We still had people who were unaccounted for, people who were actually between the target house and the house to the west. There was a fence between the two houses, a big six-foot-tall block fence that belonged to the people in the target house, and we had one of our SWAT officers and a canine officer trapped on the walkway between the target house and the fence. We were looking for people to go around there and check on these officers, so I volunteered to go with a sergeant who was gonna try to pull these guys out of there.
As we were looking for a way to get to these people, I realized that if we went around the house next door to the west, we’d be able to double back and get to those officers. A few of us went that way and found the gate into the yard of the house was locked. So I climbed over a garbage can, got inside the fence, got the gate opened up, and off we went. The canine officer had been extricated by that point, and one of our snipers was talking with her. I told him I was gonna go up and find the other guy because we still had one not accounted for. So I ran up to the wall and found the missing officer—he was trapped just on the other side of the wall from me.
I could see him. He knew I was there. I put my gun over the top of the wall and said, “I’ll cover you. Come on over.” He said, “I want more cover.” Apparently, he wasn’t ready to move with just me providing cover. A short time later, the sniper who had been back with the canine officer came up to my position; then another guy came up there right after that. With three guys with weapons covering his move, the trapped SWAT officer came over the wall. It went off without a hitch, except that one of the flash-bangs he had hooked to his body got caught up on the top of the wall as he was scrambling over. It pulled free from the pin as he dropped down onto our side, then fell to the ground right beside us. When it went off, it blew all sorts of shit into the air.
After we calmed down from that, we went back around the house to where the raid van was parked. There was still a lot of activity going on, and one of the guys at the van was throwing gas into the house, so I made myself useful and covered him. As I was doing that, I noticed that one of the gas grenades he threw got stuck between the vertical blinds and the sheet at the glass sliding door and caught the sheet on fire. I broadcast that the house had caught on fire and advised that we were going to need the fire department to respond. But it was too dangerous for them to come up and put the fire out, so we just let it burn.
Two people had came out of the house while I was in the back—the main suspect’s mother and her boyfriend. They had told one of the other guys that the suspect and his girlfriend were still inside, so we knew there were two people in the house as it burned. We finally got some fire fighting equipment close by, and the firefighters eventually said, “OK, there’s no way anybody in that house could still be alive,” then went up and put the fire out. They didn’t find any bodies in the rubble, but in the subsequent investigation the detectives found the charred remains of the suspect and his girlfriend. They were in a corner of the house near where the shoot-out went down. She had a contact pistol wound to the back of the head, and he had a contact pistol wound to the temple. So at some point, he killed her and then he killed himself.
One thing that was interesting about what happened is that I was really calm throughout most of the incident. In fact, a sense of calm and comfort settled in within the first few seconds, right after I started putting rounds back into the house. Returning fire was sort of a defining moment for me because I’d never been in a shooting before, so I didn’t know how I was going to react. I had always thought that if I was shot at, I would not run, I would not panic, I would not drop my gun or fall on the ground in fear. I had always thought I would return fire. And that was what I did. So after I started shooting back, I started feeling comfortable with the situation. From that point on, it was obvious to me that I wasn’t going to be afraid, that I wasn’t going to run away, that I was going to do what I was supposed to do. It felt good. There was a rush associated with that.
• • •
I was in my uniform at the courthouse waiting to testify in a robbery–stolen auto case when the shooting happened. The courthouse is set up with a lobby in the middle of each floor, courtrooms arrayed around the lobby, and a hallway that goes completely around on the outside of the courtrooms on each floor. I was standing in the lobby of the second floor, waiting to testify, when I heard a bunch of gunshots—at least five—go off in the courtroom next to me. I didn’t know if they were playing a tape for evidence or what, but I started walking toward the courtroom, and people started coming out.
