Hostage Rescue of an Infant

Hostage Rescue of an Infant - Surprise AZ PD SWAT On Friday, May 17th, 2024, the Surprise, Arizona Police Department received a call that a suspect had broken into his ex-girlfriend's home and taken her and their seven-month-old child hostage. The suspect told her that he planned to kill her and the baby and eventually killed her dog. She convinced the suspect to let her go outside and fled to local construction workers who called the Surprise police.

When officers arrived on scene, they found the suspect shooting out the front of the house into the neighboring homes. The decision was made to conduct a highrisk entry to rescue the child. What ensued was a textbook hostage rescue by members of the Surprise SWAT team augmented by patrol officers who entered the home and rescued the child, getting him to medical attention and saving his life.

The team, having rescued the baby, then pulled out of the home, leaving the suspect barricaded in a back bedroom. The suspect eventually lit the house on fire before committing suicide.

My guests today are Officer Ryan Scott and Officer Travis Carpalo from Surprise PD, who were both part of the team that rescued the baby.

My name is Jon Becker. For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

Jon Becker: Guys, thanks for being here with me.

Everyone: Appreciate it. Thanks for having us.

Jon Becker: So, Ryan, why don't we start with telling me about the city of Surprise, Arizona.

Ryan Scott: So, the city of Surprise is located northwest of Phoenix. We're about 30-40 miles northwest of Phoenix. We are about 160,000 as our population increases during the winter time. We get a lot of snowbirds that come through.

So, boosts up to about 200,000 sometimes in populace. Our PD alone, we're about 188 sworn total with numerous from patrol operation divisions, tactic support that we're in. So, Travis and I are in the tactic support division. But overall a little smaller size agency with a big city. So, we're not. I know it sounds a little crazy Surprise and, may seem small, but it's actually a pretty decent city.

Jon Becker: Talk to me about the team. How big is the team?

Ryan Scott: So, we got 16 overall. Is that what it is now? Eight full-time. At the time of this incident, we had eight full-time operators and then we had eight ancillary guys. I think only of those eight ancillary guys, we have, I think it was two or three wing members. So for us, we have a program. So when you first get on, you go through an internship for a year. You get a mentor that sits with you.

They evaluate you monthly, see how you perform, whether or not you're going to be fit for it. And then at the end of your 12 months, we'll get together as our wing members and say, "Hey, is this individual worthwhile to wing”, which is like a ceremony kind of thing we do where we accept you into the brotherhood, right?

Type thing. So again, we had two wing members and then the rest were interns essentially.

Jon Becker: Got it. And in the eight-man full-time element, is that full-time SWAT?

Is that a full-time element that's also working crime suppression or doing some kind of collateral duty?

Ryan Scott: So, we do a variety of roles at the time. We have, again, we have eight, including a sergeant. One of ours was a TFO, which is a what's the I'm sorry--

Jon Becker: Task Force Officer.

Ryan Scott: Task Force Officer. Thank you. He's working for the US Marshalls at the time, and he was actually at this incident as well. between just we're mainly in charge of making sure the training for the full-time team is good and we also do fugitive apprehension and then any other type of special details surveillance and stuff like that. So, there's a violent offender within our city that patrol doesn't have time to get or they hit a certain parameter, they'll send over our way, can we have a little more time, resources, some undercover vehicles, and then we'll do a work up on that individual, find out where he works, day-to-day operations. Then we'll find a way to effectively take him to arrest for the safest way, you know, that patrol doesn't have the ability to do.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that makes sense. What's the training tempo for the team?

How often do you guys get to train?

Ryan Scott: So pretty much NA standards right where we were training that 20 hours a month kind of concept. However, a little bit after this incident and about September I pitched an idea. I talked to some of these guys like “Hey let's 10hour training days kind of get exhausting. You start losing people after a while”.

So I was like “Why don't we just let's break it down. Let's try. We'll do 5 hours but we'll do it every Wednesday?” And mind you this is just a full team not the full time guys. I don't want to confuse that. So, as far as full team training, we are training every Wednesday for 5 hours.

So, we wanted to keep it consistent every single week. And we're also trying to fill time as a new team in that full-time element. We wanted to keep consistency and build routine in our weekly schedules. So, we swapped to that. We wanted to make sure that if we had a problem one week, we can address it the next week. If you missed a training, it wasn't, “Hey, we did HR this month and here it is six months later”. You may have missed that, but now we're doing HR a few months later. And then people forget that we start to deteriorate our skills. So, we kept it consistent. So, every week, 5 hours of team training.

Jon Becker: Lots of great stuff.

Ryan Scott: Well, we will touch on each month. It is definitely going to be a firearms day. We've kind of rolled our training specific to HR. We do our basic CQB movements, but we really hit hard on HR. So, at least once a month, it's HR scenarios and more specialty training where there's less lethal gas, breaching training, and snipers.

Snipers have actually kind of separated from us. They're their own element under the SAU umbrella. However, recently they've been rolling right into that five hours. So, they're squeezed into some extra training, too, which is awesome.

Jon Becker: The ancillary guys are working patrol. They're attached to the team.

They have a true collateral duty portion of your team. Those guys are working patrol normally.

Ryan Scott: Yes. So we were up until about TSD, our Tech Support division was created in 2001 with our new chief. And come 2022 some trials and tribulations, right, but our chief had the vision of, hey, we're going to go full-time. So I'm going to create an eight-man unit. Our chief came from Phoenix, so big agency stuff. So he said, "We're going to create a full-time element to this." And so eight of us went full-time. And then the other obviously other side of things are just detectives. We have a couple patrol guys. Most of them are detectives, patrol. We have two sergeants, so one full-time sergeant, one ATL. So we don't have an internal ATL on the team. It was more just a sergeant who is an ATL, but he's a full-time SRO sergeant. So that's kind of like more of the makeup of our overall team there.

Jon Becker: So on this day, what are the initial resources? Like who's working, what's available?

Ryan Scott: So this was 11:25 in the morning. So we had two day shift squads on.

