Latest / Blue Grit Podcast: The Voice of Texas Law Enforcement / #012- “Terror on Texas soil”

Transcript

#012- “Terror on Texas soil” · Blue Grit Podcast: The Voice of Texas Law Enforcement

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Maryland police officer is gonna receive the National Medal of Vambler for stomping two gunmen in a terrorist attack.
0:10
SPEAKER_05: I fired several rounds on him, he falls to the ground, he drops his rifle.
0:14
SPEAKER_05: I directed my attention to the driver.
0:17
SPEAKER_05: I fired a couple more rounds and I was kidding block 214 caliber.
0:23
SPEAKER_05: They had about six, I think they had six guns and about 1,500 rounds of ammunition.
0:28
SPEAKER_03: Welcome back, listeners, watchers, viewers.
0:33
SPEAKER_03: It's Blue Grit Podcast, Tyler Owen, Point McNear.
0:38
SPEAKER_03: Got a special guest on the day.
0:39
SPEAKER_03: Let you introduce your uh fellow colleague here.
0:42
SPEAKER_02: We have a freaking American hero.
0:46
SPEAKER_02: Um I am super proud to call him a coworker, or was a coworker.
0:51
SPEAKER_02: We're both retired now, and a good friend, Greg Stevens.
0:55
SPEAKER_02: Pleasure to be here, man.
0:56
SPEAKER_02: Thanks for inviting me.
0:58
SPEAKER_02: Yep.
0:58
SPEAKER_02: So he's got a crazy story.
1:01
SPEAKER_02: Um we talk a lot about leadership and we talk a lot about what goes on and the craziness of law enforcement.
1:07
SPEAKER_02: Um, but one thing we talk about a lot is police every day is ordinary people doing extraordinary things, people doing uh value uh extremely um displays of valor in the face of danger.
1:24
SPEAKER_02: And it's ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and Greg defines uh heroism when he's when he's got this stuck, the deck stacked against him.
1:32
SPEAKER_02: Well, that was a mouthful.
1:33
SPEAKER_02: I almost said some bad words.
1:35
SPEAKER_02: When he's got I wouldn't didn't mean to cuss you.
1:38
SPEAKER_02: That's okay.
1:38
SPEAKER_02: I'm used to it.
1:40
SPEAKER_02: Let's start off.
1:41
SPEAKER_02: Tell us tell us where you grew up, tell us about, tell us who Greg is.
1:45
SPEAKER_05: Well, um actually um I was born in Canada.
1:50
SPEAKER_05: I was born in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada.
1:53
SPEAKER_05: And uh my both my parents were Canadian.
1:56
SPEAKER_05: I have uh uh two older sisters, and and uh uh we were all Canadian.
2:02
SPEAKER_05: And uh when I was in the first grade, I think it was, uh my dad had a business opportunity.
2:09
SPEAKER_05: We were living actually living in Montreal in the province of Quebec at the time.
2:13
SPEAKER_05: Uh my dad had a business opportunity that brought him to Austin, Texas, of all places.
2:18
SPEAKER_05: So talk about a culture change from from Montreal to Austin, Texas.
2:23
SPEAKER_05: And Austin back then was probably it wasn't quite, I don't think it was a hundred thousand people yet.
2:30
SPEAKER_05: Oh wow.
2:30
SPEAKER_05: What year was that?
2:31
SPEAKER_05: That's I think it was in 1963, 62 or three.
2:36
SPEAKER_05: Anyway, uh so uh I grew up basically uh r uh right here in Austin, Texas.
2:44
SPEAKER_05: And uh and when I was 21 years old, I had to become a naturalized American citizen because I knew I wanted to be a policeman.
2:53
SPEAKER_05: And um in order to do that, you have to be an American citizen.
2:56
SPEAKER_05: So um, and I wanted to be an American citizen anyway.
2:59
SPEAKER_05: I and this was home for me.
3:00
SPEAKER_05: I don't I don't remember a whole lot about Canada.
3:03
SPEAKER_05: Um but um anyway, so I became naturalized, and a couple of years later I I had I was going to school down at Texas State.
3:13
SPEAKER_05: It was called Southwest Texas State at the time, but after I left they felt compelled to change the name.
3:18
SPEAKER_05: I'm not sure about that, but anyway because of you, but oh I'm I'm I don't know.
3:24
SPEAKER_05: Um anyway, I had the opportunity to go to work at the police department there at Garland, and um and that was in May of 1978 that I started there, about six days after my twenty-third birthday, so I was just a baby and and I stayed there until I retired in uh the last day of August 2018, so I had uh forty years, three months, and nine days on the job before I I walked away.
3:49
SPEAKER_05: I did all of it in a uniform.
3:52
SPEAKER_05: And um, you know, I I I had opportunities to promote if I had been inclined to, and and I and I actually studied and and almost did once, and that's when it the reality hit me.
4:04
SPEAKER_05: Man, what was I thinking?
4:06
SPEAKER_05: I almost screwed up and got promoted.
4:08
SPEAKER_05: I did.
4:09
SPEAKER_05: I was fixing to give up my weekends off, my my take-home vehicle.
4:12
SPEAKER_05: I was a motor officer at the time, and and uh I was like, man, what were you thinking there?
4:18
SPEAKER_05: And my son was about eleven or twelve years old.
4:20
SPEAKER_05: I heck, I'd never get to see him again.
4:23
SPEAKER_05: Probably be working evening shift with Thursday and Friday off or Wednesday and Thursday off.
4:29
SPEAKER_02: So did you know in college down in San Marcus, did you did you have a feeling you were wanting to be police or how'd that happen?
4:36
SPEAKER_05: Actually before that.
4:38
SPEAKER_05: Um I always had a as a kid, I had an interest and I thought it was kind of an interesting I mean I didn't really as a young boy, I didn't really understand the magnitude of that or anything about that, you know.
4:52
SPEAKER_05: Um but I I was always kind of mesmerized by by the police, right?
4:57
SPEAKER_02: Anybody in your family law enforcement that caused that to develop?
5:00
SPEAKER_05: No, I'm I'm the beginning of that.
5:04
SPEAKER_05: Um maybe the ending of that too, couldn't think of it.
5:07
SPEAKER_05: Anyway, uh but as I got older and I was in high school, um actually I think my sister, my oldest sister, dated a guy that was a policeman here in Austin for a for a short while.
5:17
SPEAKER_05: She's nine years older than me, so she's quite a bit older than me.
5:20
SPEAKER_05: And uh but anyway, um I just had an interest and and I started, I decided I'd gone to school and I left school because I really didn't know what I wanted to do.
5:30
SPEAKER_05: Once I decided what I that I was gonna pursue law enforcement, I went back to school, did rather well because I had I was focused, hadn't knew what I was wanting to do.
5:40
SPEAKER_05: And uh rode out with the Austin PD a couple of times, and man, I was hooked.
5:44
SPEAKER_05: Very first time I rode out, um, we hadn't been in the car 15 minutes and we're working East Austin and we're going down, I don't know what street it was, but there was a kind of industrial area over to the right and a whole line of trucks sitting over there, and there was a guy, it's the middle of the night.
5:58
SPEAKER_05: There's a guy with the hood of a truck open, loaned in there, and I told the guys riding with, I said, Hey, I don't think that guy should be in that truck.
6:05
SPEAKER_05: And he looks over there, went over there, and we we caught us a guy burglarizing those trucks, stealing the batteries out of him.
6:10
SPEAKER_05: So I was hooked.
6:11
SPEAKER_05: I was, you know, 15 minutes in, I think a bad guy.
6:14
SPEAKER_03: And that was just on a ride-along.
6:15
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you know, and so many times, and I was guilty of it, and I'm sure you guys were too, but where you get the notification of you had a rider tonight, and there's that, oh, because we're, you know, we love riding one-man or one-woman vehicles.
6:27
SPEAKER_03: Sure.
6:28
SPEAKER_03: But man, our profession is the recruitment and the retention and people wanting to get into this line of work, it's dwindling daily, if not hourly.
6:36
SPEAKER_03: And so I with with to I guess to expand upon that is that if any listeners out there that that have the opportunity to have a ride along, man, take it serious and embrace it.
6:44
SPEAKER_03: And uh, you know, you could have so much impact on somebody's life and and and have a future Greg Stevens or in Clint McNear or God forbid a Tyler Owen.
6:53
SPEAKER_03: But you know, that's that's their opportunity that that you could uh you know you could jump on.
6:57
SPEAKER_03: So I just wanted to jump on that real quick.
6:58
SPEAKER_03: Because somebody this this past week was complaining about having a rider, and I said, Man, come on, dude.
7:02
SPEAKER_03: So anyway.
7:03
SPEAKER_05: Well, you know, the interesting thing about that too is he and I immediately developed a relationship, and I haven't heard from him in 30, 40 years now, but um, but that developed a bond there uh automatically almost.
7:18
SPEAKER_05: And so, you know, after after that night of riding, he he was like, anytime you want to come ride, you just call me and we'll make it happen.
7:26
SPEAKER_05: Because they had a rider policy where you couldn't ride, you know, every night.
7:30
SPEAKER_05: But um, but I I you know that was kind of the first that was when they set the hook.
7:37
SPEAKER_05: And uh and I got reeled in and and I really wanted it bad, and and uh and Randy Bailey, who Clint knows who we worked together with, he was the president of the uh student, the law enforcement students association down there that year, and I didn't know Randy.
7:55
SPEAKER_05: Um but uh he he set up a career day thing, and I decided to go to this career day, and there's a whole room full of police officers and you know from all over the state and other states even, and the two sharpest guys in the room were from Garland, Texas.
8:11
SPEAKER_05: And there was a lot of there's a lot of sharp guys in the room, don't misunderstand me.
8:16
SPEAKER_05: But it was it was prominent to me, and I went and talked to him, and um and after I talked to him, I didn't know anything much about Garland other than the pastor of the church that I attended, left our church, Crestview Baptist Church here in Austin, and went to pastoral church in Garland, Texas.
8:36
SPEAKER_05: That was the only thing I knew about Garland.
8:38
SPEAKER_05: And um So I went and talked to the uh head of the law enforcement um department, the criminal justice department there at Texas State, and I said, Do you know anything about this agency?
8:49
SPEAKER_05: And and he said, Yeah.
8:51
SPEAKER_05: He said they're not only recognized in the state as being one of the better agencies and recognized as progressive, and and but he said they're even recognized nationally that way too.
9:02
SPEAKER_05: And they're uh just on the brink of a real big growth spurt.
9:07
SPEAKER_05: And he said, if you have opportunity to go to work there, I would recommend that you consider it very seriously.
