By David Callender, The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin)
As Madison, Wisc. Police Detective Tim Hahn sped on March 9 to the Red Caboose Day Care Center, where a man was holding a staffer hostage, he heard the urgent cry over the police radio: “Shots fired! Shots fired!”
When word came that police had killed the suspect, 39-year-old Gregory Velasquez, the initial chill that came over Hahn was quickly replaced by “an aura, a kind of empty, still feeling.”
His thoughts turned immediately to the two veteran officers - Phil Yahnke and Shane Pueschner - who had killed Velasquez as he threatened the center’s director with two meat cleavers.
Hahn, who seven years ago fatally shot a suspect in a gunfight on Madison’s west side, knows firsthand how police officers can be casualties of such life-or-death situations, even when they emerge from them physically unscathed.
The anguish Hahn went through and other officers typically experience following such an incident stands in stark contrast to the images on TV and in movies of supercops who kill without giving it a second thought.
“It’s not normal for us human beings to take a life,” he said in an interview.
Training can help officers survive the initial confrontation, but the recovery from such incidents is often more difficult.
According to the FBI, nearly 90 percent of officers involved in a fatal shooting end up leaving law enforcement within five years as a result of that incident. Many retire on full or partial disability as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder or other psychological problems.
And when police are forced to kill a suspect bent on committing suicide - a so-called suicide by cop, as in both Hahn’s case and the Red Caboose incident - the emotional toll can be even greater.
“It’s not the act itself that’s difficult. It’s dealing with it later,” says Gary Bush, who retired from the South Charleston, W.Va., police department after he killed a man in a suicide by cop case. He now advises police departments on how to handle the emotional trauma that often follows such incidents.
“We’re taught how to kill, but not how to handle killing,” Bush said in an interview.
Back in 1997, officials didn’t use the term “suicide by cop” to describe Hahn’s confrontation with Timothy Wing. But the circumstances were similar.
Both Wing and Velasquez had been suicidal for weeks before their confrontations with police; both could have backed down and lived, but made it clear they wouldn’t be taken alive.
As in most suicide by cop incidents, the situation escalated quickly from routine to deadly. According to a 1998 study of more than 430 police shootings in Los Angeles County, 70 percent of the shootings in the suicide by cop cases occurred within 30 minutes of police arrival.
In the Red Caboose case, police shot Velasquez within 25 minutes of their arrival at the day care center.
In Hahn’s case, Wing was shot and killed less than 20 minutes after Officer Andy Garcia came to Wing’s west side home to arrest him on an outstanding warrant.
But for Hahn, the time span was even briefer.
When he arrived to help with what was supposed to be a routine arrest, Garcia had already struggled with Wing, a former college wrestler. Wing then grabbed a backpack that held a gun and ran into a basement bathroom.
“When I arrived, all I saw was (Wing’s) arm out of the door and he and Garcia struggling over that door and the door being pulled shut,” Hahn recalled.
As he ran upstairs to try to get a key to the bathroom door, “I was on the third stair from the top, and all hell breaks loose. Shots started getting fired.”
Hahn turned back in time to see Garcia, who had been hit the leg and the chest, collapse at the base of the stairs.
“As I’m turning to my right, I see the suspect training the gun on him. Garcia’s down, he’s at the base of the stairs, he’s not moving, and the suspect is training the weapon on him, walking toward him, and then he sees me, he swings, and we end up shooting it out,” Hahn recalled.
What Hahn remembers most vividly was the way some senses shut down - while others were heightened - during the shootout.
“If you or I were to go into that same space today and crank off a round, our ears would be ringing for the next two hours. I didn’t experience that. I had auditory exclusion; it was just ‘pop, pop, pop,’ ” he said.
“The other thing I experienced was tunnel vision. I got down to the base of the stairs after the shootout, and I was lying over the officer. I knew there were other people upstairs, and didn’t know if they were friendly or not. I remember consciously telling myself to rapidly blink my eyes because the ‘tunnel’ was getting so small. It was like I was looking through a drinking straw up to the top of those stairs.”
But there were little things he did notice. One of Wing’s shots hit the banister of the stairs, and Hahn recalled feeling the splinters hit his face.
“And I distinctly felt one bullet go through the top of my hair. It missed me by maybe a half-inch,” he said.
Although the entire shootout lasted only three to five seconds, Hahn said, “things slowed down. To me, it lasted at least a full minute. It was going on forever and ever.”
When the shooting stopped, “you end up having this incredible adrenaline dump,” he said, recalling that his heart was racing and his breathing on 911 tapes of the incident “sounding like I’d just run a mile.”
Hahn said he had been drilled in training to handle those feelings, “and how proficient you are in training has a direct reflection on whether you come out or not.”