So about I think there were two sergeants on duty and a lieutenant along with I want to say about 15 officers total to cover the city. We're over 100 square miles.

So, we're very large. A lot of it is the bacon lands and stuff like that, but about 15 officers on scene or not on scene, but on duty at the time. And by the time we started arriving, before I got too far ahead, we had I think three three patrol officers on scene and then the sergeant had eventually showed up.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Ryan Scott: One of those patrol officers was one of our ancillary squadman.

Jon Becker: Okay. Okay. So let's start walking through the event. So how does it start?

Ryan Scott: So I was actually just we. We started our shift at about 10:00. We were working a swing shift at that time and about 11:25 I'm sitting at the computer and then I hear the radio traffic for the call. Guys are kind of trickling from the gym and stuff like that. So, we'll monitor the radio and I start hearing the call and initially, I mean, we get a lot of false calls that are kind of like exactly like these, but as I'm listening to, I'm like, "All right, this sounds actually a little bit more legit." I looked at the history of the house. There were like two DV calls.

There wasn't a lot of history there. So, this sounds pretty good. So, I started letting the guys know, “Hey, start paying attention to the radio. There's this going on.” And then by the time I get out to my car, that's when the first call for the shots fired were kicked out. So then I really knew that this was something real.

Jon Becker: So from a patrol standpoint, the initial call comes from who?

Ryan Scott: The first call came from a construction worker. So if they understand this area a few of the houses are built, but a lot of the houses are all a new build kind of community. So there's a lot of houses under construction, a lot of construction workers down that street with a few occupied homes.

Jon Becker: Got it. And like I guess let's talk about kind of what happens before and probably put in context like you guys don't know most of what we're about to say when you arrive on scene, but it's probably good to set context. So how does this for the victim's purposes, how does the day kick off?

Ryan Scott: So, what we learned in hindsight is that the victim and her sixmonth old baby that she shared with the suspect, was staying at her parents'

home in Surprise. The parents were out of town on vacation on a cruise. So, that's where the suspect got wind of this. So he had started casing the house the day prior dressing up like an Amazon worker trying to cover up the Ring cameras and about and he also made a phone call to his work saying that there was a death in the family and this was all the day before the incident. So he was pre-planning. He already knew what he was getting into.

So the day of the incident was about 3:00 in the morning. So mind you, this incident didn't kick off till about 11:25 in the afternoon. So at 3:00 in the morning, the suspect broke into the home. He had a duffel bag full. He had tons of ammunition. He had some firearms, duct tape, zip ties, the whole even mentioned trip wires in there for what he was trying to set up. So he wakes her up. He forces her outside to smoke. Forces her to do some drugs and drink and keep her going throughout the night. And at some point, he pretty much wanted to prove how serious he was that that's when he actually killed the dog. So, he shoots the dog sometime early in the morning. And about 7 in the morning is when they actually go to the vet to take the dog. She was alone in the car for a brief moment in time while he took the dog in. He just made an excuse that he found the dog, ran over. So by the time they really had the chance to look at the dog he was already out. So goes in quickly, drops the dog off, comes back, and then they end up back at the house.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So it's actually for a brief moment there, it's like a mobile kidnap where he's running her around the city and dropping off the dead dog.

Ryan Scott: Yeah. She did say that she did think about it, but it was that the process happened so quickly from him coming out, and she was still just too fearful to even take that opportunity.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. So, he has killed the dog. They're back at the house after the vet, 8:00 in the morning, let's say so 7-something 8:00 in the morning, 3 hours later, how does she get out of the house?

Ryan Scott: So, the window that he broke, she made a deal with him that she would go down, speak with some of the construction workers, and see if she can get a quote on repairing that window. Because again, this was her parents' home.

So she knew that that was her opportunity to say, "Hey, I need you to call the police." So she goes about four houses to the east, meets a few construction workers, and starts telling them what's going on. “I need you to call the police.” If he sees the police, like she's letting us then know that the baby's in the house, that he's been broken in the morning, he's been threatening to kill them. He'll kill the baby. So, she informs the initial neighbor or the construction worker before she goes across the street and then starts talking to the neighbor and has the neighbor call as well.

Jon Becker: Got it. So, now you got multiple 911 calls.

Ryan Scott: Correct?

Jon Becker: I'm assuming most of that information is probably past the dispatch.

So, as patrol officers arrive, they don't know the backstory as to what's happened, you know, about the dog and the vet and all of that, but they do know that she is in the house. He's holding her hostage and she's afraid he's gonna kill a baby.

Actually, she's now out of the house.

Ryan Scott: She is. Yeah. Yeah. She was having, so the issue that they ran into was they're getting mixed information from the original caller, the 911 caller.

The construction worker said, "Oh, she went back into the house”, but we learned later on that her going back in the house was actually the house across the street. The patrol officers were giving the wrong address for the house initially as well. They were giving the house of the second neighbor a 911 call.

And then as the 911 call from that neighbor was going on, she took off somewhere again throughout this new build construction site.

Jon Becker: Okay. So, she's kind of running around.

Ryan Scott: Correct. Yeah.

Jon Becker: Little like you would when your baby's trapped inside of the house.

Okay. So, patrol starts arriving. When do you guys first get there?

Ryan Scott: Oh gosh. I think so. Again, our one guy that's on the TFO with the Marshalls, he was actually not too far away doing a follow-up on a case. So, he had heard that scene, heard the call and he pushed that way. So, the two patrol officers and then our one TFO on the team and then our ancillary patrol SWAT guy, it was almost simultaneous, probably a few minutes after the initial patrol guy got there. I would say one one of our guys got there, I would say maybe 15 or so minutes. So, mind you, from where we work to get to that address, especially with traffic, it's like a 20-minute drive. So it takes time to get out that way. So, it was about 15 or so minutes from the time the call kicked out.

Jon Becker: When patrol officers get there, what do they see?