9:13
SPEAKER_05: So I had applied to Austin PD, I'd applied to um um oh well, I was looking at DPS, I was looking at a lot of different things.
9:24
SPEAKER_05: Um and uh ultimately, because of a number of circumstances, and I'm not gonna go into all that because we're not gonna waste our time on that, but ultimately Garland was the only agency I ended up officially applying to and going through the hiring process, and I was hired by them.
9:42
SPEAKER_03: That's cool.
9:43
SPEAKER_02: So 40 years at Garland, you almost kind of had it figured out how to do police work.
9:47
SPEAKER_02: 28 on uh motors, is that right?
9:50
SPEAKER_02: 28 of it on motors?
9:52
SPEAKER_05: About 28 on motors.
9:53
SPEAKER_05: That was the best twenty-eight years anybody could ever have ever.
9:57
SPEAKER_05: So I'm the minority here.
9:58
SPEAKER_02: He was a motor officer, and John behind the You know exactly what I'm talking about.
10:03
unknown: Yep.
10:03
SPEAKER_02: Was a motor officer.
10:04
SPEAKER_02: I'm in the minority on this.
10:05
SPEAKER_05: Well, I gotta ask you this though.
10:07
SPEAKER_05: How many times in the winter, when it's cold, you got your leather jacket on, you got your tall boots on, got it all shined up, your motorcycle's really clean.
10:17
SPEAKER_05: How many times do you ride in front of the windows at that shopping center and look over and look how cool you look going down?
10:23
SPEAKER_03: History, yeah.
10:24
SPEAKER_03: The history behind a motor officer, you you deal with you, I mean you just have a sense of a different sense of pride.
10:30
SPEAKER_03: Especially this and on the whole the whole uniform presence and and being that that motor crop.
10:35
SPEAKER_03: So yeah, I I I agree.
10:36
SPEAKER_03: Until you turn too sharp, you dump your bike right there in the middle of the highway, and those are most the most those are the most embarrassing moments.
10:45
SPEAKER_03: No, no, we uh we wake up, we have to kind of do a ritual in front of them, we salute them, we put them on, and we can't talk about that.
10:53
SPEAKER_03: That's something that only motor officers know.
10:55
SPEAKER_05: You're getting into kind of motor officer in the area there.
10:59
SPEAKER_05: Sorry.
11:01
SPEAKER_02: I didn't know if that's chats in the tall boots.
11:04
SPEAKER_02: Was just was that all or just a requirement?
11:07
SPEAKER_02: Or yeah, no.
11:08
SPEAKER_02: So an amazing career, 40 years, 28 oh motors.
11:14
SPEAKER_02: Let's talk about May 3rd, 2015.
11:17
SPEAKER_01: Here we are at the Curtis Colwell Center.
11:20
SPEAKER_01: It is Friday, the day before the Saturday Standing with the Prophet event, and uh we're being uh told to uh leave the area.
11:30
SPEAKER_01: So we'll continue this tomorrow for the uh event itself, Standing with the Prophet, as well as uh some coverage of the protest of the event led by AFDI and Pamela Geller.
11:43
SPEAKER_01: Uh this is Damon Rosen reporting for the United West from Garland, Texas, outside the Curtis Colwell Center.
11:51
SPEAKER_02: Um that was a day.
11:54
SPEAKER_02: That was a day.
11:55
SPEAKER_02: Um for the listeners, there's a large event center in Garland called the Curtis Colwell uh Event Center.
12:03
SPEAKER_02: It's kind of a convention center, conference center.
12:06
SPEAKER_02: It's up on 190 George Bush Freeway.
12:10
SPEAKER_02: Um May 3rd that day there was an event there called Draw the Prophet where it was intended the spirit, my understanding the spirit of it was was intended to be people to have artistic freedom to express their artistic uh ability to draw the Prophet Muhammad, which in the Arab world is an extreme no no no.
12:38
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's it's blasphemy in the in the Islamic faith.
12:42
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
12:42
SPEAKER_05: And this was this the promoter out of New York that put this thing on, Pamela Geller, her idea behind all this was um to to kind of point out to the um Islamic terrorists or the the radical Islamics that hey, we're not gonna kowtow to your intimidation, you know, the the Hebdo attack um in France and and another attack in the Netherlands and so on, another cartoon artist.
13:09
SPEAKER_05: She felt like that freedom of speech globally was being attacked here, and this was her effort to try and say, hey, we believe in free speech, and if we want to draw depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, we're gonna do that, whether you like it or not.
13:25
SPEAKER_05: Now, whether that's a good thing or not is I'm not sure that that was a good way to go about it, but that that I think that was the the idea behind the whole event.
13:34
SPEAKER_02: The spirit was this is American, you're not gonna tell us what to do, we're gonna do it.
13:37
SPEAKER_02: And you brought up a good point for historical context to listeners.
13:42
SPEAKER_02: This was 2015, January 7th, 2015.
13:46
SPEAKER_02: Charlie Hebdo, who was a satirical cartoonist in France, um terrorist had told him to quit making satirical depictions or cartoons uh related to terrorism and their beliefs.
14:02
SPEAKER_02: Um on January 7th, 2015, there was an attack, 12 murdered and 11 injured.
14:08
SPEAKER_02: The following month, February the 14th, 2015, in Copenhagen, Denmark, there was an event much like the one in Garland called Art Blasphemy in the Freedom of Expression in Copenhagen, Denmark.
14:21
SPEAKER_02: There was two killed and five police officers wounded during that attack.
14:26
SPEAKER_03: Oh wow.
14:28
SPEAKER_02: The the event we're talking about today is just a couple of months later on May the third, twenty fifteen.
14:34
SPEAKER_05: You know, and the Hebdo attack, we watched that on TV.
14:37
SPEAKER_05: People probably remember these guys were in body, you know, in black BDU type uniforms and with body armor with rifles, and they just went willy-nilly, just kind of shooting people as they came to them and killed a French policeman in the process.
14:50
SPEAKER_02: That's the one that they aired on TV for a couple of days where the guys running across the street, trips over the curb, balls on the sidewalk, and they run up and pretty much execute them.
15:00
SPEAKER_05: So um, and you gotta remember in 2015, this is when ISIS was at its pinnacle.
15:04
SPEAKER_05: Yep.
15:05
SPEAKER_05: Uh they had they had taken a lot of land in the Middle East, they were very strong, and their recruitment efforts in the United States were amazing.
15:13
SPEAKER_05: That's baffling to me, but it it was amazing and led to um a lot of, especially young Americans, impressionable Americans, um kind of falling by the wayside and and kind of going along with that with this very radical ideology.
15:30
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they were um they were becoming pretty efficient at radicalizing and weaponizing young minds at that at that point to quickly radicalize them.
15:42
SPEAKER_02: Not because oftentimes when you think someone changes their faith or their denomination, it happens over a period of years or relationships and they slowly change their beliefs.
15:51
SPEAKER_02: And at that time, they were radicalizing some young minds, impressionable minds, or misfits looking for a cause, I mean, in a matter of weeks and months, and then weaponizing those people to action.
16:02
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it that's amazing to me.
16:04
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I I'm I'm surprised and and kind of uh like I said, I'm just kind of amazed at the ability people have to do that.
16:14
SPEAKER_05: And for and for people to succumb to that.
16:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
16:16
SPEAKER_02: So on that day the event was going to take place at convention center, Garland had assets there on station, um, internal, external.
16:26
SPEAKER_02: I used to know the numbers when I was teaching about this quite a bit.
16:30
SPEAKER_02: About 300 civilians, or was it four?
16:32
SPEAKER_02: I don't remember the number.
16:33
SPEAKER_05: No, it's it wasn't it wasn't even three hundred.
16:35
SPEAKER_05: It was probably more in the probably two hundred and fifty or less.
16:39
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
16:39
SPEAKER_05: But you know, we it's it's an it to give put it into context, and for law enforcement people, they'll understand this especially.
16:47
SPEAKER_05: You know, you have an event that needs police security and it's got two hundred and fifty people there.
16:51
SPEAKER_05: How many officers are you gonna hire for that?
16:53
SPEAKER_05: Two?
16:54
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
16:54
SPEAKER_05: Maybe?
16:55
SPEAKER_05: Maybe, you know?
16:56
SPEAKER_03: With no alcohol.
16:57
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
16:58
SPEAKER_05: And and if if they're drinking, maybe four at the most.
17:01
SPEAKER_03: Depends on what they're drinking, and here they are.
17:03
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I guess so.
17:04
SPEAKER_05: But anyway, the reac we had for the city of Garland, not just the police department, but the police department, the fire department, and and uh and the school district, who has their own security force, um we had probably seventy or more officers assigned to this event.
17:23
SPEAKER_05: Um so that right ratio of 70 officers for 225, 250 people is just insane.
17:30
SPEAKER_05: So it was obvious this was not your typical security event and and not without a great deal of concern.
17:38
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
17:39
SPEAKER_02: And in having two people for a wedding of 200 people, I'm sure the history of the two recent terrorist attacks at a similar event probably was a the the determining factor and all of that.
17:53
SPEAKER_02: So let's talk about we had internal assets, external assets.
17:56
SPEAKER_02: Tell us about what was your role that day.
17:58
SPEAKER_02: What would you would you think you were headed to do that day?
18:02
SPEAKER_05: Well, I'll tell you the story about how I ended up there.
18:05
SPEAKER_05: It's really almost comical.
18:08
SPEAKER_05: Um I worked a lot of overtime in my career, as do lots of guys, right?
18:14
SPEAKER_05: Um, my situation at home was um my wife and I married later in life.
18:19
SPEAKER_05: We had a child, she wanted to stay home and be mom.
18:22
SPEAKER_05: I wanted her to be home and be mom.
18:23
SPEAKER_05: I loved that idea.
18:24
SPEAKER_05: Uh we were kind of used to two incomes, we kind of cut it in half, and then somebody had to make up slack.
18:30
SPEAKER_05: So basically, we were a two-income family, we just only had one guy working.
18:34
SPEAKER_05: And so that's how that worked out.
18:36
SPEAKER_05: And and we sat down, I drew, I wrote it all down on paper, and I showed her, I said, look, this is what it is.
18:43
SPEAKER_05: I can make this work.
18:44
SPEAKER_05: I said, it may not always be pretty, but I can make this work if this is what we really want to do.
18:49
SPEAKER_05: And and as a couple, um, we thought about it, we prayed about it, and we decided that's what we wanted to do.
18:55
SPEAKER_05: And I'm there's not a moment regret here for it.
