When Lt. Jonathan Blaylock’s phone rang in his bedroom at 0200 hours that frigid Saturday, he awoke to what would later be called ‘A Cold Day in Hell.’
For reasons unknown, said the patrol officer calling, a cross-country trucker had deliberately crashed his 18-wheeler, packed with a cargo of gun-cleaning solvent, into a loading dock at his employer’s warehouse and service facility. He’d splashed the crumpled cab with gasoline and ignited it, then had disappeared into the cavernous building, randomly firing rounds from a handgun as he went.
For the public safety responders now converging on the scene, things only got worse after that.
A Merciless Adversary
Blaylock, who heads a 51-member, 11-county Special Response Team in southwestern Illinois, recently debriefed the daunting challenges of that dramatic callout for more than 500 operators and commanders at the Illinois Tactical Officers Association’s 25th annual training conference. In an exclusive interview with Police1 afterward, he elaborated on details and lessons learned.
The action erupted in sub-freezing weather last January at the sprawling area headquarters of the Schneider National trucking firm in an industrial park at the edge of Edwardsville, Ill.
The suspect, quickly identified as a 52-year-old bachelor named Roger Adams, was scheduled to return to work that day after laying off for six weeks because of an injury from a traffic accident. After inexplicably smashing his semi into the dock, he tried unsuccessfully to shoot into the truck’s fuel tanks and fuel pumps nearby.
Then from inside the building, he called 911 and told the dispatcher at Edwardsville PD that he was depressed and intended to kill himself. He warned that his house in the nearby town of Alton was “rigged to explode” with dozens of incendiary devices.
Officers racing to that scene found the words “BOOBY TRAPS” and “STAY OUT” spray painted on the siding.
When Blaylock arrived at the Schneider site at about 0230, “problems were multiplying fast,” he said.
The dispatcher was maintaining contact with Adams on his cell phone as he wandered through the truck center building, shooting at unidentified targets. He was setting fires in wastebaskets and igniting piles of flammables that he heaped on desktops. This touched off a sprinkler system that over time would drench the place with 150,000 gallons of water.
Besides warehouse space, the building housed a warren of offices and cubicles, 24-hour shower rooms and laundry machines for truckers, a break room, a conference room — “literally hundreds of hiding places,” Blaylock said.
Some night staff had fled the building, but “we didn’t know if there were casualties or hostages still inside. And we didn’t know precisely where the suspect was or how many weapons he might have or whether he had confederates. Given what he’d done to his house, there was also the possibility of IEDs.”
Complicating the scene, about 100 gassed-up tractor-trailers were parked on the surrounding grounds. Some were occupied by truckers who’d been sleeping in them and by displaced workers trying to stay warm.
Sleet was pelting down. Soon smoke was drifting from the building and water was running out from under doors and icing up entryways. The weather would be a merciless adversary.
Order Out of Chaos
“Once I realized the huge scale of what we had to deal with,” Blaylock said, “I knew I’d need all the bodies I could get. There were many problems, many unknowns — and Murphy seemed to be on the bad guy’s side.”
Working from a mobile CP parked a half-mile from the Schneider property, Blaylock scrambled to “bring a little order out of chaos.”
His early-arriving operators relieved the five patrol officers who’d been the first responders. Before long, nearly 70 SRT personnel from Blaylock’s Illinois Law Enforcement Alarm System team and neighboring units were on hand. Three negotiators took over from the dispatcher and prepared to take turns among themselves in an effort to persuade the suspect to surrender.
After some stubborn technical difficulties, the phone connection was patched into the CP for real-time monitoring.
Fire and EMS were staged, with hazmat specialists on hand. Buses were brought in to shelter and warm the civilians who’d been corralled at the site as well as SRT operators in need of relief. Perimeter, assault, and rescue teams were formed and positioned.
Early on, 27 drivers were evacuated from trucks in the hot zone via armored vehicle. “At the time we had no idea what the suspect looked like,” Blaylock said. Operators worked with a Schneider representative to clear each driver to assure that the suspect was not attempting to escape incognito with the evacuees.
As time passed with “no indication that any innocent party was in immediate jeopardy in the building,” the callout eventually settled in to a barricaded-subject waiting game, Blaylock explains. “We let the negotiators work and delayed our entry,” waiting in the bone-chilling cold for whenever seemed to be the safest moment.