Travis Carpalo: They don't see anything from my understanding of it. They end up doing a soft perimeter around the house because they're still trying to figure out which house it was. And they're still trying to locate the female. The original caller that's saying that her child's inside and gets some more intelligence because everyone else that they talked to didn't know much like they had just moved here. “It's a brand new neighborhood. I don't know these people. I don't really know what's going on. I don't know where she went.” I think around that time they had set up a soft I guess kind of perimeters. Had a couple units there but not enough to do a full-on, you know, surround of the house. And I think that's when they started hearing gunshots going off from inside.

Ryan Scott: Correct. So preface that she had not been found. She did make a phone call into 911 as well at some point right after one of the neighbors. So, when officers arrive on scene, they have not contacted her. So, they haven't been able to get any actual information from her directly. One of our team guys that's on patrol found her finally. And as he's starting to talk with her, the gunshots start ringing out. So he breaks his contact with her to go figure out what's going on with the house. So we kind of lost her again. So it is until a few moments later that another officer shows up, finds her, puts her in the back of his car, and actually has that face to face with her and that confirmation that “Yes, my baby is still in the home”. So prior to that, it all went through dispatch. And as we all know, when these emergency calls kick out and you're going like, you get the information, you're looking at your MDCs. We didn't have MDC's at the time. So, we're just hearing things, but a lot of information is coming in and you're missing a ton of that information as you're trying to get to the scene. But we never had any actual confirmation. You'd hear, “Hey, there was a baby inside”, but we didn't know for sure until we actually contacted her and that face to face confirmation that that kid was in there.

Jon Becker: And at the point that you get that confirmation, shortly thereafter, he starts shooting out the front of the house.

Ryan Scott: So it was prior to the confirmation he was actually shooting out of the house.

Travis Carpalo: So I wouldn't go off of it. So our first our first the TFO guy and our patrol ancillary member, they had got a shield and started pushing up along with patrol. And as they were pushing up, that's when he started shooting through the front door. And then he took a tactical pause, pulled to the side.

We're waiting for additional assets to get there before they start going further in.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. So he basically saw them.

Travis Carpalo: Yes.

Jon Becker: And start shooting at him.

Travis Carpalo: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay. And somewhere in there, and you're not going to know this till later, but somewhere in there, he's going to shoot the baby.

Travis Carpalo: Correct.

Ryan Scott: Yeah. I believe it was during that barrage of gunfire because it was quite a bit of shooting. I don't know how many it was, but he was shooting a lot.

Jon Becker: And he shoots the baby.

Ryan Scott: Four times.

Jon Becker: Four times.

Ryan Scott: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Travis Carpalo: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay. So, you got a patrol guy that pushes up with a shot. You got one of your guys that pushes up with a shield.Takes pause while the guy's shooting out the front of the house.What's the next thing that happens?

Travis Carpalo: So, I think it was kind of a I would label as divine intervention in my mind, but it was a really weird setup for all of us because we're not all in the same spot of the city responding from the other side of the city and we all kind of arrive on scene to assist at the exact same time within like 20/30 seconds of each other getting everything prepped up. One of our operators that just got back from breacher school showed up, which is perfect, right? He was there with Tim's guy because they were doing a breaching demonstration somewhere in the city. So at that point, we Scott and the other operator had showed up to the west of the house. I had just gotten there to assist the operator and the patrol officer on the east of the house and we were trying to gather some intelligence at that point because the thing we were running into too on our end was we didn't have MDCs at the time which is like a mobile computer. So, we're basically going off of just chaotic radio traffic. So, we're hearing some bits and pieces here, but we hadn't gotten to the scene yet to actually break it down like, "Hey, what is actually going on? I hear there's gunshots. I hear there's a potential hostage, but has anybody found the mom? Is she able to provide actual information?" Because again, it's hard to act upon third party information. Like, I'm getting the information from the construction worker and the neighbor who were still kind of confused about it, giving us bits and parts. How much of that is actually intelligence and how much of that is just information? So getting it from the female herself would provide us intelligence that hey there is actually confirmation of a child inside at this time.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Ryan Scott: Yeah. So by the time I arrived like you said our he was on that so our breacher was the first. So as soon as I get up there I see a few of the patrol guys. I get kitted up. I push up and my breacher is like “Hey I need you to hit point. It's all right. My job.” And by the time I'm sitting there, I would say I was probably there for 2 or 3 minutes. And I remember just in my mind was like, "All right, this is real. This is real. It was like the moisture in my mouth was gone. It was all caught in my mouth. I was like, "This is it. This is the moment." And like, yeah, nerves and stuff like that, but like we we got to do it. We got to go. And that's when I finally heard our K9 guy was kind of like, "Hey, getting on the radio, hey, we got to push." He was a prior SWAT guy as well. He's like, "We got to get in there. We have to get in there." He hits the lieutenant like, "Hey, what are we waiting on?" And then the lieutenant was like, "You're good to go." So, we hear that and which was simultaneous to the confirmation with the officer and the mother saying, "Yes, the baby is there."

So, we kind of converge from both east and west up to that front door. The screen was locked. My breacher comes up, pops that door, gets that door front open. I remember standing there just staring at the bullet holes in the doors like, "Oh jeez, I really hope."

But I want to emphasize that just prior to that, we started hearing banging noises.

So, we hadn't heard any shooting. And to set that stage there was no shooting. I never heard shooting when I got on scene. So, it was about 7 minutes, right? I think it came-- so from the time the last shot was fired to the time we made entry was actually 7 minutes. So there was some delay in that motion. Whether you speak of stimulus being gone at that point I don't know we can have, we can have all sorts of conversations about what that means but the decision was still to go and we made entry into that house and then that's where…

Jon Becker: So I mean retrospectively the guy probably shooting out the front door sees the cops arrive.

Travis Carpalo: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Shoots at them and then flees back further into the house.

Travis Carpalo: Yeah. If we get deeper into this, I'll give you my theory of what the picture I have painted in that situation is.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Travis Carpalo: Of what happened. But yeah, we get up to the house, he breaches the door super easily, which was great. There's no delay on that. Super tight space. and then what we tell people is with HR movements, when we went full-time, we actually relied heavily with Phoenix PD for a lot of their training. So, their CQB movements and both their CQB school and their HR school. So, the movements that you hear through some of the videos were new to us. We had only trained those couple times. We had two guys that went through the training.

