Mike Thompson owes his and his partner’s lives to several things: his cool in an emergency, many hours on the pistol range, his training at the U.S. Revolver in both hands, the deputy swiveled in a wide arc, scanning the deserted parking lot for another accomplice, possibly a driver for a getaway car.
Thompson grabbed him by the back of his prison uniform, threw him to the ground, and put his foot on the man’s neck. When the shots burst out, the prisoner had started a dash for freedom. As that bullet struck the pavement just behind him, Thompson says, “at the end of the barrel, I saw the color pink, and I pulled the trigger.” His fourth and final shot fatally wounded the girlfriend. He spun to his left, toward the girlfriend, and fired one blind “desperation shot” over his left arm. Pushing the girlfriend away with his left hand, Thompson drew and fired, hitting the gunman in the chest and head. Suddenly, the girlfriend, behind Thompson and to his left, shouted, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” The gunman’s eyes strayed to Thompson’s partner, and he demanded her sidearm. In the seconds that followed the deputy and the gunman stayed locked “eyeball-to-eyeball,” Thompson recalls. The prisoner was trying to do the same, but was hampered by manacles and a waist chain. (Tunnel vision, like “tachypsychia,” the sensation that everything is happening in slow motion, is common in gunfights.) She stuck a tear-gas canister into the small of Thompson’s back and with her free hand started to frisk him for his sidearm. A woman in jeans and a pink top (who later turned out to be the prisoner’s girlfriend) ran around behind Thompson. 357 yelled, “Freeze! Put your hands up!” Thompson raised his hands and deliberately stared into the eyes of the man, who was only a few yards away.Īs he did, “something in pink” came toward him. As the deputies walked their charge back to their car in the clinic parking lot, they were ambushed.
marshal Mike Thompson and his female partner were escorting a 43-year-old convicted bank robber from jail to a local clinic. Get your UnGala tickets: A museum takeover and art party celebrating the Reader's 50ish anniversary CloseĪ couple of years ago, in Roanoke, Virginia, deputy U.S.
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