At about 0500, the good guys got their first major break. Until then, the suspect’s indoor location couldn’t be determined because he was using a cell phone, traceable only to the nearest relay tower. But at that time, his battery died. When he picked up a landline phone and punched in 911 to reestablish dialog, it could be determined that he had to be within a cluster of six offices in the building, adjacent to rows of cubicles.
“We still didn’t know which office exactly, but now we had an isolated area to focus on,” Blaylock said.
Just after 0600, Blaylock ordered a camera-equipped robot into the building. Sprinklers were still spewing water and some sections of the interior were flooded too deeply for the machine to maneuver. But the robot, its movement directed according to a floor plan of the interior, was able to clear the showers and break room. No sign of victims down or of the suspect was found.
Ninety minutes later, after the sprinklers had been shut off, the first six-operator tactical team made entry and carefully expanded the search toward the offices where the suspect was believed to be holed up. The operators had scarcely taken a good cover position when Adams suddenly went silent.
“The negotiators kept the connection open, but he didn’t speak for another three hours,” Blaylock said. “During that time, we started cycling in relief operators, sent in a second Tac Team to search an upstairs area, and cleared the remainder of the ground floor. By 0930 we were satisfied that there were no additional suspects or any victims in the building.”
Driver Just Doesn’t Give a Shit...
It was 1105 — nine hours after Blaylock got his jarring wake-up call — before operators got their first glimpse of the suspect. The robot had been sent on an investigative foray into the office area as far as standing water would permit, and the suspect heard it. He opened the glass-paneled door of one of the offices, snapped his head out, then ducked back in, locked the door — and started talking on the phone once more, asking the negotiator what was going on.
“His demeanor had changed,” Blaylock said. “Before, he was calm, depressed, talking about how life wasn’t worth living. Now he became more paranoid, concerned about what we were going to do to him. He was getting antsy and I was afraid he’d change locations and hide again.
“The negotiators weren’t making any progress. He wasn’t open to discussing surrender. I wanted to act before he came charging out of his little barricade. I didn’t want to play hide-and-seek with him.”
At about noon, moving behind shields with their “battle rattle” masked by a distracting blare from sirens and PA systems outside, a six-man gas team entered the flooded building and sloshed their way to within striking distance of the office. Adams told the negotiator he was dousing the room and himself with gasoline. In communication with the team, Blaylock instructed: “Give gas when ready.” The hope was to flush him out.
An operator fired two 37mm powder CS rounds through the door glass and suffused the office with teargas. A shot was heard inside the room. “There were gurgling sounds from within that most responders recognize,” Blaylock said. Then silence.
Unlocking the door with a janitor’s master key, operators sent the camera robot in first. The suspect was leaning back in a chair, fatally wounded from a shot in the right side of his head. A .22-cal. revolver lay below his right hand in about three inches of water.
The risks of the day were not yet at an end. Roger Adams’s booby-trapped house had yet to be disarmed. Blaylock sent four of his operators to assist the Illinois Secretary of State’s bomb squad in that chore. Inside, squad members found “dozens if not hundreds of improvised incendiary devices,” Blaylock said, ranging from lighters set to ignite aerosol cans to toilet bowls, wastebaskets, and cans filled to the brim with gasoline and flammable materials.
They also found a bumper sticker inside: “CAUTION. DRIVER JUST DOESN’T GIVE A SHIT ANY MORE.”
Appreciation in the Aftermath
Ironically, in arranging the potential death trap, the suspect had outwitted himself. “Gasoline vapors were so rich from the place being soaked that there wasn’t enough oxygen to accommodate ignition,” Blaylock explains.
All things considered, the cold day in hell was “the most complex situation our team had handled in its seven-year history,” Blaylock said. The resolution left officers who’d been involved with two major satisfactions.
First, Blaylock said, “none of the response personnel or any innocent civilians suffered so much as a twisted ankle.”
Then, shortly after the suspect’s funeral, members of his extended family sent a letter that was distributed to each of the SRT responders. The relatives were at a loss to explain the actions of Roger Adams, the letter said, but they wanted to express their appreciation for the efforts of the officers and other public safety personnel who had to deal with the unfortunate choice he made.
The letter was signed by nearly 20 family members.
Our thanks to President Jeff Chudwin and the board of the Illinois Tactical Officers Assn. for their excellent help in facilitating this report.
