At any given time, the Maryland State Police has approximately fourteen hundred sworn members on staff. All are capable of performing multiple police tasks, and in fact are expected to. Once they have received the basic training that every trooper gets, there are a number of specialties that they can enter into, including aviation and flight paramedic, homicide investigator, narcotics trooper, or—the unit I was heading up during the sniper nightmare—criminal intelligence. As young troopers’ skills are developed, the Maryland State Police provides excellent opportunities for training and honing those skills, based upon what each trooper likes to do balanced against the needs of the agency.
But whatever our current assignment or job responsibilities may be, we are all expected to react and respond as we were trained to do. We are trained to remain calm and in control during any crisis that may crop up. When a crisis occurs, from multiple-car accidents to homicide or hostage barricade situations, that first trooper on the scene is expected to take command, evaluate the situation, and report back to the barrack and his or her command to relay what’s going on, what’s needed, and then take the appropriate action. “One riot, one trooper” is a phrase that was drilled into me from day one in the academy. Troopers ride alone, and in most of the rural areas a trooper’s closest backup may be twenty minutes away, or even farther. So a trooper must make spur-of-the-moment, sometimes life-or-death decisions within the guidelines of police training and the laws of Maryland. A trooper who can’t make those decisions won’t make it as a road trooper in Maryland—or in any state police agency in the United States, for that matter.
Troopers have to trust in their training and experience. They have to have the self-assurance to stand fast in the face of any situation, and to get the job done. Likewise, supervisors and commanders have to trust those troopers under their command; they can’t second guess or countermand something the trooper was doing unless they themselves are on the scene to make the call. It’s also critical for supervisors and commanders to know the troopers they serve with. They have to know what skills each trooper has, and to avoid placing troopers in situations that they aren’t capable of handling. If there’s no other option, it’s on the trooper to attend to his or her duty. For example, a trooper who is a criminal investigator might happen upon an accident scene, in which case the trooper is expected to stop, render aid, and secure the scene until a uniformed trooper arrives. The same can be said for the uniformed road trooper who comes across a homicide scene. He or she must render aid, protect the scene and evidence, and, if the suspect is present, make an arrest. The trooper must also maintain control and handle the investigation until properly relieved by a criminal investigator. For any trooper, this is all in a day’s work. One of our mottos is, “Take no grief / Cut no slack / Hook ’em and book ’em / And don’t look back.”
When I was a young trooper patrolling the road out of the Frederick Barrack, I reported to an experienced senior sergeant. Once, when I just wasn’t sure of myself concerning an arrest I was working on, I went to him and asked what I needed to do. The sergeant looked me hard in the eye. “The citizens of Maryland gave you a badge, a gun, bullets, a cruiser, and the best police training that is available,” he said. “Make a decision, son, show some balls, and get the damn job done.”
That lesson had stuck with me throughout my career, and it would come into play as we drew nearer to catching the Beltway snipers.
One of the units the Maryland State Police deploys is the Special Tactical Assault Team Element, or STATE. When I first started out as a trooper in the early ’80s, the STATE team was made up of specially trained and extremely fit troopers—primarily road troopers—from all over Maryland. Experts in special weapons and assault tactics, they are the state police version of a SWAT team, called upon to respond to hostage barricade situations, high-risk search-and-seizure warrants, and other such events or situations on an as-needed basis. Each six-person team gets backup from its own command staff, and they have special equipment that is strategically placed around the state for deployment. There is always one team on call, with another in standby mode, in case two teams are needed.
As need for the skills of the STATE teams expanded during the ’80s, amid the violence associated with the so-called war on drugs, the teams morphed from part-time to full-time units, which helped further increase their capabilities. As each team is deployed, it comes with its own on-call command staff and specialized equipment. Upon a STATE team’s arrival at any situation, the command and control of the incident is turned over to that team, and the local barrack personnel fall into a backup and perimeter guard role. Over the years, I had worked closely with just about every trooper who is a member of the STATE team, and I had come up through the ranks with all their command staff. These troopers and their leaders are the very best of the Maryland State Police. I’ve served many high-risk search-and-seizure warrants with them, and I would put them up against any other law enforcement team in the country, including the FBI.
During my years working narcotics, it was clear that what once would have been considered a low- or medium-risk serving of a search-and-seizure warrant could now escalate to high-risk in a split second. Many of us believe there’s no such thing as a low-risk search-and-seizure warrant. Despite our best efforts in gathering all the intelligence and background concerning a search-and-seizure target, you never know what violence the bad guys are capable of until they’re cornered. I’ve seen suspects who were known to be extremely violent throw their hands up and proclaim, “You got me.” I’ve also seen suspects with no criminal record or known background for violence come out fighting—even be willing to die before submitting to arrest. Many times in the early ’80s we would hit crack houses and stash houses with search-and-seizure warrants served by only me and one or two other narcs, along with some poor uniformed cop who happened to be on duty. Knowing what I know now, we were extremely lucky that none of us was ever killed or seriously injured serving warrants—understaffed and half-assed as we were, as we in the state police like to put it.
