Worth More Dead

the buttons while his attention was distracted by the woman. Finally he felt a thrill of relief as his hand closed around his service weapon, a .45 caliber Sig Sauer, Model P220. The woman had walked to a point between the white SUV she was riding in and Yoder’s pickup truck.
    “I am a police officer,” Yoder shouted at her. “Drop your weapon. Now!”
    He yelled it three times, but the woman only stared at him. Then she placed the gun, which appeared to be a 9mm Smith and Wesson, to her head, as their eyes locked.
    “Shoot me,” she said. “Shoot me. Well, just go ahead and kill me.”
    Never taking the gun from her head, the woman began to move toward Yoder, and he edged away, trying to keep his truck between them. His eyes still fixed on the woman with the gun to her head, Randy Yoder managed to get his police radio turned on. He tried to break into radio traffic. When the air was finally clear, he spoke into it, calling out an emergency warning: “TAC thirty-six. I’ve got a party holding a gun to her head.”
    “While I’m talking,” Yoder remembered, “she’s still moving about.”
    He was warning his fellow officers inside the building and asking for help at the same time.
    “And then,” he said later, “she goes and gets back into her car, into the passenger side, and she’s sitting in there, and she’s yelling and ranting and raving, but I don’t know what she’s saying. Because now I’m focused on this guy. I’m trying to get him; I’m hollering at him. I’m watching her, and I’m hollering at him to come over to me, because I was going to throw him in my truck.”
    Randy Yoder figured that if he could get the old man into the open door of the passenger side of his pickup truck, he’d be safe from the woman, who seemed intent on shooting him.
    “He doesn’t respond, and I tell him several times…. Well, finally, he does. He comes running as fast as…Well, as fast as an old man can run. There, my door is open.”
    The old man was almost safe, but as he ran, the woman spotted him, and jumped out of the white Ford. Yoder shouted to the man to get into his truck, but he couldn’t move fast enough. “She made a beeline toward him,” Yoder said. “I saw her coming around the truck, and I began to back away from her.”
    Yoder was at the tailgate of his pickup truck when he heard the woman’s pistol go off. “And I hear two pops! I see him go down, and I see her pointing the gun at me. I didn’t know that I had been hit or what had happened. At that point, adrenaline’s kind of running. She doesn’t even skip a beat, though. She’s not lollygagging through here; she’s on the move. She goes right to him, I hear the pops, and she’s standing over him, and she’s just continually [firing]. One. Two. Three.”
    Randy Yoder retreated toward a nearby tree to get some cover. As he ran, he felt two shots hit him in the side. At that point, he turned and shot at the woman. He didn’t want her to hurt anyone more than she already had.
    Inside the station, Captain Joe Padilla heard the radio call for help and realized that, unbelievably, Randy Yoder was right outside in the parking lot.
    Padilla headed for the door. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of another officer’s gun belt lying on a table in the roll-call room and knew that Officer Daniel Perez (Joey’s brother) was still in the office, someplace. Padilla called out a warning to Perez, “Danny! She’s got a gun!” hoping he would hear it, and then Padilla plunged out into the parking lot.
    “I saw a woman first, tall, slender, good-looking, in a shooting stance,” Padilla recalled. “And my first thought was that she was a police officer and that she was holding a suspect at gunpoint.”
    Padilla was armed with a .45 caliber Glock Model 21 semiautomatic pistol. Its magazine had a capacity of thirteen rounds, and it could have one additional round in the chamber.
    It was important later on to know the type of weapon everyone involved in this strange tableau was carrying.
    Danny Perez, alerted by his captain, rushed out of the bathroom, where he was changing out of his uniform. He grabbed his fanny pack, which held his handgun, a 9mm Glock Model 17 semiautomatic pistol. This model held seventeen rounds in its magazine and one in the chamber. As Perez exited the police station, he saw Padilla running west toward the parking lot. He also saw a white SUV and caught a glimpse of Randy Yoder standing near the back of