They were saying, “He’s shooting everybody! He’s shooting everybody!” Now the doors to the courtroom have a thin panel of Plexiglas in the wood, so I looked through the Plexiglas and spotted a woman slumped in a chair at one of the tables in front of the judge’s bench. It was obvious that she’d been shot, and it was obvious that she was dead. I also saw two men laying on the ground next to the table, yelling, “He ran into the hallway! He ran into the hallway!” The courtroom is set up with doors on either side of the judge’s bench that lead to the outside hallway that runs around the courtrooms, and I could see one of the doors closing.
So I pulled my weapon out, went back to the courtroom I was gonna testify in, ran through it, and went out the door on the left of the judge’s bench that would put me near the corner of the outside hallway. When I got into the hallway, I spotted an older guy with gray hair who was wearing glasses. He had on a blue blazer with brown or tan pants, and he was holding a gun in his left hand. He was dressed similar to what our bailiffs wear, and because bailiffs are usually retired police officers or sheriff’s deputies, my first impression was that he was a bailiff. He looked scared, and I asked him, “Are you OK?” or “Is everything all right?”—some type of statement to that effect—then I turned my head to look down this long hallway that goes for about sixty yards. Just as I turned back, I heard a gunshot. I saw a flash, and I could almost feel the bullet or the report go above my head. Obviously, at that point, I realized that this was the guy who had done the shooting.
Then the guy turned and went around the corner, and I—just out of reaction—went back into the courtroom and took cover. There was silence for a while. All I could hear was people running around in panic. There were a lot of people in the courthouse, and there was a lot of confusion going on. Then I heard more shooting on the other side of the floor, so I walked out of the courtroom and into the lobby. While I was standing there, Jack Sierra—a sergeant in my department—approached me and asked me what was going on. I told him that I confronted the guy, that he’s an older white male, that he’s got gray hair, this and that. As we were conversing, I heard this door around the corner come flying open. It was like someone had just flung open a door, slamming it up against a wall. Right after that, I heard some more gunfire, and Jack moved away from me a little bit. A second or two later, the guy came around the corner, firing more rounds.
Now there’s an escalator right there that he could have gone down to try to escape, but he didn’t take it. Instead he looked right at me—I guess because I was in my uniform and Jack was in plainclothes—and then started running toward me. As I looked at him, I could see a gun in each of his hands. So there I was in the hallway, with this guy running at me, firing two guns.
I brought my weapon up and I fired.
Jack fired just a split second before me. His round struck the suspect in the lower left side, which caused the guy to kind of spin and fall at the same time. I saw my first round hit him in the head. I fired a second round, but I didn’t see where it hit. Then the guy went down, lying on his stomach and his chest. I could see that he had dropped one of the guns and that he was trying to get up. I started yelling at him, “Stay down! Stay down! Stay down!” But he didn’t. He started to get up by pushing up with his hands. He got as far as his hands and knees, then he started to pick his hands off the floor. At that point, I fired another round, and he dropped the gun. Then I went up to handcuff him.
As I was handcuffing him, he asked me, “Did I kill the bitch?” I guessed that he was referring to the woman I’d seen in the courtroom, but I didn’t say anything at that point. After I got the cuffs on him, he started to complain to me that the cuffs were too tight. I thought—maybe even out loud—“Why is this man worried about how tight the handcuffs are when he’s bleeding from the head and the chest?”
It was total chaos in this courthouse. There was a report of another gunman on the plaza level, so I asked the guy, “Who’s with you? Is anybody with you?” He responded, “No, I came alone. I took the bus here. There’s nobody else with me.” I couldn’t believe what had just happened, so when I heard the report that there was another gunman, I thought that maybe the situation wasn’t over. I’d thought to myself, “My God, what is going on here?” But once he said he was by himself, I took heart in that. I kind of believed him. Shortly after our brief conversation, the medics showed up and took him away.
The whole thing had lasted five, maybe ten, minutes from the time I first heard the gunshots to the time the medics took him away. I couldn’t believe what was going on, especially when the guy first shot at me. It was the ultimate surprise because I always thought that if somebody was going to try to kill me, it would be a gangster, a biker, someone like that. So it was a total shock when this older white male who looked like my father shot at me. It was total amazement: “Oh, my gosh, you’re the bad guy!”
