Armed Citizen Stops Spree Killer

 From the Ayoob files at the American Handgunner.

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Situation:

You are shopping with your family when a gunman on a rampage opens fire in the store … and you are armed.

Lesson:

Planning for emergencies — and training for them — can save more lives than just your own.

Sunday, June 17, 2018, late afternoon. It’s Father’s Day. David George, 47, enters the WalMart in Tumwater, Washington with his wife, his adult daughter, and his young granddaughter. They are exchanging the little girl’s tricycle, and David heads to the customer service desk at the front of the store. It’s a pleasant day and David is dressed casually, in shorts and a tee shirt. The untucked tee conceals a Gen3 GLOCK 19 pistol with Ameri-Glo sights, worn at the 3:30 position behind his right hip in a Blade-Tech Nano inside the waistband holster. A pastor by vocation, he’s also a volunteer EMT. Both jobs have made him a natural protector of others and his daily wear of a concealed handgun is simply an extension of this identity.

In the next few minutes, David George will find a desperate need to use his GLOCK.

Rampage

Timothy Day, 44, has been convicted of at least seven crimes, and has twice served hard time for being a felon in possession of a firearm. He has a history of abusing his wife and others. He will later be described by his former wife of 13 years as a paranoid drug user. Northwest Public Broadcasting reporter Austin Jenkins will later write, “… Day had a history of mental illness and was prone to bouts of paranoia — often fueled by using meth. [His former wife] started carrying a concealed pistol to protect herself against Day. She also had a protection order against him because of Day’s history of domestic violence [and said], ‘He would put his hands over my face, covering my mouth and my nose and, of course, I would try to fight back and he would hold on and I would almost pass out … I tried so hard to tell the courts not to let him out, that he would hurt somebody.’”

Her plea had apparently fallen on deaf ears. On this day, he has borrowed a car and gotten a gun from someone else, a Ruger LCR. He begins his spree attempting to steal another car from a family near a gas station. Unsuccessful, he flees, driving in the wrong direction on a highway entering the city of Tumwater.

Near Tumwater High School, he crashes his vehicle at an intersection. Q13 News will later report, “He then left his car and attempted to carjack at least two other people, fired shots at the vehicles, and demanded owners abandon their cars. Day was successful in carjacking a third vehicle that he drove to WalMart, police said. Upon arriving, officers found a 16-year-old boy and another victim suffering from minor injuries.”

The boy’s “minor injury” was a gunshot wound. Day had shot the boy in the hand while trying to steal his car. Another motorist was the luckiest of all: the bullet Day had fired at his head had barely missed, striking the headrest instead.

Violent Spree Continues

At or shortly before 4:40 PM, the many WalMart security cameras begin to capture the image of Tim Day in action. His stolen SUV is seen trying to back into a cart corral and bump into it instead, then move jerkily away and park in front of the main entrance. The cameras now record proof of the general public’s obliviousness to their surroundings.

Not only does no one so much as glance when he jumps out of a car rudely and obstructively parked out of place: No one seems to take notice when Day emerges, gun in hand, and runs through the inside of the WalMart, traversing nearly the length of the building diagonally. One person obligingly, automatically steps out of his way without so much as a backward glance; another, bumped by Day, turns with an indignant “What?!” body language but does not appear to see the loaded revolver the man who ran into him is plainly holding.

Day makes his way to the sporting goods section, where he approaches the locked glass-front ammunition display. A security camera shows us two muzzle flashes and flying glass as he shoots it open, pulls out a box of .38 Special ammo, and calmly proceeds to reload the LCR. He then closes the cylinder and moves away briskly, only to return to snatch up the box with the remaining rounds. Day then races toward the front door.

It is the gunfire that finally pierces the oblivion. One shopper will say later he and his friends were in denial, hoping they had heard balloons popping. But, at the front of the store, experienced shooter David George knows gunfire when he hears it. So does his adult daughter, who instantly scoops up her child, abandons her shopping cart, and makes her way to an exit. She will be, David later remembers proudly, the first to exit the danger scene by a good five or six seconds.

Confrontation

At the front of the store, David George is in Tim Day’s escape path as the latter runs toward the front doors. He sees George staring at him and swings the Ruger up at him.
As a part-time EMT, George has treated at least three gunshot victims he can remember, a fatal rifle-shot and two non-fatal handgun wounds. The thought “This is gonna hurt” races through his mind as he ducks behind cover. Day does not fire, turning away and running out the front door.

David begins to follow. He knows his family must be out of danger by now. They’ve gone over this beforehand. Just as he has told his daughter to expeditiously leave the scene if something like this ever happens, he has also told his family to move away from him in such a situation so they’re not in the line of the criminal gunfire he knows he will attract if he draws his gun. They have followed the plan.