They brought it back. We trained it a couple times prior, but it was like we got to do it now. So you see kind of like you do kind of fall to the lower level of training.

You'll see that through the movements, but overall pushing through and making it work at the end of the day.

Jon Becker: And you guys I mean is your theory I mean obviously the breach is going to be loud but are you not throwing bangs?

Ryan Scott: So we didn't have any resources at the time. So again we're responding as I would say as an attack officer. Obviously our team's getting pulled up, but, going back to what we do as a full-time is that we assist patrol for high-end calls or we perceive to be high-end calls. So, like initially when we hear this information, I'm not going to be driving code to this, right? Initially, I'm like, okay, this might be interesting. I'm going to start driving there with my due regard. But we'll see because patrol should be able to handle most of it.

When the shots go off, I'm like, “Okay, so now I'm driving code because it shows the seriousness of what's happening”. So, we didn't have any of the resources at the time. We were getting those in place, but getting a Bearcat through lunch traffic across one side of the city to the other is going to take forever. And that's usually that in a way our equipment van has all of our bangs on it.

Jon Becker: Got it. So you guys are going in no bangs. You got vests and and you know, you got your vests on and helmets on. And you got a shield.

Travis Carpalo: So yeah, we had the guy with his Marshall shield which we dumped.

Ryan Scott: Yeah.

Travis Carpalo: That was out there. Dumped out the front door, didn't you?

Ryan Scott: Yeah. We didn't, we didn't use it.

Jon Becker: So your normal HR movement wouldn't be you, you wouldn't be using a shield.

Ryan Scott: No shield.

Travis Carpalo: So our HR is our blessing too, especially now that we've hit on them more. Our HR is no different than our CQB except for when we do our CQB in order for the two men to let the one man know like we're good to go. We'll squeeze, but instead of squeezing, we do a “With you Scott with you Scott with you Scott” to give him that confirmation you got somebody. And we break it down to like a fourman hunt or so. Always two to a room like we do with CQB anyway. But again, most of that's the only difference is going to be we're going to be moving as a unit and then again it's with you which gives you the confirmation so you're not you're not taking your hand off gun.

Jon Becker: Got it. Got it. And the idea is with your HR movement, I don't know if normally you would use bangs in an HR, but is the theory here basically you're going to kind of stealth the contact as much as you can or are you?

Travis Carpalo: So honestly when I went in I just thought I was expecting the initial like I was literally expecting every room is he's going to be having the gun to the baby's head and this is how we're going to end this. And I always figured the first man's going to get shot, the second man's going to be able to at least take that shot because we're trying to divide the attention. I didn't think about the bangs. Again, with this being a hasty entry compared to a deliberate one, like we didn't have time to set up. I believe we were doing a deliberate, we would start introducing bangs on the side, think about interior breach points. But I think we just once got that intelligence that, “Hey, there is a kid and he's been shooting”.

We don't know what's going on with that child at this point. And obviously, this dude's showing some type of violence and the baby being 6 months old doesn't have the ability to leave or even sense the danger that's going on.

Travis Carpalo: Yeah. So, that's the stimulus to then make an entry. Yeah.

Ryan Scott: Yeah. So, there was a little bit of breakdown at the beginning and one of our takeaways from this is that there was no planning, right? So, officers had been on scene for an extended period of time and everyone's trying to figure out where the female is, the mom in this, but really there was no planning, trying to set up at least a crisis entry team. Hey, start thinking about dual entry points like just getting everything going. And there was really no planning going on. So when we started arriving and one of the things I remember after the fact is that when my preacher was like, "Hey, I need you to be number one. You're going to be my cover." It's like, "All right, I just got sucked into that role." Like I'm the point. This is my role. This is all I'm thinking about. Instead of taking that step back and saying, "Hey, one of us needs to run this. We're taking control of this.

This is our realm. So don't assume that your patrol officers or your patrol sergeant is going to actually take on that responsibility of planning. How much do they even know when it comes to this? So there wasn't a lot of planning. So by the time it was go, it was just what we got is what we got.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you're defaulting back to your standard tactics.

Ryan Scott: Yeah. So that's all we had at the time.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Ryan Scott: Plan-plan.

Jon Becker: So you guys make an entry. Is there any stimulus? Any sign of the guy as as you enter the building? What do you see? What do you hear?

Ryan Scott: No. And that was what was kind of eerie about it. We had the K9 officer bring his dog in, which was a little bit of a distraction. We talked to him about it, too. He doesn't know why he did, but again, it's high adrenaline, high stress. He had the dog with him.

Jon Becker: He's a K9 guy. He brings, you bring the dog.

Travis Carpalo: Yeah. So, he just sat in the front. All you hear is the barking at the dog and then you hear again our pushing through. We had no more stimulus.

For some reason, we talked about that first point operator. He got stuck in a room. If you ever actually watch the body cam, you'll see he stops in a room that's barricaded, which puts it like a hold on our train because we're supposed to continue movement, but I couldn't figure out what's going on. I couldn't see. So, I'm giving him the, you know, the with you command with your command. He's halted because it's barricaded, but he's like, "Oh, we'll just go on without me."

Like, I'll hold this. You guys push past. So, yeah, we're going through and then we're there's more, I guess, chaos from us or like loudness from us because at this point, they already knew we already assumed that he knew we were coming in. We got the dog barking, us breaking in. He saw the cops coming up and then we're just again our HR tactic is with you, with you. So, we're getting that out there verbally. So, no, no stimulus whatsoever. And it was just as eerie as you’re getting down to each room that he's not in. You're just like, "Fuck, this is okay.

Well, now probability. What are the odds?" Like, it's got to happen at some point.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Your odds might have been one in eight when there were eight rooms, but when there's two left, it's 50/50.

Travis Carpalo: Yep. All right, buddy. This is it. This is the time. So, yeah, it was done. It wasn't. The only thing we had gotten was at the very end moving up to that master bedroom. We had cleared out, I think, four or five rooms at that point.

