth or sixth hour, you realize it’s like deer hunting. You sit perfectly still so you’ll be the first one to see or hear anything, you’ll be the first one to get him. Then fatigue sets in and you start imagining things. I had already been up for two days so I was tired to begin with.”

  By the next morning, cramped and sore, Weirick’s kidneys were sending out SOS signals. At noon, she told the other troopers she absolutely had to go to the bathroom. As quietly as possible, she got up and went behind a tree.

  During their watch, the troopers had neither heard nor spotted anything of significance. Later, they discovered that Shornook had also spent the night in the woods—only a hundred yards from where they sat.

  “That was enough to give us the shakes,” said Weirick.

  Tuesday morning, November 26, the search entered its third day.

  A contingent of law enforcement officers from various agencies had set up an ambush at Ivory Marshall’s home the night before, figuring Shornook would return there for food and shelter. But he never showed.

  So Lieutenant Randy Case, of the Henderson County sheriff’s department, formed a tracking team to go after him.

  With him were three volunteers: Henderson County Deputy Victor Moss and two state troopers, Randy Campbell and David McMurray.

  Case and Moss would track, while Campbell and McMurray served as lookouts.

  They set off at daylight, amid cold rain and a heavy, damp fog. Driving up the lonely mountain road, Trooper Randy Campbell, seated next to Moss, had a strange, uneasy feeling.

  “I felt like something terrible was gonna happen,” said Campbell, “and I started to mention it to Vic, but didn’t. Then it passed.”

  During the night, fifteen to twenty officers from the state prison department had secured the abandoned Jeep and were still at the scene when Campbell and the others arrived. The lawmen gathered in a circle, discussing which way Shornook may have gone.

  “The prison team had found tracks Monday night,” said Deputy Vic Moss, “so we followed those until we got to a place where someone had bush-hogged the trail, causing the tracks to stop. We turned and took a lower road that went across a spring. There were muddy places on it we thought might hold more footprints.”

  The mud, however, offered no clues.

  Another road lay further up the mountain, but the men had to cross a meadow to get to it.

>   No one spoke as they started up the ridge toward the meadow, for Shornook could be anywhere, lying in wait.

  They walked four abreast, ten to twelve feet apart, Campbell and Moss in the middle, flanked by Case and McMurray. The two deputies and Trooper McMurray carried a .223 Mini-14 while Trooper Campbell was armed with a borrowed sub-machine gun. Randy Case had a hand-held radio for communication with officers at the command post. All four were dressed in camouflage fatigues and wore bulletproof vests.

  Halfway across the field, the fog began to lift. From the woods, a sudden shot rang out and the officers hit the dirt.

  “My god,” thought Trooper Randy Campbell, “he’s gonna shoot us in the head!” He raised up, fired off thirty quick rounds, and fell back down. Seconds later, Shornook—hidden behind an oak tree directly above the meadow—released a barrage of gunfire.

  Deputy Vic Moss was struck first. The bullet entered the left side of his nose, plowed through the roof of his mouth, and exited out his right ear. To Moss, it felt like everything inside his head exploded.

  “I could hear the yelling and the sound of guns, but it seemed a long way off. I remember thinking that since I was hit in the head, I was probably going to die. Then after a few seconds, I thought, ‘Well, I ain’t dead yet. It’s gonna take a better shot than that to kill me.’”

  Campbell was lying next to Moss and had just reloaded his gun when he noticed Moss wasn’t firing.

  “Shornook was just peppering us. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill us all. Vic was lying with his head on his arms, moaning, so I crawled over to him and lifted his head. The wound looked bad, but not real bad. He asked me if he was gonna die and I said, ‘No, you’re gonna be all right, but we’ve got to get you out of here.’”

  Case and McMurray, aware that Moss had been hit, told Campbell they’d cover for him while he pulled Moss from the line of fire.

  Then Trooper David McMurray called out, “I’ve been hit!”

  “The first thing that passed through my mind,” said McMurray, an ex-marine, “was, ‘Why doesn’t it hurt any worse than that?’ I’d always heard gunshot wounds were painful. This felt like I’d been hit with a hammer. So I thought, ‘Okay, either I’m not hurt bad at all, or I’m hurt real bad.’ But I could still move my leg.”