But he wasn’t as prepared for what came next.
Bush, the police consultant from West Virginia, said the manner in which police handle the aftermath of a suicide by cop incident often determines how well officers will recover from it.
Ideally, he said, a department will debrief officers and other emergency personnel involved in the incident within 72 hours. That helps put to rest many of the questions officers have about specific details.
Madison police policy calls for such a debriefing within 48 hours of any critical incident, including suicide by cop cases. In addition to police officers, the sessions are open to paramedics, firefighters, and 911 dispatchers involved. Police officers are urged, but not required, to attend because of the fragile state of mind that inevitably ensues.
Hahn said the debriefing after his 1997 shooting of Wing helped answer some mundane questions that his mind had seized upon.
“I wanted to know how many times I shot the gun,” he said. “For other people, it might have been something else. But to me, it was just paramount in my mind. I don’t know why that was so important. I guess it’s because I’ve been an avid shooter all my life.”
It also helped him to reconstruct the event and talk it over with others, although the need to continue talking about it continued for months.
“There is an overwhelming need to inform people about what you just did. You’re going over this event, feeling like you have to get it out, you have to explain it in detail. You just have to justify your actions,” he said.
But in many suicide by cop cases, the most pressing question officers ask is why the shooting had to take place at all and why they were forced to kill the suspect. Because of that, the incidents often leave police filled with anger.
Even seven years after the shooting, Hahn notes somewhat bitterly that Wing wanted to kill himself, “but didn’t have the guts to do it. This was a very cowardly act. And it was a very selfish act.”
The Red Caboose case, Hahn said, demonstrates “the old adage that no man is an island. You come into a city like ours, you commit an act like this fellow did with the officers who had to go and deal with them, and you’re affecting hundreds of lives.”
It’s still unclear why Velasquez chose to make his last stand at the day care center, where scores of children were put at risk.
Velasquez’s half-brother, David Lance, said his family continues to grapple with that question.
“I don’t think he wanted to harm those children,” Lance said, noting that Velasquez himself had a 9-year-old son. “I don’t think he was thinking, ‘This is a day care center. I can go harm children.’ That wasn’t like him.”
Instead, he said he believes Velasquez may have picked the center because it was only a few doors down from the Monkey Bar gym, where he had worked.
“That sounds more consistent with his character,” Lance said. “I don’t think he wanted to go too far from there.”
Velasquez did enter the center earlier in the day to “look around,” he told Red Caboose workers, and was asked to leave. He returned with cleavers taken from a restaurant in the Gateway Center next door.
In Bush’s case, he was able to question his assailant - who pointed what turned out to be an unloaded rifle at him - shortly before the man died.
“I asked him, ‘Why? Why all this for nothing? You’re dying, and I’ve just shot you. Your death is going to be on my hands. Why?” His assailant answered only, “I wouldn’t have shot you.”
“I mean, it’s one thing when somebody commits a bank robbery and you go on the call and they fire a couple of shots at you and you shoot and kill them. The why is obvious. But in a suicide by cop ... it can be because of the smallest of things or the largest of things, but none of them are worth dying over,” Bush said.
Hahn said he has come to terms with the Wing shooting - and been one of the rare officers to return to police work after such an incident - thanks to the support of family and friends and his religious faith.
It helps, he said, that other members of his family had been in law enforcement and public safety; in fact, his brother-in-law, Phil Petersen, took part in another suicide by cop shooting last year when officers killed a man following a botched robbery at the Park Bank.
“I had my support structure right here. All I needed to do is pick up the phone, but most of the time, those guys beat me to it,” he said.
Hahn said he has worked for years with all of the officers involved in the Red Caboose shooting and has offered them his support.
“The big thing you feel is that ‘people are going to look at me differently’ ” because of the shooting, he said.
“Well, that’s true. You just risked your life, you went into a day care center where a guy attacked another person with a meat cleaver and threatened to kill another person, and probably saved countless lives. Yeah, people are going to look at you differently - a lot differently. I think every parent of every child is going to look at Phil Yahnke and Shane Pueschner and Jean Papilia a little differently. Those people, they’re heroes. They answered the call that day.”
Even in talking about the Red Caboose shooting, Hahn’s eyes well up when he considers what he heard on the radio that day - Yahnke and Pueschner demanding Velasquez drop the weapon, then the shots, then the desperate call for backup.
“I don’t want these people to have to be put in these spots. It’s no fun,” he said. “But the day you sign on, you swear an oath and you’re not worth your salt if you don’t live up to it. You’re there to serve and to protect, and heaven forbid you’ve got to be involved in one of these things. But there are things that happen in this world and you’ve got no rhyme or reason as to why.”