Then, when he came around the corner shooting at us, I couldn’t believe that it was still going on. There were a lot of other officers all over the courthouse, so I just couldn’t believe that this thing started on one side, and this guy managed to go almost all the way around the floor; that nobody had put this guy down, killed him, or taken him into custody. I just could not believe it went on as long as it did. I even said to myself, “I can’t believe this. This has got to stop.”
I had tunnel vision, and things started to slow down as he came at us. I was so focused on him that I didn’t even know that another officer, Mike Ball, was in the hallway shooting along with Jack and me. I also didn’t know that when the guy turned the corner, he shot a security guard who was standing in this little indentation in the hallway off to my left. Shot him in the leg. I mean, the hallway was only about twenty-five feet wide, and I didn’t know these guys were there. When the suspect came around the corner, it was like my brain fixed on what I needed to do, so all I saw was him.
I was looking down the barrel of my gun through the sights when I fired my first round. I saw him spinning. I heard Jack shoot, but it was like my shot was just an instant after his. It was like, “Bang, bang,” real fast. My .45 didn’t feel like it would when I’d shoot at the range. I didn’t feel the recoil, and I even said to myself, “My gosh, this isn’t like it is on the range!” It was weird. I was concentrated on the suspect, and it felt like a popgun going off in slow motion. After Jack’s first round, I didn’t hear any of the other shots he and Mike fired. I could hear my own, but they were muffled, like somebody put a pillow over the gun.
Like I said, I saw my first round hit the guy in the head. It caught him kind of above and behind his right ear. I could see the flesh separate, and I could see the blood splatter when the round impacted. I didn’t see my other two rounds hit him, but I found out later that the second round hit him in the upper chest, and the round I fired as he was trying to get up hit him in the hand he was holding the gun in, separating one of his fingers from his hand. That’s what he was talking about when he complained about the cuffs being too tight; his hand hurt because he was missing a finger. I don’t remember where all of Mike and Jack’s rounds hit, but all total, we shot the guy nine times: three by me, three by Jack, and three by Mike.
Before we stopped him, the guy shot five people. He was in court for a divorce proceeding, and he just went nuts. He pulled two .38s out of his briefcase and started shooting. He had a lot of ammunition that he’d stuffed in his pockets, and he reloaded a couple of times after he got out of the courtroom. In fact, he reloaded right after my first confrontation with him where he shot at me. The woman I’d seen at the table was his wife. So he killed his wife, shot his attorney, shot her attorney, shot the security guard, and shot a bailiff. He also shot at the judge, but he didn’t hit him. He also shot at another police officer at some point but missed him. So all together, he fired on at least seven people besides Jack and me, wounded four, and killed one before we were able to stop him.
• • •
The key thing about my shooting is that the North Hollywood bank robbery happened one week prior to it. The morning of the shooting, I saw the video of that incident for the first time. I had heard what had happened, but I was still shocked as I watched those two guys with body armor and automatic weapons shooting it out with the LAPD for such a long time. It sent a shiver down my spine because I was getting ready to go to my extra job, working security at a bank, as I watched it. I double-checked all my equipment, made sure my pistol was loaded, topped off my magazines, and headed to work.
I got to the bank at 7:15 and just did the usual stuff. At a quarter to nine, an armored car pulled up. I thought that was kind of unusual because they usually come over after the bank opens. The armored car left at about five minutes until nine. I know the car times because I was watching it. Nine o’clock I opened the doors. I was getting really sleepy, really bored, and I said to myself, “What a boring job this is.” I actually remember myself saying that. Then, at 9:10, I saw three masked figures with assault rifles run through the foyer of the bank. They were wearing all black, including their ski masks.