18:58
SPEAKER_05: But uh anyway, so I I had a lot of overtime available to me in the traffic unit.
19:03
SPEAKER_05: We were, especially on motors, um, I wasn't on motors at the time, but but throughout my whole career in traffic, um, which was the last 33 just about years of my career, so I spent a lot of time in there.
19:16
SPEAKER_05: And uh I had a lot of overtime available, so I didn't I didn't go into the squad room, the patrol squad room, and sign up for stuff very often.
19:25
SPEAKER_05: Just because there's a lot more of those guys.
19:27
SPEAKER_05: I you know, I didn't want to take their overtime.
19:29
SPEAKER_05: They didn't have nearly as much available as I did, and I was never really hurting for it.
19:33
SPEAKER_05: But I had walked through the squad room, I I I like to look and see what was going on up there, but so I had gone through there and there was this draw the profit event, and there was one spot open on it.
19:45
SPEAKER_05: And I'd been in there, I bet you I'd been in there three or four times over the course of two or three weeks, and this one spot kept staring at you, was always open.
19:53
SPEAKER_05: And I thought, well, it's Sunday, and it's like you know, from you know, one to six or or one to seven or something like that, or or whatever it was, uh two to seven.
20:06
SPEAKER_05: I don't I forget what time it was.
20:07
SPEAKER_05: I think it was two to seven.
20:09
SPEAKER_05: So I'm looking at that thinking, man.
20:12
SPEAKER_05: What could go wrong?
20:13
SPEAKER_05: There's five, there, there's five hours easy overtime, yeah, right.
20:17
SPEAKER_05: So I I thought if nobody else is gonna take it, I'll I'll kill the Sunday afternoon from literally.
20:22
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no point intended.
20:23
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
20:24
SPEAKER_05: So that's how I I signed up, and I didn't I had no idea what the draw the profit thing was about.
20:29
SPEAKER_02: And oh, when you signed up you had no clue?
20:32
SPEAKER_05: No clue.
20:32
SPEAKER_05: No clue.
20:33
SPEAKER_05: I thought I was gonna direct traffic at the Colwell Center.
20:36
SPEAKER_05: You know, and you know, I'd work graduations there, all that stuff.
20:39
SPEAKER_05: It's easy peasy, really.
20:41
SPEAKER_05: I mean, you just kind of endure directing traffic, but other than that, it's it was no big deal.
20:46
SPEAKER_05: So I I I here I was, I signed up for five hours of easy overtime.
20:51
SPEAKER_05: And a few days later, I get a text.
20:55
SPEAKER_05: Now I'm the team leader for our SWAT negotiators at the time, right?
20:58
SPEAKER_05: So I get a text, a SWAT text that says, Hey, we have a briefing at so-and-so time in the Ashlock room, which is a meeting room at the police department.
21:07
SPEAKER_05: So I go to that, and it's about this draw the profit thing, and I'm I have no idea what it is.
21:13
SPEAKER_05: Finally, after a few minutes, I have to poke the guy next to me and say, What the heck are they talking about?
21:18
SPEAKER_05: I have no idea what's going on.
21:19
SPEAKER_05: Then he's then I get somebody starts explaining it to me, and I'm thinking, Oh, maybe there was a reason there with a name on there.
21:27
SPEAKER_05: I don't know.
21:27
SPEAKER_05: So, anyway, that's how I ended up there thinking.
21:30
SPEAKER_05: And then we had a briefing after that.
21:31
SPEAKER_05: That first briefing was just for SWAT team members, and the second one was actually for everybody that was gonna be working the event.
21:37
SPEAKER_05: And we had people from Homeland Security, ATF, um, FBI, uh, everybody that we even had the security people for the for the dignitaries that were gonna be there.
21:48
SPEAKER_05: Everybody that was gonna be there, we wanted in this briefing so we could all put eyes on each 'cause a lot everybody was gonna be in a uniform.
21:55
SPEAKER_05: So we wanted to be able to put eyes on each other and know if that's a good guy or a bad guy.
22:00
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
22:00
SPEAKER_05: But anyway, that's how I ended up.
22:02
SPEAKER_02: So what was your role that day?
22:03
SPEAKER_05: So I I was assigned um to the west entrance and I had a pretty simple assignment.
22:11
SPEAKER_05: Um the guy that put this thing together and you know him.
22:18
SPEAKER_05: So I I can tell this.
22:20
SPEAKER_05: He's a lieutenant and his name is Dan.
22:24
SPEAKER_05: Lieutenant Dan.
22:25
SPEAKER_05: So you know where that's going, right?
22:27
SPEAKER_05: But he's a good guy, smart, smart guy.
22:29
SPEAKER_05: I have nothing but respect for him.
22:31
SPEAKER_05: West Point Grad?
22:32
SPEAKER_05: Yes, just he's just off the charts, good guy, and good people and and smart.
22:39
SPEAKER_05: Shout out Dino.
22:40
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
22:41
SPEAKER_05: So anyway, and he and I have worked together on SWAT, and uh so he comes to me and he says, Man, I got I got a good deal for you.
22:49
SPEAKER_05: He said, This is easy.
22:50
SPEAKER_05: He said, I got you at the west entrance, simple job.
22:52
SPEAKER_05: Dignitaries are gonna come in there, dignitaries are gonna leave out there, and there's a caterer gonna come through there, nobody else comes or goes out of there, don't let anybody in the parking lot.
23:00
SPEAKER_03: Boom.
23:01
SPEAKER_05: Those are simple instructions for a motor cop, right?
23:03
SPEAKER_05: Yes, sir.
23:04
SPEAKER_05: I can, you know, yeah.
23:05
SPEAKER_05: That's Marine Corps like stuff, right?
23:08
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
23:08
SPEAKER_02: Was it drawn in crayons?
23:10
SPEAKER_05: Um, not yet.
23:11
SPEAKER_05: But anyway, uh, so I said, cool.
23:14
SPEAKER_05: I said that's great.
23:15
SPEAKER_05: So I go to my assignment and they gave me uh one of the um uh unarmed security guards for the school district joined me there, and uh and if I guess nothing else keep me awake, I don't know.
23:29
SPEAKER_05: But anyway, I I I was w working my post, and interestingly enough, if you looked at the rest of the event, every officer that was there was rifle trained, whether they were in a uniform or complete SWAT kit, they had their rifles deployed, and uh there were multiple officers at every entrance and every other part of that event, except the west entrance, where there was me and my security guard buddy.
23:58
SPEAKER_05: Who's unarmed?
23:59
SPEAKER_05: Who's unarmed, yeah.
24:00
SPEAKER_05: He's in a kind of a uniform, but he's not he's he doesn't have a an any kind of weapon with him.
24:04
SPEAKER_05: So uh, like I said, my job was just to have the promoter and her security crew come through, and I had the the entrance blocked off with tall, like four-foot cones, and I just left about a ten-foot opening where we'd get a car in and car out, and I stood kind of in that opening for the bulk of the day.
24:22
SPEAKER_05: And uh and they came and went, um as they should have, and all seemed to be pretty easy to get along with at the time.
24:31
SPEAKER_02: And for context, you were on if the building had a perimeter immediately around it, you were on kind of an outer outer perimeter.
24:41
SPEAKER_05: Yes.
24:41
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it was the west entrance was the the first.
24:45
SPEAKER_05: If you came down Naiman Forest Boulevard from North Garland Avenue, it was the first entrance you'd come to, and then you would continue on, and then the rest of the entrances and so on to the facility would be on your right hand side past where I was.
24:58
SPEAKER_05: So I was I was on the outer edges.
25:02
SPEAKER_02: Uh May in Texas, it was already pretty hot.
25:06
SPEAKER_03: Wasn't horrible, but it was motor cops, yeah.
25:11
SPEAKER_02: It was below 120, it wasn't that bad.
25:14
SPEAKER_02: Um the event throughout went pretty well.
25:20
SPEAKER_02: You had just left motors, so you had a brand new police car, was that right?
25:24
SPEAKER_05: Well, I'd been off motors a a little over a year.
25:27
SPEAKER_05: The first car I they were the the department, and I'm so appreciative of this, and I I have nothing but good things to say about uh the Garland Police Department.
25:38
SPEAKER_05: I never I was I was well treated and taken care of throughout the entirety of my career.
25:45
SPEAKER_05: I never uh you won't hear me say anything bad uh or was it perfect?
25:50
SPEAKER_05: No, it's not per none of it, no, none of it's perfect, but but I really was well taken care of.
25:54
SPEAKER_05: And at the end, toward the end of my career, when it was time for me to get off motors, and I knew when it was time, um they let me use a car that wasn't being utilized at the moment and didn't take me off of my motor yet, and let me kind of transition because they knew how I really didn't want to have to do it, but my body was telling me, hey, 28 years of this and you're getting a little older now, and and what was the killer for me was winter.
26:25
SPEAKER_05: I couldn't stay warm in the wintertime.
26:26
SPEAKER_05: Heat never bothered me.
26:28
SPEAKER_05: Um I could go out and work and do it right now if I wanted to in the heat, but I I I struggled to stay warm and and I would get home from work in the wintertime just exhausted because my body was working so hard trying to stay warm.
26:41
SPEAKER_05: But they had allowed me to transition and I had a car to use for a while, and then ultimately I did get that brand new car.
26:48
SPEAKER_05: It was a brand new Caprice.
26:50
SPEAKER_05: That was the nicest police car.
26:51
SPEAKER_05: And you had gotten it not long before this event.
26:54
SPEAKER_05: I got it in March.
26:55
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
26:56
SPEAKER_05: There's there's a we'll come back to that.
26:58
SPEAKER_05: We'll come back to that in a minute.
26:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
27:00
SPEAKER_02: So March, you get a brand new car.
27:02
SPEAKER_02: May 3rd, you're out working.
27:03
SPEAKER_02: The day went pretty smooth.
27:05
SPEAKER_02: It was kind of warm.
27:06
SPEAKER_05: It was good though.
27:07
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I I I um I didn't have to spend time in my car.
27:12
SPEAKER_05: I didn't I didn't feel compelled to do that.
27:14
SPEAKER_05: Um, I had some water in the car, and in case somebody got thirsty, I'd go get a drink of water.
27:18
SPEAKER_02: That's a great point for you for young officers out there.
27:22
SPEAKER_02: At that point, you did 40 years, you stayed on about three years after this event, three or four years.
27:27
SPEAKER_02: At that point, you've got 36, 37 years on.
27:31
SPEAKER_02: You told me in the truck that night why you didn't sit in the AC all day.
27:37
SPEAKER_05: You remember?