We're moving up to that master bedroom which was located at the very rear of the house and it did like a weird U-shape. So, you go into the master bedroom, a type of foyer master bedroom. It wraps around on the other side of the bathroom in the bathroom closet. Scott went in first and then our TFO operator went in second and it was I guess he didn't see but he was trying to get to his corner because we go to our each corner is how we do ours. So we made sure we ran our walls and our corners and when he did it to get a footing to run that wall to the right he swept the floor which happened to be where the baby was in the bouncer. So that was our stimulus. So once the baby went down he said, “Get the baby! Get the baby!” And I was third man in. I was looking for work because I figured at this point I thought again probability was this is where he's at. The only thing I got was looking for the baby. The house is trashed and I just hear the baby cry. And that's why I'm looking around and I finally see a turned over bouncer.

{Video of Moment} Oh, I got you. We got the gun. Get the baby. Go-go-go. I got you.

(Erratic screaming of orders) We got the baby out. Go-go-go.

We’re good.

[End]

Travis Carpalo: Which worked out for me because I had a kid at that time. My youngest was a little under a year. So getting a baby in on bouncers is like what I do day-to-day. So I thought that was kind of a good spot for me to be in. Yeah, so I was able to scoop the baby out. That was the only stimulus we got was a little bit of whimpering from him. And then at that point it was time to get out because we didn't know where he was. We've got our goal. Our goal was to get the baby whether or not we made contact with him. We don't know where he's at. Wasn't sure at the time if he'd killed himself during that thing. Like did he shoot the baby and kill himself or what it was? But at that point, we had gotten our objective and we went off of our safety priorities, right? So, we're hostage, innocent, police, suspect. At this point, we have our hostage or innocent, however you want to look at it. Now we have a suspect in us and we're above him. We can take this out of the house and we've got tools and training and tactics to handle this properly and safely, so we can make sure officers don't get hurt or at least limit that.

Jon Becker: When did you figure out the baby was hurt?

Travis Carpalo: I didn't know it until I had passed off the child. So when I had initially done it, I had figured with all the chaos and all the drugs and crap that he was doing that they were just neglecting the child. So when I initially picked him up, I had felt some wetness and some things, I thought he had just soiled himself or he had a leaky diaper. And it wasn't until I had passed off the child to the detective at the corner of the perimeter that as I'm passing off, I saw blood all over my arm and stuff like that and in the baby. So I was like, "Hey," telling detective, "Hey, he's been shot or he's bleeding." I didn't know he had been shot at the time, but I said, "Hey, he's bleeding. He’s bleeding. Check him, check him”.

And then I turned back and went and joined my dudes on the one-two corner to start barricade procedures at that point to assist with that.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, one of the interesting things about this case and one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you guys is obviously, it's very easy to run past your end state, right? The end state here is rescuing the child, but it's very easy to run past your end state and end up in a gunfight that you maybe didn't have to.

What was the stimulus that made you guys? Was that just the way you train that if you find your jackpot, you're out. Or what was the stimulus that made you go, "We're out of here. Let's turn this thing into a barricade."

Travis Carpalo: Exactly. That we have separation, right? With separation and safety priorities. It's funny that some people asked about that. “Well, you guys already dominated the house. Why not stick with it?” I was like, “Is that even an option?” I’ve never done it like that before?

Ryan Scott: Never tried that.

Travis Carpalo: Like I got separation and I can go into barricade procedures.

Yeah, I get it. We're giving that dude that house back up to that guy. But at the same time, we've got cover. We've got all our tools. Everything's back here. We don't mean, we're adjacent to this master bedroom where we believed he was in the master bathroom closet. We're now adjacent to this guy who's been indiscriminately shooting out the doors, in the house, at the kid. And we want to have drywall as our separation. And then them hearing us there. So just the end state was get that child out or find him whichever came first. So we found the child and get out of there and get to safety and handled this how we handled it.

Jon Becker: Was there any argument in the team?

Travis Carpalo: No.

Jon Becker: That's fantastic.

Travis Carpalo: Everyone knew exactly their role.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's fantastic. I mean it's especially that close, right? Like to some degree you end up it's very easy to end up the dog chasing the ball off the cliff, right? So, it's great that you guys quickly figured that out and pulled back. So you make the decision. I mean, a normal barricade for you guys, let's maybe describe what your normal barricade procedure looks like?

Travis Carpalo: So the normal barricade procedure is just containing that house.

We've got armor up there. We're pretty much just a surrounding call out team. So we'll just start working people out of the house one by one. With resistance, we'll start implementing our next steps through gas and depending on the propensity of violence at the end of the day. I mean, down to even tearing a house apart if we've got to.

Jon Becker: Yeah. No, it makes sense. It makes perfect sense. So, okay. So, you guys baby's out, baby's getting on a medevac flight, going to get surgery and is going to survive with four gunshot wounds.

Travis Carpalo: Yes.

Jon Becker: And then you guys fall back into a barricade procedure. So, how many guys do you have when you actually initially make an entry? How many team guys do you have and how many patrol officers are with you?

Travis Carpalo: We had technically five SWAT guys.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Travis Carpalo: We had two patrol units, a sergeant, patrol sergeant, and then a K9. So, as soon as we made that initial entry, one of our guys was hung up on that barricade, which after the fact was like, I don't know why I did that. It's cool. He kind of had those guys hold off there and then we continued that flow through.

And that's the conversation. It's just like having mixed tactics patrolled. I mean, do they have a patrol element, right? You have a few SWAT guys, you have patrol elements that don't train those things. What makes them stop? Is it fear? Is it I don't want to get in your way? Is it, hey, they're SWAT guys. They train this. Like, just let them do their thing. It can be numerous things, but they end up staying back there. So, yeah about eight, nine guys. Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Ryan Scott: Total.

Jon Becker: And so, now you're going to pull back obviously trigger the entire team at that point. I'm assuming team's probably already rolling your way, right?

Ryan Scott: Yeah. Oh, yeah. So, we already had one of our guys on light duty at the time. So by the time I was leaving our office, he's like, “You need to get there now”. I was like, “I don't care about your light duty” because he was on light duty.

