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.

He came down here to hide, recruited two additional people for robberies. Not knowing about these robberies, we served an arrest warrant for him on the murders on his girlfriend’s house. He wasn’t there. This was Wednesday. She told me, “officer, he’s not going to be taken alive. He’s a crazy man.”

On Friday we received information from an informant that three men were going to rob this warehouse because they knew there was cocaine and money. We didn’t piece together that this would be the same people. We surrounded the building, waiting most of the night.

They ended up showing up, broke into the warehouse, all armed. We could see the weapons as they were going in. I was next to a van. Thje first fellow came out. I told him to get down, and he did. The second fellow came out. I told him to get down and he did. Then the one involved in the homicides came out. I told him to get down. He had a .45 in his hand, and just raised it up at me. And I had to take the shot. Hhhhh.