27:38
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, well that that wasn't my job.
27:40
SPEAKER_05: My job was to make sure that I was doing my job, and I can't do my job sitting in the car.
27:46
SPEAKER_02: Well, you said you felt something compelled you you needed to be seen, you needed to be outside, you needed to be visible and mobile instead of sitting in the AC, because I'm fat and I would have been sitting in the AC for five hours.
27:59
SPEAKER_02: I don't I don't know about that.
28:00
SPEAKER_02: But um But you told me that night sitting in the in the mobile command facility, I felt compelled to sit in that car.
28:08
SPEAKER_02: I mean to not sit in that car and to stand out there.
28:11
SPEAKER_05: Well, here's the thing.
28:13
SPEAKER_05: And it may or may not have been that night, and I don't I don't remember that conversation um unfortunately, but um Needless say I've slept since then.
28:22
SPEAKER_05: But anyhow, it's always been my belief that it on these security assignments, these extra job assignments, um if you're expected to be at a post and seen and available and and I can't, you know, I'm not comfortable sitting in a car because I can't see, I can see out in front of me.
28:43
SPEAKER_05: I can't see beside me good.
28:44
SPEAKER_05: I certainly can't see behind me where the hoot.
28:46
SPEAKER_05: And uh it's just uncomfortable for me.
28:49
SPEAKER_05: So I like I, you know, I think it's important and for the younger guys out there, if you're doing one of those assignments, don't be stuck in your car.
28:58
SPEAKER_05: I've I've watched these kids, and I call them kids because they look like they're about 14 now to me, but anyway, it's it's kind of funny to me.
29:08
SPEAKER_05: You watch these guys, everything has become so technological in police work.
29:12
SPEAKER_05: They have computers that they're working on, everything has to be done on a computer, they're on their phones because they that's how a lot of times there's communication going on there, and and and and and they got the air conditioner going and they got you know, all those things.
29:27
SPEAKER_05: And I almost feel compelled to go over and knock on the window and say, listen, see this button right here?
29:32
SPEAKER_05: If you push that button, the window will come down automatically.
29:37
SPEAKER_05: You know, it's like they don't even know they wouldn't have a clue what a crank window was, but but um but it's just kind of amazing to me.
29:46
SPEAKER_05: Um policing is done in a bubble anymore.
29:49
SPEAKER_05: And I was just the complete opposite of that.
29:52
SPEAKER_05: I needed to be out because I I want to hear things.
29:54
SPEAKER_05: I w I worked with young officers, I worked a lot of overtime on late nights and a lot of young guys out there, and and I used to tell them, hey, you want to hear what's going on in your beat?
30:05
SPEAKER_05: About two o'clock in the morning, shut your car off and either roll the windows down or get out of your car with the motor shut off and just stand there and listen a minute.
30:14
SPEAKER_05: You'd be amazed what you hear going on in the middle of the street.
30:16
SPEAKER_03: Smells cigarette smoke at 2 o'clock in the morning in a residential neighborhood.
30:19
SPEAKER_03: You know what's up.
30:20
SPEAKER_05: I mean, yeah, you know, there's all kinds of things.
30:22
SPEAKER_05: Kind of some lost art um in policing, in my opinion.
30:25
SPEAKER_02: Well, a 36-year veteran who chooses to sit in the Texas heat, stand out in the Texas heat rather than sit in his car with AC running.
30:33
SPEAKER_02: I think that's cool.
30:34
SPEAKER_02: That's stuck with me.
30:35
SPEAKER_02: And there's some more things you said that night we're going to talk about that you may or may not remember.
30:39
SPEAKER_02: But so the day goes smooth, you're out there about five hours, uh uh radio comes out on um event is indexed.
30:51
SPEAKER_05: Well, they uh I'm standing there and and uh actually I'd gotten one of the SWAT guys.
30:58
SPEAKER_05: We had uh two two-man cars with two kitted out SWAT guys, unmarked cars, that were roaming around on both sides of the deal, and I had one of them relieve me.
31:06
SPEAKER_05: I had to run up the building and use the bathroom, and uh and I got back and got resituated in my spot, and I'm standing there and I heard the radio crackles and I hear somebody say, Well, it looks like it just ended.
31:17
SPEAKER_05: And I thought to myself, this was a lot of ado about nothing at this point.
31:22
SPEAKER_05: We had no protesters, which was kind of weird either, also, because we had had an event prior to that um that kind of created some ire in the city, and without going into a lot of detail, but we had protesters, protesters at that, and and it was you could see the tension in the air.
31:39
SPEAKER_05: And this thing, not a single protester.
31:42
SPEAKER_05: It was it was just kind of I thought that was a little unusual too.
31:45
SPEAKER_05: But anyway, it said they said, Yeah, it looks like it just ended, and I'm thinking, well, good.
31:50
SPEAKER_05: Well, this was a lot of get my check and go to the house.
31:54
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm ready to go.
31:55
SPEAKER_02: So tell us tell us what happened.
31:57
SPEAKER_02: Tell us tell us what you see next.
31:59
SPEAKER_02: See here.
32:00
SPEAKER_05: Okay, so I'm standing there and I'm facing the street, and uh, and the the driveway has some elevation to it.
32:08
SPEAKER_05: There's an approach that goes up, and uh it's about a 40-foot driveway, and I've got 10-foot cones on top of that approach there, kind of blocking the driveway with about a 10-foot opening.
32:19
SPEAKER_05: I'm standing on the uh, if you're standing in the parking lot looking at the street, I'm standing on the left side of the driveway.
32:27
SPEAKER_05: And uh, like I said, been there most of the day.
32:32
SPEAKER_05: And this little black car comes up and pulls partially into the driveway and uh and stays partially left to right.
32:41
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, coming from my left to my right, going down the street, and uh partially in the driveway, partially still in the street, and pulls to the all the way to the other side of the driveway and comes to a stop kind of abruptly.
32:54
SPEAKER_05: And I thought that's weird.
32:58
SPEAKER_05: And um can't see inside the car.
33:00
SPEAKER_05: No, I can't I can't see anything.
33:02
SPEAKER_05: And it's not dark, it's just I just can't see in the car.
33:05
SPEAKER_05: And um, it's a little two-door car.
33:08
SPEAKER_05: So they pull up, so I'm watching this car, and here's a little an interesting tidbit.
33:14
SPEAKER_05: The the security guard that was with me, he's seeing the exact same thing, right?
33:19
SPEAKER_05: And he was behind me and to my left.
33:20
SPEAKER_05: I he never came into my field of view, so and and he told me this, and he actually testified to this in a subsequent trial, but anyway, he he told me, he said he saw the same thing that I was seeing, and he just assumed it was somebody gonna ask directions or ask a question or something like that.
33:37
SPEAKER_05: Um I had a different perspective on it because if they wanted to ask this guy a question, they needed to stop where I was, not 30 feet away, because the chances of me ambling over there 30 feet, they're gonna have to back up, they're gonna have to do something, you know.
33:52
SPEAKER_05: I'm I'm not really inclined to leave where I was at in order just to see if they had a question or something.
33:58
SPEAKER_05: But the security guard says he's walking toward the car.
34:01
SPEAKER_05: So here's a difference in perspective already, right?
34:05
SPEAKER_05: The next thing that happens is both doors of the car open simultaneously, and I can see the passenger side clearly, I can see the back clearly, I can't see the driver's side as much because it's blocked a little bit by the car, but I can see both doors open at the same time.
34:19
SPEAKER_05: And the next thing I see is the passenger stepping out in the barrel of a rifle coming up in my direction.
34:26
SPEAKER_05: So the security guard is seeing exactly the same thing.
34:33
SPEAKER_05: Okay?
34:34
SPEAKER_05: Now, once again, here we are on perspective, right?
34:38
SPEAKER_05: He said, and he told me this personally and and testified to it.
34:41
SPEAKER_05: He said, when he saw that, his first thought was this is the stupidest prank that anybody could ever pull.
34:50
SPEAKER_05: Because that garn policeman's gonna kill that guy.
34:54
SPEAKER_03: Wow.
34:54
SPEAKER_05: Well, interestingly enough, now we're kind of on the same page, right?
34:59
SPEAKER_05: We we took two different roads and finally got the same intersection.
35:02
SPEAKER_05: But the the the point being here is preparation isn't just learning how to shoot a gun, learning how to, you know, exchange um uh you know physical altercation uh or any of that kind of stuff.
35:17
SPEAKER_05: A lot of it has to do with this right here.
35:19
SPEAKER_05: It's mindset.
35:21
SPEAKER_05: He he wasn't prepared for something that dramatic or difficult to happen.
35:28
SPEAKER_05: Um his brain immediately went to this can't really be happening, this has got to be a prank.
35:33
SPEAKER_05: My brain wasn't there.
35:35
SPEAKER_05: As soon as I saw the barrel of the rifle coming up, I immediately was ready to engage.
35:40
SPEAKER_05: And and when I was asked in in a trial subsequent to this, uh the one of the attorneys said, Well, when you when you saw the barrel of the rifle coming up in your direction, what happened next?
35:51
SPEAKER_05: Well, my answer to that, and I and it's on the record, and my I said, my training kicked in.
35:57
SPEAKER_05: Because that's exactly what happened.
35:59
SPEAKER_05: I didn't I wasn't making a plan, I wasn't going, Oh, wait a minute, what do I need to do now?
36:03
SPEAKER_05: Right.
36:04
SPEAKER_05: I knew that it it was it was go time, I had to do something, right?
36:10
SPEAKER_05: So you can remember drawing your gun?
36:12
SPEAKER_05: Nope.
36:12
SPEAKER_05: Don't remember drawing my gun.
36:14
SPEAKER_05: The first actual memory I have is getting a sight picture and squeezing off around.
36:20
SPEAKER_05: And um and on the passenger first?
36:23
SPEAKER_05: Yes.
36:24
SPEAKER_05: And people have asked me, well, um, who shot first?
36:28
SPEAKER_05: And I have no idea who shot first, whether it was me or him or we shot simultaneously or what happened.
36:34
SPEAKER_05: I do remember a sight picture, and interestingly enough, I do remember every round I fired, I got a sight picture.
36:43
SPEAKER_05: And I remember also that my rate of fire was not this spastic as fast as I could pull the trigger.
36:48
SPEAKER_05: It was rather rhythmical.
36:49
SPEAKER_05: And it took me a few days to remember that.
36:52
SPEAKER_05: It it it didn't, it's kind of interesting.