He was like, “Get the Bearcat and start going. We'll handle that later.” So he was getting that set up. So we had a couple guys there with our equipment van, our armor, everything was getting rolling. So it was by the time we set up across the street or around the area, it wasn't long before armor was already showing up and breaching those windows.

Travis Carpalo: Yeah, I think that was one of the good things I liked. I thought it was reassuring or comforting in my own mind when we were out, we're done.

We had gotten back behind cover. We made it clear on the radio. We said, "Everybody calm down. Slow down. We are down to barricade procedures. We'll handle this appropriately. Like don't get over amped up. Like everyone's out. No officers are hurt at this time. Let's continue on with what we're doing as a treating again back to barricade. We can relax as far as our you know."

Jon Becker: Oh, so you guys actually like there was an actual conscious reset.

Ryan Scott: Yeah.

Travis Carpalo: Yeah.

Jon Becker: That you guys engaged in. That's an interesting point. So who did that conscious reset?

Travis Carpalo: That was officer Vega Reed actually.

Ryan Scott: Yeah.

Travis Carpalo: At the time he was our initial breacher, the guy that got hung up on the thing. He's the one that would know that was great. Colin McCully, which again it's just help for everyone on scene because we're overrated traffic. You can hear that from whether it be patrol, our fire assets, everyone that's coming in route saying, "Hey, everyone, we are on barricade procedures. We can slow down now."

Jon Becker: Nice.

Travis Carpalo: So that way, you know, you didn't want responding officers still driving code and all this other stuff and hurting themselves unnecessarily. Right.

Jon Becker: Yeah. No, I mean it's brilliant to not only make the decision that you've got the baby, get out, but then to consciously reset and go, okay, just like slow this whole thing down. We're at a barricade now. That's a pretty advanced skill set to modulate your speed that much and pull it back to like, okay, everybody just calm it. We're going to like reset.

Travis Carpalo: We did a great job.

Jon Becker: So, so now you're set up in this house. Your armor's getting there.

You guys, I'm assuming, are setting a perimeter. What happens next in the barricade? Are you ever talking to this guy? Is he saying anything?

Ryan Scott: No. That's the thing is is we go through this house and again we any team that trains HR or has a vision in your mind of like what's that whatever happens what's it going to look like and you go through this entire house-almost the entire house and you don't find the bad guy like that when we talk about that hunter mindset going through these houses that if you find somebody you shouldn't be surprised. I know we weren't surprised, at least I was definitely not surprised because every time we turned a corner I was surprised not to see somebody. I was expecting someone to be there at every turn. Nobody was there.

So when we start backing, I'm like, "All right. I mean, maybe this guy killed himself." Like how did this dude not present himself with us coming through?

And then fortunately, the baby was where the baby was. So we didn't have to push deeper into that master bath closet where he was hiding because that was a no. That was a Fatal Funnel if you ever saw one, right? That was as tight as can be.

And thankfully he didn't have that child in that closet. So we got there skills, there's tactics, and there's so much luck that comes with this.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Ryan Scott: Like when I talk about when we do these conferences and I talk about how things fell into place so well from our having a breacher on scene right away as quickly as we did. But I tell them that the breacher was actually doing a demo with the robots down the street from our training center and he had our tac medic with him. He didn't have any gear. He didn't have his stuff but we had a tac medic there. So by the time they just started hauling butt down to the scene. So he's just throwing on my buddy's secondary gear just to get there.

But we had a medic right there on scene to deliver that baby immediately while they're getting fire resources together as well.

So when I say things fell into place as best as it could, this was one of those situations that everything should land in place.

Jon Becker: Yeah. But I firmly believe that luck favors the prepared.

Ryan Scott: That is true. That's true.

Jon Becker: To some degree, you make your own luck, right?

Ryan Scott: Like, that is true.

Jon Becker: Or you prevent luck from being on your side. So, how long does the barricade go on before you-- are ever going to have any contact with this guy or is he just…?

Travis Carpalo: Nothing as far as conversing or or any type of negotiation? The only contact we had was visual movement and him shooting at us. That's the only thing that we knew he was alive. But again, I was on the same thing as Scott. Like, this dude probably killed himself. Like it's the odds of us not finding him was uncanny to me.

But we went with our normal Bearecat procedures. The Bearcat rolls up, breaks in immediately, ports the front window and tries to get eyes inside the house again so we can keep there. We rally our guys there to the back of the Bearecat.

We get in contact with our secondary unit. Goodyear usually helps us out when it comes to our need for an extra set of armor. So they're in route as well.

Jon Becker: So City of Goodyear.

Travis Carpalo: City of Goodyear. Yes. Yep. Their team comes out okay.

Jon Becker: Yeah. We're like, we only have one armor, one Bearcat.

Travis Carpalo: So, equipment advances. So, we'll utilize them because they've got a bear and a Bearcat.

Ryan Scott: Yeah. So, they're like our go-tos and vice versa they'll call us typically. So we're getting that going on. And then, once we get everything in place, I think it's been about an hour, hour and a half. We just started deciding, “hey, we're going to insert some gas into that three side to see if we can get some type of stimulus, something from him” or see if we can ideally the idea behind that is to put gas in the three side or to the back of the house and to push into the front where we're at and we have an arrest team in place in order to affect him to come into custody. And at that point he started shooting at us again like “Oh okay well at least now we know he's alive. We can handle that and work through that problem because again if we can't get anything else we're going to have to start again taking out walls or putting in softening the structures what we call it by putting in technology robots, drones and stuff.”

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. So over the over how long is this barricade going to go?

Travis Carpalo: Gosh. So I would say from the time we made entry about 11:54.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Baby's out basically noon right till about.

Travis Carpalo: I think this went to 3/3:30.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Travis Carpalo: Those two and May and Phoenix.

Jon Becker: And so you're gonna have you're gonna have multiple. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. May and Phoenix and a Bearcat wrong armor. He's going to fire multiple volleys at you guys over the course of that 3 hours.