At the door, David discovers he’s not the only armed citizen at the scene. Jesse Zamora is there too, putting a hand on David’s chest and telling him protectively, “I’ve got a gun, man.” The two bond, and move out of the WalMart into the parking lot.

More Gunfire

They see Day attempt a carjacking, and can’t know it’s not the gunman’s first such attempt of the afternoon. The driver of the vehicle, Rickey Fievez, resists. As he reverses his car and backs away, Day shoots him twice, in the chest and neck. Instantly paralyzed from the neck down by the wounds, Fievez crashes into a parked vehicle. The frustrated gunman turns to the next person he can see by a vehicle, a woman.

He points a gun at her too, and she tells him to take the car, the keys are in it. He jumps into the driver’s seat. She hides, inexplicably, behind the same car.

Finale

This is the situation confronting David George as he approaches the vehicle in the parking lot: the woman crouching desperately behind her own vehicle for cover, and Day in her car with an expression of rage on his face. Day is pounding fist and gun on the dashboard in frustration — desperate to survive, the woman has misled him. There are no keys in the car and he can’t get it started.

And now, at last, David George’s GLOCK 19 is in his hand, leveled on the gunman as George approaches from behind the vehicle

Instead of surrendering at gunpoint, Day begins to turn his revolver toward George.

Five staccato shots explode in the parking lot: BAMBAM — BAMBAMBAM.

Perhaps seven feet away, on the passenger side of what the gunman had hoped would be his getaway car, David George fires a double-tap from a two-handed Isosceles stance. The gunman’s body seems to freeze for an instant, but then he tries to bring the revolver back at him again, and George launches three more shots.

Day reaches to open the driver’s door of the stolen car. “Hands! Hands! I want to see your hands,” David yells at the gunman. Then, able to see the revolver has been dropped on the front seat, David holds his fire.

Day manages to emerge from the car, but the five gunshot wounds in his upper torso have taken effect. He slumps to the pavement. George can see his shots have all gone into the chest, the lowest appearing to be diaphragm high. The gunman rattles off a bit of agonal breathing, and then, very soon, it’s over.

Immediate Aftermath

Police officers had been only about a mile and a half away, investigating the earlier carjacking and shooting scene, when the calls came in from WalMart. They made it to the new shooting scene quickly. By that time, the pastor/EMT had holstered his GLOCK and was already treating the gravely wounded Rickey Fievez.

Police emerged from their vehicles and asked, “Who shot him?” People pointed their fingers at David George and shouted, “That guy!” At the point of an AR15 patrol rifle, they ordered him into a kneeling position, his hands visible at his head, and took his gun.

However, the “who did what to who” quickly sorted out. Paramedics had not yet arrived. When George asked if he could go back to treating the wounded victim, the officers consented.

George gave a recorded statement at the police station. He asked the investigating officer if he needed an attorney. “I can’t tell you that,” the cop answered, “but I can tell you this: my supervisor says you’re a witness, not a suspect.”

By 10:30 the next morning, the Tumwater Police Department had officially declared David George had been cleared in the shooting.

And the press was calling him more than a witness.

They were calling him a hero.

Long-Term Aftermath

No lawsuit has been filed on behalf of the estate of the dead gunman. Tim Day’s long-suffering ex-wife was asked by a reporter how she felt toward David George, the man who had killed her husband. She answered, “I don’t judge. He did what he had to do.” Fox News called David “The Good Samaritan Pastor.” One of the witnesses and potential victims at the WalMart, Bryan Adams, spoke for many more when he told a reporter, “He is a hero. He took action. I really think more people could have been shot … he saved us all.”

Detective Lieutenant Jennifer Kolb of Tumwater PD told American Handgunner, “We had a lot of agencies assisting us. This allowed us to complete the investigation in such a timely manner…. Our recommendation was a finding of justifiable homicide; one of the prosecutors did a thorough review over a few weeks, and agreed. There is absolutely no doubt Mr. George saved many lives.”

It’s hard to imagine a more quintessential “Good Guy” than a full-time pastor and volunteer emergency medical technician. And it’s hard to imagine a more archetypal bad guy than a long-term felon, serial abuser, meth-head and spree shooter. This certainly helps the good guy involved to deal with the psychological and emotional aftermath.

What is called colloquially “post-shooting trauma” seems to have two manifestations which are almost universal, no matter how righteous the use of force may have been: some element of sleep disturbance, and the sociological phenomenon the great police psychologist Dr. Walter Gorski defined as “Mark of Cain” syndrome. David George did not escape either.

He told us he stayed up most of that night going over the incident in his mind, tormenting himself with the question, “What could he have done to keep Tim Day from shooting and horribly crippling Rickey Fievez?” Logically, he concluded with what knowledge he had to work with at each stage of the event, he had done the best anyone in his position could.