36:55
SPEAKER_05: Um, you know, Colonel Grossman, I everybody probably most everybody who's listening here probably knows who Colonel Grossman is, but he had his book on combat talks about things that happen when you're engaged in combat and what your body does and doesn't do and those kinds of things.
37:10
SPEAKER_05: And um and and one of the things that he talks about is memory delays or memory lapses and those kind of things.
37:18
SPEAKER_05: It's all normal.
37:18
SPEAKER_05: There's not anything to get worried about, but it took me a few days that I actually remembered that particular thing.
37:25
SPEAKER_05: And uh and and I had this very rhythmical, rather, rate of fire, and I got a sight picture.
37:32
SPEAKER_05: But you know, when we when we train at the range, it's all about hitting what you're shooting at, and that was as fast as Greg Stevens could shoot at something and hit what he was shooting at.
37:41
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
37:42
SPEAKER_05: If I did it any faster, I was just wasting bullets, probably.
37:45
SPEAKER_05: Spraying and praying.
37:46
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
37:46
SPEAKER_02: So passenger exit comes up with the rifle, you engage him.
37:51
SPEAKER_02: I did.
37:52
SPEAKER_02: What what what happens during that engagement, or what's the next event that happens once y'all exchange gunfire?
37:59
SPEAKER_05: Um, well, I fired several rounds on him, he falls to the ground, he drops his rifle.
38:04
SPEAKER_05: Um, I knew I had two assailants, so I felt he was at least temporarily out of the fight since he dropped his rifle and went down.
38:14
SPEAKER_05: I directed my attention to the driver who had made his way out of the car and he was toward the at the back of the car.
38:20
SPEAKER_05: He had his rifle shouldered, and he was I'm I'm and I never saw the security guard, but I'm assuming that's who he was shooting at was uh the security guard who's headed for the Mexican border at this point because he has no cover, no nothing.
38:33
SPEAKER_05: He's just out of luck, right?
38:36
SPEAKER_05: And uh and so I I engaged the uh the driver, fired several rounds on him, he falls to the ground similarly to the to the passenger, drops his rifle.
38:46
SPEAKER_05: I still had concerns about the passenger, so I I readdressed my attention to him.
38:51
SPEAKER_05: He's laying on the ground and he's moving around.
38:54
SPEAKER_05: He hasn't retrieved his rifle, but he's got his hands up here around his throat and around this area, and he's moving his hands around and and we had talked about in briefing, paying attention in a briefing, we talked about IEDs and the possibility and probability that if anybody mounted any kind of attack, they would have small weapons, you know, uh handguns and rifles, and uh very likely IEDs of some sort, whether body borne or or or vehicle borne.
39:24
SPEAKER_05: So I'm thinking, while he's doing this, is he trying to pull a pin?
39:28
SPEAKER_05: Is he trying to push a button?
39:29
SPEAKER_05: I don't know what he's doing, so he is still a very much a threat in my mind.
39:35
SPEAKER_05: So I re-engaged him and uh fired several more rounds.
39:39
SPEAKER_05: He quit wiggling around quite so much.
39:42
SPEAKER_05: And uh and then I I once again directed my attention toward the driver.
39:48
SPEAKER_05: He hadn't done a whole lot.
39:50
SPEAKER_05: Um he had kind of pushed himself up and slumped back down.
39:52
SPEAKER_05: He hadn't retrieved his rifle, but once again, the IED thing is I had to make sure that threat was completely eliminated.
39:59
SPEAKER_05: I fired a couple more rounds and I had I was carrying a Glock 21 45 caliber handgun at the time and my slide locked back.
40:07
SPEAKER_05: I'd fired 14 rounds.
40:09
SPEAKER_05: And uh I immediately did a tactical reload.
40:14
SPEAKER_05: Wasn't something I thought about, and man, I was reloaded in a hurry.
40:18
SPEAKER_05: Um I was I that's one of the things I'm I'm kind of excited about when I tell this story is how that training really gets ingrained.
40:27
SPEAKER_05: Because, you know, weapon up, eyes down range, dropped my mag, retrieved another one, inserted my mag, recharged my weapon, got another sight picture, check the other guy, you know, and then by this time help had arrived, and they're screaming at me trying to get me to point a cover because I'm standing no man's land.
40:44
SPEAKER_05: But I'm kind of in a whole nother zone at this point.
40:47
SPEAKER_05: I'm my focus is very much where right in front of me, and it took them a while to get my attention.
40:53
SPEAKER_02: But so you had a Glock 2145 caliber.
40:57
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
40:58
SPEAKER_05: They were shooting AK style, AK.
41:02
SPEAKER_05: They were AK-47s with uh 762 by 39s, I guess, in it.
41:07
SPEAKER_02: And it was hundred-round drums, wasn't it?
41:09
SPEAKER_05: One of them had a hundred-round drum.
41:11
SPEAKER_05: They had about actually they had uh investigation would later reveal they had about six, I think they had six guns and about 1,500 rounds ammunition.
41:20
SPEAKER_05: Wow.
41:20
SPEAKER_05: They were there at a party.
41:21
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, they were shooting old cop wasn't what they were there for.
41:25
SPEAKER_02: Well, and they thought they were there for a massacre until they met a 60-year-old garland cop with a glock.
41:31
SPEAKER_05: Well, it's it's interesting.
41:33
SPEAKER_05: People ask me, you know, um why and why if they have if I have any idea why they picked that spot.
41:43
SPEAKER_05: And uh and I don't have any real um I can't point to evidence of this or any documentation per se, but these two guys were from Phoenix, right?
41:54
SPEAKER_05: So if coming from my left to my right, from Garland Road down Naiman Forest, I find it probably unlikely that the first driveway they came to, they're just gonna mount this attack after driving from Phoenix, right?
42:10
SPEAKER_05: I think they I think they uh surveyed this place.
42:13
SPEAKER_05: They reconned the area and they saw me and and the security guard there went down, see guys, all of them got rifles deployed, there's multiple officers, there's guys in cars, there's all kinds of things going on everywhere else.
42:27
SPEAKER_05: But heaven forbid, this one place, there's just two guys there, only one of them's armed, and he's a hundred years old.
42:36
SPEAKER_05: How hard can this be, right?
42:37
SPEAKER_05: Seriously.
42:38
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I I mean it from a tactical perspective, it probably was a pretty reasonable plan.
42:44
SPEAKER_02: Well, and I had seen documentation where they did a heat run prior.
42:47
SPEAKER_02: They had been down that road and turned around and gone back by.
42:49
SPEAKER_02: So I'd never heard that, but they had done at minimum a drive-by of a at a minimum heat run just to have a view of it.
42:56
SPEAKER_05: And I don't remember seeing the car more than once, you know, but there was a lot of cars coming and going.
43:00
SPEAKER_05: So it's a busy road.
43:01
SPEAKER_05: And it was a nondescript little black car.
43:03
SPEAKER_02: Right.
43:04
SPEAKER_02: So you fired 14 rounds of 45.
43:08
SPEAKER_02: Do you know how many rounds they got off?
43:10
SPEAKER_05: Um they had a little trouble because after the fact the uh the bomb unit kind of blew up the crime scene a lot, and there's reason for for that, but they think they got off about 35 rounds between the two of them.
43:23
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
43:23
SPEAKER_02: You had no cover.
43:25
SPEAKER_02: Your car was back behind you some distance, and then I think off to your left was a really small live oak tree that I wouldn't call much more than a sapling.
43:35
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
43:35
SPEAKER_05: So you were exposed.
43:36
SPEAKER_05: I required a much larger tree than that.
43:39
SPEAKER_05: You were you were exposed.
43:41
SPEAKER_05: I mean there.
43:43
SPEAKER_05: And here's the thing when this attack occurred, like I said, my training kicked in.
43:48
SPEAKER_05: I did what I was trained to do.
43:49
SPEAKER_05: This wasn't me thinking, okay, I'm gonna go all John Wayne on these guys.
43:55
SPEAKER_05: This was just me doing what I was trained to do.
43:58
SPEAKER_05: The only real conscious Thought that I had when this started to unfold was I need to become the aggressor in this battle because if I don't, I have no chance of survival.
44:11
SPEAKER_05: I have nowhere to go.
44:12
SPEAKER_05: I can't go to cover.
44:13
SPEAKER_05: I can't, any of that would have been disastrous.
44:15
SPEAKER_05: So I need to become the aggressor in this battle to have any chance of surviving it.
44:19
SPEAKER_05: Not a great chance, but at least that's better than no chance.
44:23
SPEAKER_05: And uh, and that was kind of the mindset that that came across.
44:27
SPEAKER_02: And that is freaking amazing because that night we talked in the in the mobile command facility, and I uh you may not remember it, but we were talking about it, and you realized while we were sitting in there waiting on the investigation and for the bomb units to blow up the car.
44:43
SPEAKER_02: And I I was picking your brain, hey man, what happened?
44:46
SPEAKER_02: And you said, you know, I was out in the open and I said, Did it ever occur to you to retreat behind your car?
44:52
SPEAKER_02: And you said, No, I was taking the fight to them.
44:55
SPEAKER_02: And, you know, in the Marine Corps years ago, they taught if you're ambushed, you turn and fight through it, because that's the that's not what anybody's gonna expect.
45:03
SPEAKER_02: And a hasty ambush, you you immediately turn and fight the ambush and take them head on.
45:07
SPEAKER_02: And I think when you have two young, radicalized guys and you turn and take the fight to them with some aggression and immediate action, you you've probably put them on their heels because clearly a guy with a handgun versus two guys with assault weapons with hundred-round drum magazine and another one with however that's probably not what they expected in their survey of the incident.
45:34
SPEAKER_02: And I asked you that night, you said not only did I not back up, I was still closing the distance.
45:39
SPEAKER_02: And I said, Were you really?
45:40
SPEAKER_02: And you said, I w I wasn't through killing those sons of bitches.
45:44
SPEAKER_02: And I don't remember that quote, but we'll go with that.
45:48
SPEAKER_05: Well and and and to be honest with you, um after this happened, emotions are rampant.
46:00
SPEAKER_05: I mean, this was not this isn't another day at the office for Greg Stevens.
46:04
SPEAKER_03: This is fighting two terrorists on Texas souls, probably not that every day.
46:08
SPEAKER_02: Well, there's a couple things that stood out about you, your character that night.
46:13
SPEAKER_02: You got really emotional, wanting to know if your family was okay.
46:16
SPEAKER_02: Yep.
46:17
SPEAKER_02: And I was joking around with you, trying to lighten it up, and I said, You just killed two freaking terrorists.
46:23
SPEAKER_02: Texas is now 2-0.
46:25
SPEAKER_02: Texas, you just killed two terrorists.