Travis Carpalo: The initial part. Yeah. and then again, there was no contact with them whatsoever. And it was I. My perception of time is probably way off, but I remember they've sent a couple of us to take some rehab in the van and I remember at some point someone was like, "Hey, I see movement." That was like the first time was like my heart kind of sunk. I was like, "Dang, that dude was actually alive the whole time”. I thought he was just me. I came to the conclusion we didn't see him because he was dead.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Travis Carpalo: And then knowing he's still alive. He was still there. So he was just waiting or whatever. So that was the confirmation he's still kicking. So he was trying to barricade some additional because Goodier's Goodyear was on the two sides with several of the windows and they can actually see some barricading happening in one of the windows.

Jon Becker: So he's basically he set up his ambush and he's waiting for you guys to walk into it.

Travis Carpalo: Yeah.

Ryan Scott: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Got it. So you introduce gas and he shoots a little bit and then anything else happens?

Ryan Scott: No, that's it. He's shot and then again just more barricade procedures. I mean it happens that 14% of the population is unaffected by CS, right?So we're just trying to figure out we can do two different things with this.

We can either introduce the gas to force him out to the front like we want or we can introduce the gas to deny him an area or we can do it just for location purposes because we can't see in yet, right? We're still trying to work on getting everyone in place. We had called Phoenix at that time to get a rook out there which is best described as like an armored tractor that helps.

Travis Carpalo: They call it something different around here. I don't know if they do, but yeah, it's like an armored bobcat.

Jon Becker: Yes, it's an armored bobcat.

Ryan Scott: Yeah. So, we had that in place. We weren't really ready to take on the deconstruction of the house yet, but we're hoping we can do ulterior means because again, we're waiting for time wise. We got to think about rehab and switching out with our guys because it's again like he was saying May and in Phoenix. so, yeah. So, after that, it's just him starting to barricade some more and we're trying to figure out how we're going to tackle this at this time.

Jon Becker: Okay, what's the next thing that will happen?

Travis Carpalo: So this is where a lot of the planning started happening. So on our lieutenant, so the command level with Phoenix Rook coming out and wanting to take apart this house, their advice was, “Hey, if you guys are going to need to swap out, we're not going to take apart this house until our team gets here”. So they didn't want their team to come in the middle of a house being taken down.

So it was like, "Hey, do you guys want to stick with this?" And we're like, "Yeah, we're not giving this up. We want it. We own it. It's ours." So we held it for that time period.

So again, as we're talking a few hour process, we've decided we're taking this.

There was a point where we'd already taken the garage out. We've taken the front window out by the front door. Pury has put in some gas. I'm sorry.

Goodyear is putting some gas onto that two sides. And again, not really a ton of movement going on inside the house. There's a few moments of barricading and then our robot actually spotted the fire.

Jon Becker: So then the fire started which at this point you've actually rolled a robot into the house.

Travis Carpalo: Yep. Robots are in there. Our throw got locked up in the garage.

It was a little bit cluttered and then the robot our transcend robot was cruising through holding that foyer into the master bedroom and that's where the tile started to carpet. And then usually our med guys will actually kind of run the robot and they say, “Hey, there's a small fire right here”. So, actually right where the baby was located is where the fire kind of started in that general area, which he wasn't anywhere else in the house. So, he was now kind of stuck in the master bedroom area more likely when that fire started kicking up. So, his only option was to go out the master bedroom window, which I believe was the broken one. I could-- Yeah, I believe that was the broken one. So, he had the option to just go out that he chose not to. So the fire just started consuming the house at that point.

So we were working on it. We had no exit sheet for him with that fire. It was just a control burn at that point. He had every opportunity to leave that home and he never did.

So we actually got the fire department to come around and the house next door on the maps. It looks like it's an empty lot but there was a home there that they were out of town. So we started putting water onto the house to kind of control that fire as best we could. So there were some active measures to contain that fire and then that's when rounds just started ripping. It's just constant rounds just firing-firing-firing-firing-firing. So, and then they stopped and then worked after the fire was kind of contained some time down the road again. Still no contact with this guy, never appeared. And yeah, so you can talk in that part because you guys went in there.

Ryan Scott: Yeah, we were trying to figure out what was going on. So once we got into control burn and like he was saying we actually kind of got we kind of worked out in our own favor too because prior to the fire starting we had already sent groups of elements around to get everybody out of the houses nearby because he had been known to consistently be shooting. So we're trying to get everybody vacated from their homes in the immediate area, and get the construction crews pushed back to the street. So we already had that done. So that was easy for us to get our Tims in. The Tims did a great job. They control it and the burn goes down. And then once it was safe to go in, I went in with the fire inspector and a few Tim's guys, fire department people to see where they could find him. We end up locating him in some rubble in the master closet area underneath it.

Jon Becker: And the house had at that point pretty much burned to the ground.

Ryan Scott: Yes.

Travis Carpalo: The majority of it. Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay. And so you guys located him in just the master closet?

Ryan Scott: Yes. Which is that one room away from where we had found the baby.

Jon Becker: Got it. And he self-inflicted.

Ryan Scott: Yes.

Travis Carpalo: Yeah. Yeah, he shot himself. However, it didn't kill him.

Ryan Scott: Yeah.

Travis Carpalo: So, he actually had smoke in his lungs. So, he ultimately died from the smoke inhalation from the fire.

Jon Becker: Shot himself in the head and didn't--

Travis Carpalo: Knocked him out obviously, but he actually died from the smoke inhalation.

Jon Becker: Oh, really?

Travis Carpalo: In the lungs.

Jon Becker: Interesting.

Travis Carpalo: Yeah.

Jon Becker: He even failed at shooting himself.

Travis Carpalo: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Yes. Nice. So now looking back at this thing, I mean, obviously fantastic rescue, very little doubt that baby was going to die. I mean, he had shot the baby four times, so there's no doubt the baby's going to die. looking back at it, what did you guys get right? Like, you know, I think there's both positive and negative lessons learned in any kind of an event like this. And like, let's start with the positive. What did you think you guys got right either in training or on the operation that that kind of brought luck to your favor?

