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.

They get there, open the door, look inside, see somebody on the sofa who appears to be dead. The guy slams the door and the iron door on them. Uniform called swat. We go. They start negotiation with him.

We go into that house, gassed up with our masks on, listening to him talk to negotiators for three hours with two dead bodies no more than three feet away from us, listening to this guy saying, “I don’t care who comes in, I’m going to kill them. I know you’re out there. I know they’re in my kitchen. I can hear them.”

Quiet as you want to be, you’re still going to make noise. You’re breathing through the masks. Plus the guy knows his house, the creaks and noises. Three hours, nonstop.

Finally the negotiator says, “We’re going to try a technique where we’re going to bring him down. If you confront him with a group of guys, chances are he’s going to give up.”

Well, as soon as Felix made entry into the living room, jumping over those two dead bodies, he opens up on us, firing two rounds. Felix was able to get off one shot, caught the guy in the left arm with the shotgun. I shot two rounds with my MP5 sub machine gun. I missed. The shotgun had knifed him around sideways leaving five rounds in the wall in a pattern of softball size where he had been. The guy ducked back in the bedroom.