46:27
SPEAKER_02: You just won the Super Bowl.
46:29
SPEAKER_02: And you were pre- you were very emotional, worried about your kids, uh, about your your son and your wife.
46:37
SPEAKER_02: And then all of a sudden you lit up and you got it really angry and you wanted to know, did those son of a bitches shoot my brand new car?
46:44
SPEAKER_02: And you were asking, did they hit my car?
46:46
SPEAKER_02: I think they shot my brand new car.
46:48
SPEAKER_02: And that's how I learned you had a new you had and you said I get the department let me order it, they let me fix it the way I wanted it.
46:55
SPEAKER_02: I think they shot my damn car.
46:58
SPEAKER_02: I could I now that seemed pretty reasonable.
47:02
SPEAKER_05: Yep.
47:02
SPEAKER_05: Yep, that one stuck out to me.
47:04
SPEAKER_05: That was there is a story about the car beyond that though.
47:06
SPEAKER_05: Oh, is there?
47:07
SPEAKER_05: Oh, yeah.
47:08
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
47:08
SPEAKER_02: Well, and then later when the bomb unit came and blew up their car, you were worried about is there shrapnel?
47:13
SPEAKER_02: Did it hit my car?
47:13
SPEAKER_05: And I think it did, didn't it?
47:15
SPEAKER_05: Yes, it did.
47:16
SPEAKER_05: Yes, it did.
47:16
SPEAKER_05: They blew up my car too.
47:18
SPEAKER_05: Uh, not too bad, though.
47:19
SPEAKER_05: It I mean, they fit and they fixed it for me and and all was good.
47:22
SPEAKER_05: But um, yeah, I was um I was really proud of that car.
47:29
SPEAKER_05: That was like uh that was like being yes, it was I was awarded that car.
47:34
SPEAKER_05: I wasn't assigned that car, I was awarded that car, you know.
47:37
SPEAKER_05: And uh I was so very appreciative to have what a you know, that was my office on wheels, and I spent a lot of time in that car, trust me.
47:46
SPEAKER_05: And uh, and what a treat it was.
47:48
SPEAKER_05: And I was I had gotten it just the way I want.
47:51
SPEAKER_05: I mean, it was just just right.
47:53
SPEAKER_05: And for guys that work in a law enforcement, your car is an important tool.
47:56
SPEAKER_05: It is, it is.
47:56
SPEAKER_05: It's an important tool.
47:57
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
47:58
SPEAKER_03: So this event happens on Sunday.
48:00
SPEAKER_03: Uh and then the investigation, you know, kind of took some weeks, I would imagine, with the federal investigation on top of the state, and then your your you know, department has your the uh the critical incident.
48:11
SPEAKER_03: How soon did you start hearing uh from the White House uh, I mean, kind of an instant fame, I mean, quite honestly, and uh how how did that kind of process work?
48:23
SPEAKER_02: Well, initially and did you realize then what you had done?
48:27
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, no, not a clue.
48:29
SPEAKER_05: Um I hey, it was just I just did what I thought everybody would do, and I don't believe most people would.
48:36
SPEAKER_03: I'm not being disrespectful, but but not to you by any means, but when you think of ISIS, everybody has a standard kind of of what they think an ISIS fighter looks like, right?
48:47
SPEAKER_03: Right.
48:48
SPEAKER_03: So when they when the when they exited the car, based off the briefing, based off the reports, was it obvious to you that oh shit, I mean, here they are.
48:57
SPEAKER_03: Or what were they dressed like they were in France, tact I mean tactical pants?
49:02
SPEAKER_05: Was it I mean, yeah, they were I knew they were I I didn't think ISIS or it was just two guys trying to kill me, is what it was.
49:11
SPEAKER_03: That's why you didn't recognize it at the time.
49:13
SPEAKER_05: Right.
49:13
SPEAKER_05: And but they were wearing dark clothing, like tactical type clothing.
49:18
SPEAKER_05: They both had soft body armor on, and they both were wearing uh load-bearing vests with multiple magazines in them.
49:24
SPEAKER_05: So my think, my thought is their idea was they were gonna breach the perimeter where I was and then go on foot split up and then mount the attack as people because it everybody, it was the fatal funnel thing.
49:36
SPEAKER_05: Everybody was just starting to leave the facility.
49:39
SPEAKER_05: So yeah, they but but I didn't I wasn't thinking these are terrorists, I wasn't thinking these are just two guys trying to kill me and for whatever reason.
49:48
SPEAKER_05: I it really didn't matter to me at that point.
49:51
SPEAKER_05: Um and so I just reacted by doing what I was trained to do, basically.
49:56
SPEAKER_03: So how soon after did you hear from the White House and and what did that look like?
50:02
SPEAKER_05: Well, one of our assistant chiefs at the time um actually uh sent in a nomination.
50:10
SPEAKER_05: It's a non and and once I was there, I kind of I talked to um a a guy that there was a chief of police in Delaware, I believe it was, but that was actually the head of this committee that got all these applications, and they would go through all these applications and they would award up to um five of these medals a year.
50:31
SPEAKER_05: Um yeah, and so and they and they did the ceremony every two years.
50:36
SPEAKER_05: So up to there would be ten recipients every two years, right?
50:40
SPEAKER_05: And uh and I asked him, I said, Man, how do you go through all those?
50:44
SPEAKER_05: I said, policemen do extraordinary things every day all over this country.
50:48
SPEAKER_05: How in the heck do you figure out five out of those?
50:52
SPEAKER_05: Um, because I'm thinking, how did I end up here?
50:55
SPEAKER_05: You know, and he said, you know what's interesting, he says, we get we do get lots and lots of nominations, I mean hundreds, obviously.
51:03
SPEAKER_05: And he said, every year there's like five of them, or maybe six of them, but five or six of them that just seem to rise right to the top.
51:12
SPEAKER_05: And he said, it's not as hard as you might think it is.
51:14
SPEAKER_05: And I thought that was interesting.
51:16
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
51:16
SPEAKER_05: But uh, but anyway, this this assistant chief made then made the nomination and uh and I didn't know anything, I didn't even know he had, and until months later.
51:26
SPEAKER_05: I mean, this is not I mean it was it was almost a year to the day from the time the incident happened to the time I went to the White House.
51:33
SPEAKER_05: So this is a a kind of a lengthy process.
51:37
SPEAKER_05: And finally they came back to me one day in my office and said, Hey, uh, how do you feel about it?
51:42
SPEAKER_05: Maybe going to the White House and getting awarded a medal by the president.
51:46
SPEAKER_05: I'm all but laughing, like, okay, yeah, whatever.
51:49
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, right.
51:50
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, where's the camera?
51:53
SPEAKER_02: But anyway, uh here is the medal uh that she received if you want to show that to our viewers and well so you're the third recipient of the Garland Police Medal of Valor.
52:07
SPEAKER_05: No, the the the I'm the third recipient of the Garland Police Medal of Honor.
52:11
SPEAKER_05: Medal of Honor.
52:12
SPEAKER_05: Um there have been other there is a Medal of Valor that's also awarded as well, but you know, our police department was um came to being in 1951, I guess it was.
52:23
SPEAKER_05: And we've only had three recipients of the Medal of Honor, and that was uh uh Michael Moore, Mad Dog Moore, was uh was given the Medal of Honor.
52:33
SPEAKER_05: Um unfortunately he lost his life, uh stopped trying to stop a bank robbery and and was shot and killed.
52:39
SPEAKER_05: Um we had uh one of our who's now I I guess he's a captain, um that uh he he he was chasing a suspect and on foot and the guy turned around and shot him in the head.
52:56
SPEAKER_05: Which you would think that would be kind of the end of the chase, but no.
53:00
SPEAKER_05: Um he continued to pursue him um um in spite of his his wound and was able to catch him and ultimately um subdue him.
53:12
SPEAKER_05: I think he he was fatally killed and and he received this medal of honor.
53:17
SPEAKER_05: And then there's me, and I'm thinking that's some pretty interesting company to be a part of.
53:22
SPEAKER_05: Um kind of, you know, it's it's just surprising.
53:26
SPEAKER_05: You know, I I it it was really, especially right at first, it was really hard to navigate all the people that were, you know, just had so many nice things to say, and and and it was kind of uncomfortable to be honest with you.
53:40
SPEAKER_05: I I was really not used to that.
53:42
SPEAKER_05: Policemen don't that's not what policemen do.
53:44
SPEAKER_05: Right.
53:45
SPEAKER_05: You know, they just go do their job and you know, an occasional pat on the back goes a long way for most cops.
53:51
SPEAKER_05: You know, they they're just they're just glad they can do their job.
53:54
SPEAKER_05: Um recognition is not what it's all about.
53:57
SPEAKER_05: It's nice to get a little now and then, but more importantly, you know, you can get letters from the public and everything, that's all fine and good.
54:04
SPEAKER_05: But the most important recognition for me has always been from my fellow officers.
54:09
SPEAKER_05: If they say you did a good job, they know whether you did or not.
54:12
SPEAKER_05: Sometimes the public will think you did a good job when maybe you didn't even do that great a job.
54:16
SPEAKER_05: You know what I'm saying?
54:17
SPEAKER_02: So in the history of Garland Police Department, three Medal of Honor winners, you're one of those.
54:23
SPEAKER_02: And this is the public safety officer medal of valor presented from the president.
54:30
SPEAKER_02: And you are in the history of the United States, you're the 140th?
54:34
SPEAKER_02: 104th.
54:35
SPEAKER_02: 140.
54:35
SPEAKER_02: 104, yeah.
54:37
SPEAKER_02: 104th recipient of the police medal of valor from the president.
54:41
SPEAKER_05: And I think this came into inception uh in um at after 911.
54:45
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
54:45
SPEAKER_05: I think they started doing that.
54:46
SPEAKER_02: So maybe hold it up and maybe go on to the camera, get a shot of that.
54:50
SPEAKER_05: Let's see here.
54:51
SPEAKER_05: Uh straight across.
54:52
SPEAKER_05: There you go.
54:53
SPEAKER_05: That's what it looks like.
54:54
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's a it's a it's a beautiful medal, and man, what a what an honor to to get invited to the White House and be presented a you know a medal by the leader of the free world.
55:09
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
55:10
SPEAKER_05: Um, and I always look at it as it doesn't matter who the president is.
55:15
SPEAKER_05: Um it it's presented, you know, on behalf of the leader of the free world, on on behalf of the uh of the people of the United States.
55:22
SPEAKER_05: Yep.
55:23
SPEAKER_05: And and it's truly an honor.