Travis Carpalo: The ability that we can feed off each other like we know how to move. We are so consistent in our training that there's no delay once we start getting on scene. We start controlling that stuff and it's go time.

There might be little hoops and hurdles in there especially learning new movements but we feed off so well working together. And I think that's an important thing with teams that cohesiveness it generally prevents things from happening that you don't want. Like I trust this person. So I think that's one of our done wells is we just we did well with just getting through the best we could on that house. Don't stop. Don't don't freeze. Just move. That was a positive thing I took away from that in action away from training. This is real life.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Travis Carpalo: I always tell people that even a scenario is still a real scenario, right? Even just because no one can get hurt in that scenario, it's still a lesson learned. It's still an experience you went through that's now in your brain. So, this was a real one. So, I love the way we have worked together. I wish things were a little bit different, but in some aspects.

Jon Becker: So, what would you change looking back at it? What's your I wish we had or we should not have or…?

Travis Carpalo: The biggest takeaway that I recall is controlling that. So, by the time we arrived there, I mean, there wasn't really any time. There was a lot of time kind of leading up to when some of the operators arrived. By the time we arrived, it was only a couple minutes before we actually made entry. But still looking back, one of our rules now is as soon as an operator arrives at a scene because we'll hear things on the radio. Sometimes it's bogus, sometimes it's not.

We'll get there, we'll assess it. Is this a situation that's going to bring us into play?

So we'll feed that information to our TL and say, "Hey, now it's nothing we need to touch, but if it's something we will take over. So don't get sucked into a role.”

If you're the first operator there, I recommend you start with your knowledge and this is a SWAT call whether it's an HR or just “Hey this is going to a barricade”

like be the leader. You take control of it. It may not like you might have to have that conversation with a patrol sergeant say “Hey dude like this is something I'll take care of. I'll help you.” Most of the time patrol sergeants are going to be fine with it. Like especially smaller agencies where they don't have those skills or there's a lot of major calls in a city like hey SWAT guys are here like I feel really good letting you kind of take it over so we'll take over the scene we'll control that we'll start managing the bodies we'll start setting up the dual entry points thinking about banks because I recall being like I said when I was sucked in that role I was just thinking of my role. I wasn't thinking of all these other factors that are part of planning so plan-plan-plan. When you have the time to plan, you better be planning.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Travis Carpalo: Or else you're winging it.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Travis Carpalo: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Is there anything else you changed after this event in the way you guys are training or your tactics?

Travis Carpalo: Training patrol, these smaller agencies. Get in with your patrol guys. Teach them because they're really not-- I mean, I can't speak for every agency, right? But what patrol or what value training are your patrol folks getting? I mean, at the end of the day with HRs that are moving rapidly, patrol is going to be the one handling.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Ryan Scott: It's not very often that a SWAT team's going to be there and get the opportunity to take care of that. It's usually a patrol entry to a hostage situation.

So, they need to know, you need to teach them because they're not getting it.

They're not getting hostage rescue training from anywhere else. We're the leaders in that realm at your agency. You have to represent that and teach them.

I’m a training coordinator. So I coordinate all the training with our patrol side once a month. So it could be firearms, it can be just actually this month was my plan to do the KOD DME with ours. So our patrol guys start seeing that and debrief. You have to debrief with these guys. You have to have uncomfortable conversations. If errors were made, I get it sometimes we don't want to hear that we made a mistake, but how you approach it, how you converse with them and have those debriefs even with your patrol. Don't just get sucked up with your folks and just it's a SWAT only patrol or SWAT only debrief. It's a C only brief. It's a patrolling brief. Like you guys have to come together and air that all out together or you'll never learn.

Jon Becker: No. Yeah, absolutely. Trav thoughts?

Trav: I know we end up moving to 5 hour trainings each week, too, which is kind of helping us out. And then the same thing like Scott was saying. Yeah. , getting out there with your patrol and opening up to more training that they don't normally get. Like we had the luxury of getting more things, more time to do it.

And they're the majority of at least in our agency it's board driven. So they're just going call to call to call ready to go 10-7 and get done with it and take a break.

But it's good to get them in there early and expose them to things that they may probably see more as the first responder. Being SWATS, it's great and it's good having the good tactic of having the full-time operator, but we're not like the first responders. Typically, we will be the second or or third getting on scene. So, giving them the confidence, the ability to control the situation or at least have some form of idea of where this is going to lead to is a good opportunity to do and we've been trying to implement that since the incident.

Jon Becker: Baby ends up surviving.

Ryan Scott: Yeah. Yeah. The baby survived. Shot four times. One of the rounds was skin-to-skin or skin to barrel contact. So, that's how vicious this guy was.

When we were re-watching the body cam, it's hard to explain, but right before you entered that master bedroom, the firearm was on the floor. Slide lock back.

So, empty guns. And he had called it out when we were making that entry.

So after the fact when I was saying we were hearing some banging noises right before entry, but I believe what happened is that through his shooting he just dropped the gun, let it go, started barricading. not the front door because the front door wasn't barricaded at all, but he started barricading kind of that initial entry that was barricaded was to the garage. So it's not really a mud room, but a little hallway to the garage and a closet. So that was all his error.

So I believe when we started breaching that front door, it actually drove him back. He had no gun anymore. It drove him back into hiding.

So when we finished, we found the baby, got the baby out, and then the drone went through towards the end where it showed all the bullet holes that he was shooting through. The gun was gone.

So he had retrieved the gun again, of course. Not sure if he had any additional guns. I know that the father who owned the home said he had some guns there too. So I don't know if he had access to them, but I don't think I think by the time we started breaching he wasn't in that mental state to fight yet. He was kind of in that I'm just going to barricade.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Ryan Scott: So it drove him back. It caught him off in some way. So I think that's a point of why we didn't find him.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that makes sense. You disrupted his process.

Ryan Scott: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Guys, fantastic conversation. Obviously, there's at least a seven-month-old that's alive because of your efforts. Congratulations on an amazing op.

Ryan and Travis Carpalo: Appreciate it.

Travis Carpalo: Well, thank you for having us here.