Which story is better?
Tommy’s way out of it was the ultimate bluff. He knew he was going to get his ass kicked, or get killed. For us, getting knocked down is getting killed.
Tommy said to the guy in charge, “You know, you guys got me.There’s no two ways about it. Maybe I can hurt somebody, but I’ll tell you what. I’m going to bite your fucking nose off your fucking face. I’m taking your nose.”
And he bluffed his way right out of it.
The guy said, “Oh, wait a minute, man. That’s OK.”
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.
He had a fatal wound from the shotgun blast, and was probably going to bleed out in a couple minutes, decided it wasn’t worth it, put the gun to his head and shot himself.