55:24
SPEAKER_05: And I don't I you know it wouldn't it doesn't matter to me who the president is or was, or it could have been any of them, and and uh it wouldn't uh it doesn't make it any better or or less valuable either way.
55:37
SPEAKER_05: Whether whether you agree with somebody's politics or not, it's neither here nor there.
55:40
SPEAKER_05: That's right.
55:41
SPEAKER_05: You know, at this point.
55:42
SPEAKER_05: But uh what a what a great honor and and uh and what a great experience that was, you know.
55:48
SPEAKER_00: I imagine Officer Gregory Stevens, Medal of Valor, presented to Officer Gregory Stevens, Garland Police Department, Texas, for demonstrating extraordinary courage to save lives.
55:58
SPEAKER_00: Officer Stevens exchanged gunfire at close range.
56:02
SPEAKER_03: Well, uh you wanted to kind of just touch on wellness, uh kind of how it affected you, uh the incident.
56:12
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's a you know traumatic incident to go through.
56:14
SPEAKER_03: You just fought two two ISIS terrorists, you know, on a Sunday afternoon.
56:18
SPEAKER_03: Um and if you want to kind of briefly talk about you know wellness and and how you went through that, how you navigated through it.
56:25
SPEAKER_05: Well, you know, for me that that was just an incident.
56:31
SPEAKER_05: You know, being in the traffic unit for near about 33 of my 40 years, I may, you know, I was uh um an accident reconstructionist, made a lot of fatality, you know, accidents, and some of those are pretty gruesome and and uh all that.
56:50
SPEAKER_05: All that all that stuff takes a toll.
56:53
SPEAKER_05: This was just another one of those toll-taking kind of events.
56:57
SPEAKER_05: Um but it's interesting.
56:59
SPEAKER_05: Um I I managed my own wellness pretty well, not because I'm really that smart, but just because I did things that were teaching people to do.
57:11
SPEAKER_05: I just did it kind of because that seemed like the thing to do for me.
57:14
SPEAKER_05: It just I didn't have to think about it, it just happened.
57:17
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
57:17
SPEAKER_05: And uh here's a great example.
57:19
SPEAKER_05: I made a uh an accident call one night.
57:22
SPEAKER_05: I called in the middle of the night, and I was I was team leader for I was a negotiator on SWAT for about 22 years and and team leader for part of that, and I was a fatality investigator for 30-something years.
57:32
SPEAKER_05: My phone rang in the middle of the night a lot, right?
57:35
SPEAKER_05: And uh you were an investigator, person's investigator, your phone rang a lot in the middle of the night, too.
57:41
SPEAKER_05: You know what I'm talking about.
57:43
SPEAKER_05: Um but uh I got this call, middle of the night, go work this wreck.
57:47
SPEAKER_05: It's a single car accident up on LBJ Freeway, which is one of the deadliest roads in the state of Texas.
57:53
SPEAKER_05: And so I get up there, and this guy had been going way fast ultimately through my investigation.
58:00
SPEAKER_05: I got him at about 138 miles an hour when he loses control of his BMW and hits a light standard pole in the middle of the highway.
58:08
SPEAKER_05: This is before they put HOV lanes in the middle, bounces off of that and goes down the road, and I've got a 2,100-foot crime scene of debris, fluid, parts and pieces of everything.
58:20
SPEAKER_05: And so I get out there, but it's kind of a garden variety one if it's a one-car wreck, because the guy unfortunately lost his life in this thing.
58:28
SPEAKER_05: Pretty gruesome crash.
58:30
SPEAKER_05: He was uh he was an ex-Detroit Lion football player that I had never heard of, you know, but thought that was kind of a big old guy.
58:38
SPEAKER_05: And um anyway, so I'm out there working this wreck.
58:41
SPEAKER_05: Well, I have to I have to go ahead and take it pretty seriously, even though it appears to be one of those garden variety wrecks.
58:49
SPEAKER_05: So in case the phone rings tomorrow and somebody says, Hey, did you guys ever catch that truck that hit that BMW that lost control, you know, in case it turned out to be not just a garden variety crash, right?
58:59
SPEAKER_05: So I'm out there all night measuring stuff, and you know, um, that's kind of a lengthy process in and of itself.
59:07
SPEAKER_05: So I I I get home and I'm telling my wife about this wreck.
59:13
SPEAKER_05: And um, and it's it's daylight, it's just about daylight, and and we're sitting on the edge of the bed, and and I'm kind of telling her, yeah, this is about this guy, and blah, blah, blah, and and there wasn't much to it.
59:26
SPEAKER_05: And all of a sudden, I become very emotional, and I'm just all of a sudden, I'm just sobbing over this guy that I have no idea who this guy is.
59:35
SPEAKER_05: I'm just literally just can't control my emotions at all.
59:39
SPEAKER_05: I'm sobbing, I'm upset.
59:40
SPEAKER_05: My wife's looking at me with complete astonishment.
59:44
SPEAKER_05: Um, I'm returning the same astonished look at her, like, what in the hell is going on with me here?
59:49
SPEAKER_05: What is wrong?
59:50
SPEAKER_05: You know, I had no idea what was going on.
59:54
SPEAKER_05: And in a few minutes, I kind of, you know, regathered myself, and she looked at me and she said, Are you okay?
1:00:02
SPEAKER_05: And I said, Yeah.
1:00:05
SPEAKER_05: I said, I feel better right now than I have felt in forever.
1:00:09
SPEAKER_05: I I I said, I can't even explain the difference.
1:00:12
SPEAKER_05: It's like the weight of the world just got lifted off of me.
1:00:15
SPEAKER_05: And what that was was that emotional release that, as policemen, we're so bad about harboring all that grief and all that heartache and all that trauma, and we never find an avenue to release it.
1:00:29
SPEAKER_05: It boiled over.
1:00:30
SPEAKER_05: It did.
1:00:30
SPEAKER_05: It my cup just overflowed.
1:00:31
SPEAKER_05: And it was gonna say manopause had hit.
1:00:35
SPEAKER_02: Can we just watch the Family Network and watch a good movie?
1:00:40
SPEAKER_05: No, that wasn't it.
1:00:41
SPEAKER_05: But it but those kinds of things that's one that was a realization um moment for me, too, that I said, hey, I gotta be better at not harboring this.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_05: And you know, it's easy to say, ah, I've seen a million of those, it doesn't bother me.
1:00:56
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it does bother you.
1:00:57
SPEAKER_05: You just may not want it to bother you.
1:00:59
SPEAKER_02: And that was the culture of our agency in the 80s and 90s, it wasn't.
1:01:02
SPEAKER_05: Probably the culture of law enforcement.
1:01:04
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that I was gonna say more than just our agency.
1:01:06
SPEAKER_02: Well, I'd worked at other agencies, and ours was Alpha the Alpha.
1:01:11
SPEAKER_02: Our leadership were old school, some former Marines, former military, old narcs, and pretty crusty.
1:01:20
SPEAKER_02: It was a salty department.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, back then you wouldn't have said, Man, I'm that last call bothered me, or that last call upset me, or I'm struggling, or you would never you would have been eaten alive.
1:01:33
SPEAKER_05: No, and and uh even in my unit, in the in the traffic unit that I was in, this was an assembly of I thought y'all were all sensitive on motor unit.
1:01:41
SPEAKER_02: All those years I thought y'all were very sensitive.
1:01:43
SPEAKER_05: Pretty touchy-feely.
1:01:44
SPEAKER_05: Not really.
1:01:45
SPEAKER_05: Just with our bikes.
1:01:46
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
1:01:47
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
1:01:48
SPEAKER_05: You're touching my bike, I'll be feeling you.
1:01:50
SPEAKER_05: You know, but anyway, um, really, and really, I worked in a in probably one of the more alpha kind of units in the department on top of that.
1:01:59
SPEAKER_05: These were a bunch of salty old, strong-willed, hardworking, you know, kind of guys.
1:02:06
SPEAKER_05: And um and and so you would never in a million years go, you know, I went home and I cried about that guy last night.
1:02:13
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, you don't yeah, yeah, it wasn't gonna happen.
1:02:15
SPEAKER_05: But the reality is it's okay to go home and cry about that guy.
1:02:19
SPEAKER_05: If you if, you know, you need to.
1:02:22
SPEAKER_05: You need to we need to we need to maintain our humanity.
1:02:27
SPEAKER_05: That's a horrible thing.
1:02:29
SPEAKER_05: And uh and just like what happened at the Colew Center, you know, those two young men needlessly lost their lives because of some kind of an ideology that I have no con no idea how they come to that, how they get there.
1:02:42
SPEAKER_05: But there was a tragedy at the Curtis Cowell Center on May 3rd, 2015.
1:02:47
SPEAKER_05: It just could have been a whole different kind of tragedy.
1:02:50
SPEAKER_05: But these both these young men had moms and dads and brothers and sisters and friends and people that cared about them.
1:02:56
SPEAKER_05: Uh, the loss of a human life is is impactful on so many people um that it is a tragedy, and we got to remember that no matter who it is, it doesn't matter who it is.
1:03:09
SPEAKER_03: Well, and you and you had a rock.
1:03:11
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I've never met your wife, uh, but just by your sacrifice, by working so much and trying to give a better life for your family, it's obvious that that you had that that that bond with her, uh, and and she was your rock.
1:03:23
SPEAKER_03: And I think you having that at home is probably what got you through that.
1:03:27
SPEAKER_03: So, you know, for our listeners uh or our watchers, that uh you don't have that.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_03: You you need to reach out to your brothers and sisters law enforcement.
1:03:35
SPEAKER_03: If you're not married, if you're if you're a single person, uh you know, reach out to your brothers and sisters in blue because uh at the end of the day, we've we've sometimes it may feel like we're the only ones that you got, you know.
1:03:47
SPEAKER_02: Well, I don't want it lost on a point.
1:03:49
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:03:50
SPEAKER_02: There's 230, 250, however many people pouring out of the fatal funnel as you referred to, that front door.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_02: Right.
1:03:57
SPEAKER_02: Those guys were loaded for bear, they were there to party.
1:04:02
SPEAKER_02: I don't want it lost on the people that aren't familiar with this story and people that are listening.
1:04:07
SPEAKER_02: But for a guy with a Glocked pistol, if those two had gotten past you with 1400 rounds or however many rounds of ammo in those two rifles, automatic weapons, with 250, 240 civilians unarmed walking out of a building, that was going to be a bloodbath.
1:04:27
SPEAKER_02: That was going to be a freaking massacre.
1:04:30
SPEAKER_02: Right.
1:04:31
SPEAKER_05: But for well, that's part of it.