I was located adjacent to the front door in a little hallway that branches off the front door before the floor opens up into the lobby. When I saw the figures run in, I had some weird thoughts. The first thing I thought of was SWAT for some reason, like maybe the team was doing a practice raid. Then Halloween even came into my mind. Maybe they were trick-or-treaters. It was just disbelief. Those thoughts lasted like a hundredth of a second, because by the time I had them, I already had my gun up. As soon as all that weird stuff passed through my head, I moved closer to them because I wanted to reduce the advantage they had with their long guns. I remember seeing these two girls sitting behind these two desks that were dead smack right in the middle of the lobby, and I thought, “Oh, God. They’re going to get hit.” I had to think of a way to draw the robbers’ fire, so when I got about fifteen feet away from them, I shouted, “We’re being robbed!” and went to shoot the first guy. I was scared, but I felt that I had to stop them before anything happened to the people inside the bank.
When I squeezed the trigger, my gun malfunctioned. I heard this loud “CLICK” that echoed through the hall, so I did the tap, rack, and shoot drill to clear the weapon. I watched the ejected round come out, and by the time I came back up with my gun, I had eye-to-eye contact with the third guy through the door. He raised his weapon, and I got off my first round. I fired that first round center mass, but nothing happened. When he didn’t go down after that center mass hit, I thought that he might be wearing body armor. I moved down to his legs with one round and then back up to his face with at least two more. He dropped like a rock. As soon as he dropped, I stopped firing at him.
By that time, all hell had broken loose. When I opened up on the third guy, guy number one and guy number two started shooting at me with their AR-15s. I didn’t know it at the time, but the number-four guy, who was on the outside with the getaway car, also started shooting at me through the glass with a 9-millimeter pistol at about the same time. So as I was shooting at the third guy, I heard a lot of gunfire and watched the walls exploding by me as the rounds from the other three guys were hitting the Sheetrock.
It was kind of strange, but once they started shooting, I wasn’t scared anymore because all of a sudden I felt like I had a duty to protect the people in the bank. I really can’t explain it, but I was thinking about those people and about what I had to do to take out the bad guys. I
felt I had a duty to eliminate the threat they posed to those people. So I stood my ground, exchanging shots with the two guys in the bank for a few seconds. Then their rounds started getting closer to me, and I retreated back into the hallway. A few seconds later, I came back out and tried to take them on again. When I got back to engage the guys inside the bank, the guy I shot was gone, but the other two guys inside the bank were still shooting at me. Their gunfire was real intense. Then I ran out of ammunition and retreated back into the hallway again.
In the back of the hallway, there’s a door that leads to the back of the bank that I wanted to go through to get out of the bad guys’ line of sight and sneak around on them. The door is always locked, so I went to open it with the key I had, but my hand was shaking so bad I couldn’t get it in there. As I was doing that, the number-one guy apparently figured that I was out of bullets, and he came almost all the way into the hallway to get me. I peered around the corner, and what I saw is the thing I remember the most out of the whole bank robbery: the number-one guy firing at me with his AR-15. I remember it because I saw these star-shaped bursts of fire and the heat vapors coming at me. Then, as soon as I pulled my head back, I saw the Sheetrock explode in front of my face where my head had been.
The rounds were penetrating through the wall at the corner there, and I thought I was going to die. I saw my whole life pass before me. Then, for some reason, I got real angry. When that happened, I started thinking about my new girlfriend, how I’d hate to lose her because I’d just met her. I also thought about my dad because I’m real close to him. I don’t know what it was. He just came to mind. I also thought about the rest of my family. I could almost see their faces, but that was not connected to anything.
I could still see the bullets popping into the hallway, but I reloaded and shot back. The gunfire from the guy was so intense that I just stuck my hand around the corner and just started spraying. When I stopped shooting, there was silence, and I peered around the corner. Nobody was there. I didn’t want to walk into an ambush if the guys were still in the bank, so I went back to that back door and managed to open it. It leads behind the teller lines, so I scanned and checked the area and went into the teller booths. Nobody was there. Then I jumped over the teller booth into the main lobby. I didn’t see anybody. Then I ran over to one of the desks in the middle of the lobby, ducked under it, and called 9-1-1.
Into the Kill Zone Page 25