We started talking to him through the door.

He said, “Go away or I’ll jump. “

One senior official said, “Well, let his wife talk to him.”

She got up to the door and said , “Albert, you’re acting like an ass. Why don’t you come out?” Which completely flipped him.

We started telephone negotiations. I was talking with him, looking at him from another apartment across his terrace. He was facing a deal for him to turn hmself in. He knew he was going to be arrested, do ten years, be disgraced and lose everything, including his million dollar job.. He had nothing to live for. But I had him a few times.

He was saying, “OK, I’m going to come out now. I’m going to feed the dog, then I’ll come out.”

A good and a bad sign – good that they’re going to come out; bad that they start performing rituals. They just want to get washed. They just want to feed the dog. They just want to tidy up the loose ends, which happens a lot in suicides.

Tactically it was very difficult to get him. He was on a highrise terrace. Our team prepared to throw one of these cargo nets from the thirty third floor over the balcony to cops on the thirty first floor who would try to pull it tight against his ledge.

We talked for about seven hours, up and down. Yes, he was on my side. No, he can’t come because there was nothing to live for.

He had decided to come out three times. Each time I walked over to the other building and knocked on the door.

He’d say, “Who is it?”

I’d say, “It’s me, Gary. Are you going to come out now?” I’d walk all the way back, pick up the phone. “Why aren’t you going to come out?”

“Well, I don’t want to come out. What am I going to do?”

Again I talked about life, about all the things he had to live for.

We decided to move on him. We opened door slowly. He was in the living room. He ran out to the ledge. The net was dropped, pulled tight. With superhuman strength he squeezed out around it and dove thirty two floors to his death.

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.