1:04:33
SPEAKER_05: Now we did have a lot of other guys, very competent individuals there that, you know, were were available to engage these guys, but it would have been a whole lot more difficult in the confusion, and especially these guys are split up and all that kind of stuff.
1:04:47
SPEAKER_05: Um I I have complete and total confidence, you know.
1:04:50
SPEAKER_05: My the SWAT guy, those guys came to rescue me and they were there in in nothing flat, right?
1:04:56
SPEAKER_05: And uh I'm very appreciative of those guys, love those guys, and and uh that was a team effort.
1:05:01
SPEAKER_05: It wasn't just Greg Stevens, it was it was a it was a team effort.
1:05:05
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
1:05:06
SPEAKER_05: And uh I'm very appreciative of that.
1:05:08
SPEAKER_05: And had they gotten by me, I'm sure they would have been engaged very soon on.
1:05:13
SPEAKER_02: But nonetheless, they're taking somebody coming across them in a gunfight first, hopefully.
1:05:18
SPEAKER_02: Um your exchange of gunfires what drew what drew the React teams, and um uh I'm glad their assessment was this is just a security guard and an old dude.
1:05:30
SPEAKER_02: I'm glad their assessment was that because they picked the wrong time, the wrong guy, in the wrong place.
1:05:35
SPEAKER_05: It was the generator of some very interesting memes, though, I can tell you that.
1:05:41
SPEAKER_02: The first one that popped up into my mind was the Clint Eastwood Get Off My Yard.
1:05:48
SPEAKER_02: Oh man, that's awesome.
1:05:49
SPEAKER_03: Well, brother, I'm telling you about this is the first time you and I met today, uh, and just what an honor.
1:05:54
SPEAKER_03: What an honor to meet you.
1:05:55
SPEAKER_03: I've heard so much about you.
1:05:56
SPEAKER_03: I've seen you on TV, I've seen a couple of interviews that you've done.
1:05:59
SPEAKER_03: Um Um I and and and the day that you received this, ironically, I saw it come across the news and I'll never forget that because I was thinking, man, uh that's badass.
1:06:07
SPEAKER_03: You know, that a Texas cop took care of business that day.
1:06:10
SPEAKER_05: So that that day was quite a day, and when I got home, there was a newspaper that a bunch of my neighbors and stuff had gathered newspapers and brought them to me because above the fold and below the fold was a picture of me receiving this medal from the president of the United States, which is unbelievable.
1:06:30
SPEAKER_05: Right, I've got some of those newspapers at home.
1:06:33
SPEAKER_05: But in addition to that, this is greatness.
1:06:36
SPEAKER_05: In the upper left-hand corner of the Dallas Morning News, teasing an article that was in the sports page was a picture of Rugnet O'Dorr punching out Jose Batista on second base.
1:06:48
SPEAKER_02: Remember that photo?
1:06:49
SPEAKER_02: Yep.
1:06:49
SPEAKER_02: Batista's jaws like.
1:06:51
SPEAKER_05: So I have that photo and me getting a medal on the same newspaper.
1:06:54
SPEAKER_05: Is that not the best front page every year?
1:06:56
SPEAKER_05: That's right.
1:06:56
SPEAKER_05: That's right.
1:06:57
SPEAKER_04: Only in Texas.
1:06:58
SPEAKER_03: Only in Texas.
1:07:00
SPEAKER_03: Well, this about wraps it up, I think.
1:07:02
SPEAKER_03: Uh we're gonna shoot some uh no punt intended, sorry, Greg, but we're gonna uh fire off some uh rapid questions till you're ready.
1:07:09
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
1:07:10
SPEAKER_03: And I've got faith.
1:07:10
SPEAKER_03: I know that you drove at Malibu uh or the Caprice, I'm sorry, as your last car, but I've got faith that you're that you're gonna give the right ones.
1:07:18
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
1:07:19
SPEAKER_03: Best cop movie or line from a cop movie, best patrol vehicle, and best drink.
1:07:26
SPEAKER_03: Whiskey, you know, adult drink.
1:07:29
SPEAKER_05: Best line from it's gotta be Clint Eastwood with his 44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun.
1:07:37
SPEAKER_05: Pretty popular.
1:07:39
SPEAKER_03: I know the 45 did pretty good that day.
1:07:41
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, well.
1:07:43
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that 45 worked pretty good.
1:07:45
SPEAKER_05: That's a whole nother.
1:07:46
SPEAKER_05: We can do a podcast on that whole thing.
1:07:49
SPEAKER_05: Um there's something about the the bong that the 45 makes when it hits a steel target versus the ding that a nine millimeter does when it hits a target that is worth.
1:08:00
SPEAKER_05: I mean, nine millimeters good round now.
1:08:02
SPEAKER_05: They they've done a whole lot with that, but but uh, you know, old guys like 45s.
1:08:07
SPEAKER_05: That's all there is to it.
1:08:08
SPEAKER_05: Yep.
1:08:09
SPEAKER_05: Um Best Patrol car was my was probably my uh 2007 Harley.
1:08:15
SPEAKER_05: Yep.
1:08:15
SPEAKER_03: Um that was uh slide on that one, I agree.
1:08:19
SPEAKER_03: Road King or Electrical?
1:08:20
SPEAKER_05: It was a Road King.
1:08:21
SPEAKER_05: There you go.
1:08:22
SPEAKER_05: And uh I loved that motorcycle and um but really as a car that that Caprice was a I thought they were great.
1:08:31
SPEAKER_05: Yes.
1:08:31
SPEAKER_05: Because they had they they had that six-liter, they were fast.
1:08:34
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
1:08:35
SPEAKER_02: About 94 or so when it had that Corvette motor in it.
1:08:38
SPEAKER_02: That was it 90?
1:08:40
SPEAKER_02: Oh, this was he's talking about the one 2013.
1:08:42
SPEAKER_05: I'm talking about the 2013.
1:08:44
SPEAKER_05: Now the older ones, like he was talking about the shamu ones, yeah.
1:08:49
SPEAKER_05: Man, they were ugly.
1:08:50
SPEAKER_05: Goodness gracious.
1:08:52
SPEAKER_05: They were fast though, and they handled good.
1:08:54
SPEAKER_05: And those kind of square impollas were really pretty cool too.
1:08:58
SPEAKER_05: They they were good cars.
1:08:59
SPEAKER_05: But my favorite vehicle was my was my Harley.
1:09:03
SPEAKER_05: And I rode a Kawasaki for about 20 years, and I've loved my Kawasaki.
1:09:07
SPEAKER_05: Um, you could jump curves with it and do all kinds of stuff that you couldn't do on the Harley.
1:09:11
SPEAKER_05: But the Harley was there's just something about the Harley.
1:09:15
SPEAKER_03: Best drink.
1:09:17
SPEAKER_05: Best drink.
1:09:17
SPEAKER_05: Well, I'm kind of a beer guy.
1:09:19
SPEAKER_03: Yep.
1:09:19
SPEAKER_05: And uh my favorite beer is the National Beer of Texas.
1:09:23
SPEAKER_05: I'm a Lone Star fella.
1:09:24
SPEAKER_02: I like Lone Star.
1:09:25
SPEAKER_02: Lone Star's good.
1:09:26
SPEAKER_02: Lone Star and Lone Star Light.
1:09:27
SPEAKER_02: Can't go.
1:09:28
SPEAKER_02: First one.
1:09:28
SPEAKER_02: First one, yep.
1:09:29
SPEAKER_02: So years ago, uh, where I live in Fourny was not dry, you had to drive to Terrell to get alcohol.
1:09:35
SPEAKER_02: And I had a guy that would order me like a case of Lone Star.
1:09:40
SPEAKER_02: This is several years ago.
1:09:41
SPEAKER_02: I went in there to pick it up and he goes, I can't get it anymore.
1:09:44
SPEAKER_02: I said, what?
1:09:45
SPEAKER_02: He said lone star is suddenly a fad in the Northeast.
1:09:48
SPEAKER_02: Like in New York.
1:09:49
SPEAKER_02: It's hip to drink, like here it's you know, Corona or whatever.
1:09:53
SPEAKER_02: He said it became a fad.
1:09:54
SPEAKER_02: He goes, You cannot get lone star in Texas.
1:09:57
SPEAKER_02: Because they're shipping it all up there because it's a fad beer and they're making a ton of money.
1:10:00
SPEAKER_02: I thought that'd be a felony if it's not to drink.
1:10:04
SPEAKER_05: It's hard, it's not as easy to find as you know, Miller Light or any of that kind of stuff.
1:10:09
SPEAKER_05: Um, you have to do a little uh little looking to find it.
1:10:13
SPEAKER_05: And uh and you know, it's a throwback kind of thing.
1:10:17
SPEAKER_05: When I was growing up here in in uh um in Austin, um as soon as I turned 21, um that was uh a day before.
1:10:27
SPEAKER_05: Not a day before.
1:10:28
SPEAKER_05: That was the uh that was kind of the beer of choice.
1:10:31
SPEAKER_05: You know, that everybody drank long.
1:10:33
SPEAKER_05: That was and uh it kind of like you said, it kind of fell to the wayside for a long time, it seems like.
1:10:41
SPEAKER_02: Well, you got anything else, Clint?
1:10:43
SPEAKER_02: No, I cannot thank you enough.
1:10:45
SPEAKER_02: I love you, brother.
1:10:46
SPEAKER_02: I was honored to work with it.
1:10:47
SPEAKER_02: My pleasure.
1:10:48
SPEAKER_02: I was honored to work with long long uh side you guys for all those years, honored, honored, honored, and to still call you a friend.
1:10:55
SPEAKER_05: Well, it's my my treat.
1:10:58
SPEAKER_05: What a pleasure to meet you, Tyler.
1:10:59
SPEAKER_05: It's been uh we got to do some more of this and yeah, absolutely, you know, spend a little more time together.
1:11:05
SPEAKER_03: Well, this wraps it up.
1:11:06
SPEAKER_03: Again, hit that subscribe button to our viewers, watchers, listeners, boyers.
1:11:13
SPEAKER_03: Uh hit the subscribe button.
1:11:14
SPEAKER_03: Let us know what you think of the uh of the Blue Grit podcast.
1:11:17
SPEAKER_03: Also, if you need to get in contact with us, Blue Grit at TNPA is our email.
1:11:20
SPEAKER_03: Again, that's bluegrit at tmpa.org.
1:11:25
SPEAKER_03: God bless you guys.
1:11:26
SPEAKER_03: Stay safe, and as always, may God bless Texas.
1:11:29
SPEAKER_03: We're out