For sure I was lucky when, as a young trooper working the road in Frederick County, I was called in to assist the narcs with a search warrant. When I arrived at the barrack, I was told to do whatever they needed—I was to be the “uniform presence” for the warrant service. Soon I met Detective Sergeant Peter Edge, who was in charge of the Westminster Barracks Criminal Investigation Section at the time. Edge gave me simple instructions: follow them to an address across the street from the barrack and go up on the front porch with the server and knock on the door and announce that it was the state police with a warrant. Edge said I was there only so the bad guys would see that it was the real police. Looking around the room, I realized what he meant. The office was full of guys with long hair and beards—hippie cops wearing jeans, T-shirts, and ball caps emblazoned with Orioles, Yankees, and Harley Davidson logos. Little did I know that I would eventually spend a decade and a half of my career looking just like them.
Instructions done, we went across the street, and I knocked on the door. Instantly, a massive shootout started, with bad guys firing at us from both inside and outside the house. Bullets were flying. At least one round hit the wooden door trim, just inches above my Stetson—a shot that was fired through a window from the inside. It was then that I realized I was the only readily identifiable target out there. In those days, we didn’t have raid jackets and hats with POLICE emblazoned on them; instead, there was just that ragtag collection of baseball hats. I didn’t know who to shoot at, so I jumped off the porch and got under it, followed quickly by Detective Sergeant Edge. He looked at me, saw the panic and confusion in my face, and said in a calm voice, “This is a fucking mess; this was supposed to be easy.”
Years later we still hadn’t learned those early lessons. We still were hitting houses and serving warrants with only a couple of us and a uniform. Every time, we thought it was going to be easy, but far too often we would burst into some building, house, or apartment only to be confronted by ten or more armed people—in over our heads just like that. Sometimes we had to fight our way in, and occasionally in the bad neighborhoods in Charm City (Baltimore) we had to fight our way back out with prisoners and a haul of cocaine or heroin. It was probably only due to dumb luck that we never lost a trooper doing this kind of thing.
Eventually we wised up. Because the Narcotics Division was serving so many search-and-seizure warrants at multiple locations nearly every day, we had to tighten up our act. As a result, the STATE teams began training the rest of us to serve search-and-seizure warrants. We certainly weren’t trained to the level the STATE teams were, but we implemented their basic method—meaning, first of all, that we would never serve any search warrant with anything less than a six-person team. We were taught how to gain entry and, working with a partner, and in three teams of two, clear an entire house and take control of anybody who was found inside the target location. I saw firsthand how STATE worked as a team and what they needed any other troopers on the perimeter to do. I learned that no matter what we heard—gunshots, flash-bang grenades, or shouting and screaming, we were not to come in, but to maintain weapons discipline and to hold the perimeter while they did their job—which they did every time.
All these lessons that I had learned over the years, and all that I had practiced, taught, and preached as a commander, would now be vitally important to me. The last day of the Beltway sniper investigation was about to begin.
STATE teams were being utilized daily to assist in the securing of the schools in Montgomery County. Also, since multiple agencies were involved in the SNIPMUR task force, we had worked on cross training with SWAT teams from Montgomery County and the FBI. Once we cornered the suspects, it was likely going to end in a violent confrontation. One-on-one, the snipers had every uniformed police officer, trooper, or agent outgunned. And since the snipers had proven their ability to kill at will, there was good reason to think they wouldn’t go down without a fight. With their obvious god complex, they felt invincible and thought they were much smarter than the police.
The Maryland State Police STATE team commander was the same Major Jim Ballard who had called me and alerted me on the first day of the investigation that something unusual was happening. He was now doubling as regional commander for the state police. This was a stroke of luck for us. Major Ballard was respected among both Montgomery County SWAT team members and the FBI special tactical teams.
During the first twenty days of this investigation, Ballard had coordinated the Maryland State Police uniform response as well as the protection efforts at the schools in Montgomery County. In his spare time, he helped with the combined training among state police, FBI, and Montgomery County SWAT teams, aiming to hone them into a single unit. The various team members got to know one another and learned to account for the differences in each agency’s training. As a combined unit, they prepared and trained for the unknown. They tried to create every scenario they could think of, from a traffic stop or a hostage barricade situation to a manhunt for heavily armed suspects in the woods. Then they practiced how they would operate in each situation—a next-to-impossible task.
Major Ballard feared, as did the rest of us, that sooner or later a road trooper or county officer was going to stop the killers in a routine traffic stop or checkpoint and would be outgunned. In an attempt to counter the imbalance, the teams formed into three-person traffic backup teams, known as TANGO teams. Each TANGO team consisted of a STATE team member, an FBI SWAT team member, and a Montgomery County police SWAT team member. The TANGO teams deployed throughout the Montgomery County and metropolitan area. Their job was to monitor all traffic stops being made and immediately serve as backup officers to assist in the traffic stops. We were dealing with an unknown killer with unknown training, so the TANGO teams wore full tactical gear and were heavily armed. Their appearance was intimidating, and was meant to be. How this impending confrontation played out was going to be completely up to the killers.