Which story is better?
But things don’t always go smoothly for Otto. One day he was playing to a street crowd with a puppet on his arm when a drugged person came up to him and started talking roughly to the puppet.
“Otto was just unable to resist the opportunity. ‘Come on! Come on! You got a problem, tough guy? Come on!’
“‘Oh, yeah? How do you like this?’ The guy pulls a knife.
“Otto thinks he’s playing along. ‘Oh, yeah? What are you going to do with that? Oh, a pussy with a knife! You don’t have the balls to use it!’
“Then Otto goes, ‘Awwwww!’ and slumps. The guy had stabbed the puppet, and got Otto in the arm. Then the crowd jumped him.”
A captain that I knew tells me the story and jokingly says, “Make sure this guy doesn’t die.” I even smiled, a little bit, good-natured gallows humor. It turns out four hours later we shoot this guy to death in the hallway. The captain who was by then off duty called me up and apologized.
In his apartment the guy had his eighty year old father at gunpoint. Our tactics and response unit drilled a hole from the apartment above and put down a little filament which is a television camera, a little wire hanging down over his refrigerator.
This guy wanted cigarettes.
We could see him standing at the door with the gun. We said no. This is a bad guy. As a tactic we cut off communications.
He wants to talk to us now. He threatens, “If youse don’t talk to me I’m going to set the house on fire.”
You’ve got a building with forty families in it, and he’s on the first floor. We call in the fire department stand ting by, all lined up in the streets with their hoses.
The guy does in fact start a fire. It’s starting to go good in there, but you can’t run in because he’s got a gun.
All of a sudden the smoke starts to get real heavy. Through the smoke we see he’s got his father in front of him, this eighty year old man. He’s pushing him forward. One cop grabs the father and pulls him out of the smoke.
There’re two guys with rifles in the hallway. They shoot this guy on the spot. He goes down. Every body gives him quick CPR. You don’t want him to die. We put him on a stretcher ran him out past the firemen.
They say, “What happened to him?”
One of the cops says, “We shot him.”
“For starting a fire?” He didn’t know what was going on in the hallway.
Those was only the second that I lost in thirteen years, but they came a week apart. They just went sour. If a guy comes out with a gun, it’s kill or be killed, and like a gunfight in the street when someone starts to draw.