By Chuck Remsberg
Senior Police1 Contributor
Sponsored by Blauer
How’s this for an environment in which to hunt an active killer who isn’t yet done shooting:
• He could be hiding any place in a “monster” warehouse (1.3 million sq. ft.), filled with a maze of floor-to-ceiling racks and shrink-wrapped pallet piles of grocery products;
• Much of the place is quickly filling with choking, blinding smoke from multiple fires he’s lit;
• Water from the sprinkler system is sloshing more than ankle deep in spots, but not dousing all the flames;
• In refrigerated areas, pipes carrying potentially lethal ammonia are in jeopardy of bursting;
• The building’s thick concrete construction is blocking radio communications;
• One person is dead already, four others are seriously injured and unknown numbers more remain at risk in this vast stalking ground. And a showdown gunfight is yet to come.
In this challenging atmosphere, Denver police faced the city’s first active-shooter terror binge in recent memory—and won. “It was a case for going in fast and putting cops’ lives on the line,” said the Rocky Mountain News. “To walk in there and face what they faced was, at best, confusing,” said a warehouse spokesman. “They created order out of chaos.”
In the process, Denver responders reinforced a number of critical principles for dealing with an active-shooter scenario. Primary among these is the value of training an entire department—regular patrol officers as well as SWAT—in the urgent tactics needed when a murder-minded offender goes postal.
Starting at 3:12 p.m. on the first Sunday of last summer [6/25/06], a flurry of 911 calls suddenly flooded into Denver’s police communications center from the Safeway grocery chain’s massive distribution warehouse near Interstate 70 on the city’s northeast side.
Initial frenzied reports ranged from “a man with a gun” to “shots fired” to “a person shot and needing an ambulance” to “a man shooting people and setting the building on fire.” Only later, with the help of chilling sequences recorded by security cameras, would investigators piece together exactly what was underway.
In an unexpected melodrama all too familiar in the modern workplace, a 22-year-old Safeway employee, a teetotaling, non-smoking produce picker named Michael Julias Ford, showed up at shift change in a check-in area of a freezer section of the cavernous warehouse. He greeted a fellow worker who was just back from a trip to Africa and gave him a hug. “Have a great life,” Ford told him, as if saying goodbye.
Moments later, he can be seen on camera stalking another employee from behind. Then he produced a long-barreled Ruger .357 revolver and started shooting. Precisely why is still uncertain. His sister later told reporters that other workers ridiculed him for converting to Islam. Other sources told Police1 that he was teased and bullied on the job for working too slowly. One employee supposedly bumped into him with a pallet jack.
Whatever the cause, he was “pissed off,” a source familiar with the episode says. Before coming to work, the Denver Post would later report, Ford talked to his father, himself a 30-year employee retired from the warehouse, and told him, without elaboration, “Something big is going to go down. You’ll hear about it.”
At Safeway, he attacked with a vengeance. In short order, he shot four male fellow workers: one in the hand and arm, one in the leg and two in the head. People fled, screaming, and he chased them. At a loading dock, he confronted a startled worker and shot him six times, five in the upper torso, one in the head. Some of the rounds drilled through the victim’s hands, raised up in futile self defense. The man fell to the floor, dead.
As calls streamed into 911, Ford went outside to his car and got a container of lighter fluid. Back in the building, he jumped onto a motorized pallet jack and rode toward the west end of the huge complex, the equivalent of a block-length away. Squirting stacks of paper products and other flammables, including fireplace logs, he lit them afire. In one stack, plastic jars of olive oil melted and sent the flames roaring. Ford rode on, igniting fires and hunting prey.
Some 30 officers are assigned full-time to SWAT duty on Denver PD. But ironically, Sunday is the day off for the whole unit. Pulling all day- and night-shift officers in from scattered locations throughout the metro area would take time, and when an active shooter is on a rampage the luxury of waiting is unaffordable.
Spurred initially by a suspect who loosed a bloodbath in a Texas cafeteria, Denver PD has trained in active-shooter response since the early ’90s, explains Frank Conner, day shift lieutenant for the SWAT unit. “A core philosophy of that training has been to educate all our police officers, not just our SWAT personnel,” in tactics of entry, search, rescue and neutralization, he says. When an active-shooter call comes, they are not expected to wait for specialists.
The mission is for officers, regardless of regular assignment, to “seek out where shots are being fired or are last known to have been fired and work toward that area as quickly as possible to neutralize the threat,” Conner explains.
Fortuitously, patrol officers from District 2, which encompasses the warehouse, had received refresher training in active-shooter suppression just a few weeks before Michael Ford’s eruption.
Within minutes of the first frantic reports from the warehouse, a make-shift CP had been established among scores of semi-trailers in a Safeway parking area, under the on-scene incident commander Pete Conner, a District 2 lieutenant.