“Mark of Cain” syndrome is the realization people are treating you differently as a result of your having shot someone. In David’s case, the attention was positive but almost overwhelmingly so.

At David’s request, the police kept his name out of it. They described the Samaritan-rescuer as a pastor in a small town nearby who was also an EMT and lieutenant rank on the local fire department. There weren’t too many folks who fit that profile, and the media quickly sniffed him out. Soon, David told us, “The press was all over it.” He figured a press release would put an end to it, and put one together with the help of Alan Gottlieb at the Second Amendment Foundation.

“The funniest phone call of all,” David remembers, “was from a major network that wanted me on its morning show. I said ‘No, I’m giving a press release.’ She said, ‘This is a hot story, tomorrow no one may want to know it.’ I said, ‘That’s fine with me!’”

Most people in every circle of his life were supportive of the hero who was credited with stopping what might well have become a mass murder spree. But not all. “A few people became standoffish,” he says. He later learned in most of these cases, it was because they simply didn’t know what to say to him.

Altered Perceptions

Most people involved in life or death situations experience altered perceptions to some degree, and again, this case was no exception. I teach every summer at the Firearms Academy of Seattle, and a month or so after the shooting, David was kind enough to drop by and give my class a lecture. He had trained at FAS before the shooting. A year later, at which time he had learned more about the incident and the man he had been forced to kill, he returned to take my MAG-40 class, and gave an expanded lecture on the occasion. Part of the curriculum includes the physio-psychological aspects of violent encounters, and David told the class, “I experienced just about everything in last night’s homework.”

Tachypsychia, the sense of things happening in slow motion? Check. “I felt I had all the time in the world,” he told me. Auditory exclusion, gunfire sounding muted or even silent? Check. “I was wondering why my ears weren’t ringing as I sat on the sidewalk afterward.”

Tunnel vision? Check. He had thought fellow armed citizen Jesse Zamora was right behind him as he approached the gunman in the parking lot, but he was wrong. Zamora’s pistol, a Phoenix .22, had jammed when he went to activate the slide and put a round in the chamber. By the time he got the now-damaged round out, jacked a new one into the chamber, and ran to assist George, the last shots had been fired. Zamora’s equipment had not lived up to his courage.

Lessons

First responder confidence and competence. David George had trained extensively with his GLOCK 19 at the Firearms Academy of Seattle and elsewhere. The training held. He remembers actually thinking “Front sight, press!” as he fired the shots ending Day’s deadly spree. All five shots struck where aimed: a 100 percent hit ratio, resulting in relatively swift threat neutralization.

Smart engagement tactics prevented mistaken identity tragedy when two law-abiding armed citizens who didn’t know each other responded to the threat. George, in his EMT role, had trained with police for response to active killer situations, and had been told by the cops any person with a gun not wearing a uniform was highly likely to be shot by mistake by responding officers. Accordingly, he did not draw his gun until he saw Day firing directly at the innocent. A role model for us all, including plainclothes and off-duty or retired cops.

Both men secured their lambs from the wolf before they went after the wolf. George had long since worked out a plan with his wife and daughter that in such a situation, they would expeditiously leave the danger scene while he engaged, and it worked out perfectly. Zamora told me he hadn’t worked that out beforehand with his girlfriend and her kids, but when the first shots went off in the WalMart he instructed them to escape safely, and they did so.

A highly reliable pistol with an already-chambered round allowed George to prevail in a very rapid timeframe. By contrast, Zamora’s inexpensive .22 jammed when he attempted to rack a round into the empty chamber, essentially taking him out of the fight at the most crucial time. Would his .22 ammo have worked as well as George’s 9mm HST rounds? We’ll never know, but no professional would bet on it.

Use of cover. David George told us he faults himself for squaring up with the threat on the passenger side of the car instead of taking better cover. I don’t think he should beat himself up over this. Looking at the surveillance video of the shooting, it appears he had to get pretty close to where he wound up to guarantee safe and efficient neutralization of the gunman.

Moreover, challenging Day from behind the stolen car would have been problematic. For one thing, that’s where the woman who owned it had huddled. Taking a challenge position there could have drawn the gunman’s fire to her location.

American Handgunner wishes to thank David George, Jesse Zamora, and Lt. Jennifer Kolb for their assistance in making this article possible. We also applaud lead investigator Tim Eikum, Detective Bryent Finch, the Thurston County prosecutor’s office and all the emergency service personnel who handled this case so competently and fairly. This incident stands as a classic example of the life-saving value of competent armed citizens at such deadly danger scenes, and the truism it takes a “Good Guy With a Gun” to stop a Bad Guy With a Gun.