At 3:24 p.m., a team of half a dozen District 2 officers led by Sgt. Steve Gonzales made entry on the north side of the warehouse near the area where Ford had fired his first volleys. They were accompanied by tactics-trained paramedic support. “They went in knowing they might be shot,” Cmdr. Conner told reporters.
Quickly, the group came upon Ford’s first four victims. All were still alive, although at least two were critically injured. “The two with head wounds almost certainly would have died if they’d laid there much longer,” says SWAT’s Frank Conner. “Those officers saved lives by making immediate entry.”
While the first team helped evacuate the injured and other terrified employees they encountered, a second team of District 2 officers, under Ofcr. Robert Fitzgibbons, entered and began the seemingly near-impossible task of sweeping the building, which covers more than three square blocks. Many of the complex’s 150 workers were still unaccounted for…and Michael Ford was yet to be located.
The scene was “almost surreal,” Gonzales said later. Some workers were randomly driving forklifts in search of wounded friends, too shocked to speak. Others stampeded past officers, leaving them to wonder if among those escaping might be the shooter himself.
As SWAT operatives (“technicians” in Denver parlance) arrived, they were deployed by Frank Conner. The body of the man Ford had killed was discovered, and a number of fearful employees found huddled in hiding places were rescued. Two male employees who had holed up in a foreman’s shack shakily recounted a near-disastrous encounter with the gunman.
Unaware that shootings had taken place elsewhere in the immense warehouse, they’d been trying to put out fires they’d discovered in a dry goods area in the northwest section of the building. As they hoisted a fire extinguisher, Ford walked up to them. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he said quietly. He pulled out his revolver and pointed it at one of them.
The other man recognized Ford as someone he’d gone to high school with and tried to persuade him to put the gun down. “I almost had him convinced,” he told officers. “Then something snapped and he says, ‘No, that’s not gonna happen.’” Ford fired a shot but missed them. They fled to the foreman’s shack and called 911.
A little after 4:00 p.m., another call reported that people might be trapped in a second-floor lunchroom that overlooked an open area not far from where the two would-be firefighters had encountered Ford.
At about 4:15, Frank Conner sent three of his technicians—Ryan Grothe, James Sewald and Derick Dominguez—to check on the area. By then, much of the warehouse interior was in netherworld conditions. Acrid smoke clogged the air, water from the sprinkler system sloshed over the floors, fires continued to flare, concerns mounted over the risk of the ammonia pipes melting, and radios had been silenced by the building’s bunker-like concrete.
Against these odds, the trio moved in and at 4:24 located a narrow steel staircase that led up to the little lunchroom of vending machines above. They called out “Police!” several times to let any employees who might be cowering in the room know that rescue was at hand.
Dominguez, leading the way up, scanned over the railing on their right to the open area where fires were burning, searching for the suspect or at least for a fire extinguisher. As his eyes swept back through the smoke toward the area under the stairway, his peripheral vision for just a flicker caught a human figure below the steps, about a car length away.
In that split second, Michael Ford fired six fast shots from under the stairs.
Five of the rounds were stopped cold by the thick metal that formed a welded rim around the riser on step number 12. They only dented it. But one of the ball-ammo shots hit the thinner center of the vertical plate. The bullet drilled right through it—and blasted into Dominguez’s left femur like the blow of a sledgehammer. The shot shattered the technician’s hip joint and leg bone. He cried out and went down, gushing blood.
At the foot of the steps, Grothe immediately fired on the ambusher with his AR-15. Sewald quickly pulled Dominguez to the bottom of the stairs, then also delivered rapid fire from his HK 53.
Grothe and Sewald “never hesitated,” says Patrol Div. Chief Steve Cooper. “Instead of diving or running for cover, they stayed their ground. Their concern was not just for the active shooter but also for their comrade who was down. The notion of providing for their own safety never entered their minds.”
One of their rounds broke Ford’s arm. He dropped his revolver and collapsed to the floor.
“Stay down! Don’t move!” the officers shouted. Instead, Ford pushed up in a last-ditch effort to reach his firearm about a yard away. The officers fired again, and again the assailant fell to the floor. He did not get up again.
Of 17 shots that Grothe and Sewald between them fired, seven struck Michael Ford—in his arm, leg/knee area, side and back. All seven bullets and their fragments remained in his body.
During his 72 minutes of madness that afternoon, Ford fired 16 rounds from his revolver. That means he had to reload twice. His one shot that hit an officer took out a large chunk of Dominguez’s leg bone. At this writing, the technician is still undergoing physical rehabilitation after extensive surgery. He has advanced from being mobile only in a wheelchair to maneuvering on crutches. But he does not yet know when he’ll be able to return to duty.
Denver’s DA, Mitchell Morrissey, was quick to rule Ford’s death wholly justified. He commended the “three heroic officers” who were the last people the active shooter ever saw alive. He praised too all the other professionals who helped in confronting that bloody Sunday, from patrol officers and dispatchers to paramedics and hospital personnel.
“Your collective actions saved lives,” Morrissey said, “and for that we are grateful.”
