Taking Down a Serial Killer

On June 14, 2020, the Butte County Sheriff's SWAT team was tasked with the apprehension of an arson suspect related to a missing-person case. The suspect was hiding on a very remote rural mountain property owned by a friend. Because of the remoteness of the property, the team decided to covertly infill the property with small elements using night vision to allow them to conduct reconnaissance before overtly executing their search and arrest warrants with the entire team. What resulted, however, sounds more like the setup of a horror movie than a real police operation. As the team entered the location, they discovered the suspect was in the process of attempting to murder the property owner and were forced to intervene to save the property owner's life. The suspect was later determined to be a serial killer responsible for three murders and two attempted murders.

My guests today are Josh Brazzi and Angelo Tavelli from the Butte County Sheriff's Office SWAT. Josh is a 21-year veteran who is currently a lieutenant supervising operations and the SWAT team commander with 12 years of SWAT experience. Angelo is a sergeant currently assigned to the Special Enforcement Unit, aviation unit, and is the current SWAT team leader.

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.

Angelo Tavelli: Thanks for having us.

Josh Brazzi: Thanks for having us.

Jon Becker: So, let's start with some kind of individual bios. Angelo, let's start with you. Tell me a little bit about you.

Angelo Tavelli: So, I was born and raised in Orville, California. I kind of just fell into law enforcement. I've been with the sheriff's office since 2008. Started in corrections, went to the streets, and then kind of made my way through the ranks. And currently, I'm a supervisor sergeant of the Special Enforcement Unit, which is a marijuana unit. I also supervise aviation and I am the current team leader of the SWAT team.

Josh Brazzi: I started my law enforcement career in 2003, Glenn County Sheriff's Office in corrections as well. Came out to patrol in 2006 and left Glenn County in 2011 to join the Butte County Sheriff's Office. I'm currently the operations lieutenant. I oversee patrol, dispatch, K9, EOD, and I am the current SWAT team commander.

Jon Becker: Talk to me a little bit about Butte County. It's Northern California, but give me a little bit of color on what Butte County is like.

Josh Brazzi: Well, being that Angelo was born and raised there, it would be good for him to talk about Butte County.

Angelo Tavelli: Butte County, pretty rural place. I don't know, we've got the lake, the rivers, lots of hunting, lots of fishing. It is a great place to live. For whatever reason, we have a lot of crime. We stay pretty busy. As far as the sheriff's office goes, but overall, a good place to live. Lots of cool places to visit, lots of cool places to frequent.

Jon Becker: What's the population of the county?

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah. The population of the county, the entire county, not just the city?

Jon Becker: Yes.

Angelo Tavelli: Probably like 200,000.

Josh Brazzi: I think it's about 220,000. Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Becker: So, it's a small county by California standards. Small county, but geographically pretty large.

Angelo Tavelli: Geographically large. That probably sits close to, I don't know, 1,700 square miles.

Jon Becker: And most of the county is mountainous and forested. What's the the environment like?

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah, a lot of mountains, a lot of forest. Pretty rural, a lot of farmland down in the valley. And then kind of as you progress up past the lake and the valleys, a lot of mountains, so big mountains.

Jon Becker: Which is going to come into play here in this story, which I affectionately refer to as the serial killer story because I can't think of a better way to put this. Talk to me about the team. How big is the team? How many guys?

Josh Brazzi: So, our team is slotted for 17 operators plus the commander. Currently, I believe we're at 14 operators. We hover kind of between 14 and 16. I don't know if we're ever completely full. We try to be full. If we are, it's for a short period of time. But we're made up of mostly entry guys. We do have a four-person sniper element with a sniper team leader and then three snipers within the sniper team.

Jon Becker: Collateral-duty team, part-time team?

Josh Brazzi: Collateral-duty team, part-time for sure. We come from patrol division and investigations, SEU. Our operators are kind of spread out all throughout the department which is kind of nice to be honest with you because then we can share that experience all throughout the department.

Jon Becker: What's most of your work?

Josh Brazzi: Typically we have the in-progress call out stuff or the high-risk search warrants. Those seem to be what we mostly do. A lot of it is rural. Being in Northern California as well. A lot of counties up there have SWAT teams. But there are a few that don't. So, we also, we've done search warrants or in-progress missions in neighboring counties as well as on an outside assist to them because they didn't have a team or they needed another team. So, we've traveled quite a bit in surrounding counties, which is kind of nice as well.

Jon Becker: What's the operational tempo of the team? How many callouts do you guys get a year?

Angelo Tavelli: A busy year would probably be...

Josh Brazzi: 12 to 15.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah. 12 to 15. 20 would be a busy year.

Jon Becker: So, one or two a month.

Josh Brazzi: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Josh Brazzi: And then we'll have those spurts where we'll go a couple months with nothing and then we'll have three in a week something like that. So, it kind of spreads out, but over the course of the year it evens itself out.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's one or two a month, but it's never one or two in a month.

Josh Brazzi: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Jon Becker: Yeah. This is very typical actually of a collateral duty team. Okay. Let's talk about this case. So, how does this thing first come to you guys? Like, how does the agency start investigating this? What is the initial kickoff?

Josh Brazzi: So, initially, it was a missing-person case in the city of Orville and Orville is obviously within Butte County. So, they were working a missing-person case and as part of that, they had a burned-up car within the city's jurisdiction. When they started investigating, how did this car burn up? Who did it belong to? It turned out it belonged to the missing person. and a suspect was developed as possibly being responsible for burning the car. So through the investigation some leads were found and it was believed that the suspect in that arson case is related to the missing person might be out in the county. So, the Orville Police Department requested assistance from our investigations unit to flesh out that lead, basically. Is this property somewhere that the suspect might frequent? Do they know each other? Is there other information through phones or anything like that that can put them there? So that's essentially how we got involved in it. And through the course of the investigation with the Orville Police Department and our investigations unit, we were pretty confident that the suspect was in what we call the Brush Creek area of Butte County, which is up just east of Berry Creek, which is a small rural community of just a few hundred people.

Jon Becker: So, how do the investigators develop that the suspect is related to this? Do you have the missing-person case first and then they find the car, or do they find the car and then realize that the person who owns the car is missing?

Josh Brazzi: To be honest with you I don't know the answer to that. They come in pretty close to each other so Angelo do you know?

Angelo Tavelli: I think it ended up being the victim's, or the missing I guess we'll call her being her car. And then there was some information that came about where the missing person may have been in a relationship with the suspect and then that kind of unfolds and then the two roads meet and then it becomes the investigation of missing person and suspect being more connected than one would have thought.

Jon Becker: Got it. Yeah. And you've got a burned-up car and a missing person. So, you got to be thinking that she's probably dead somewhere.

Angelo Tavelli: Then throughout some initial search warrants, then you start to pick the pieces up. Which then kind of takes us down the road with the suspect.

Jon Becker: Okay. When the suspect is located, he's on the property of a friend. A family friend or something?

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah. I believed it to be like a family friend if I remember correctly.

Jon Becker: So you guys have initially an arrest warrant and a search warrant or what do we start with?

Josh Brazzi: So, we start with the arrest warrant for the arson case. So, the burned-up car prompts the arrest warrant for the arson and then when we believe we've located him on the property, then we get a search warrant for the property itself. So, we can go onto that property and arrest him.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. All right. So, I think property is kind of a key part of this problem. So, let's walk through that. Angelo, describe for me what this property looks like. Where is it?

Angelo Tavelli: This property is outside of Orville, like you said, the Berry Creek area. As we progress through Berry Creek, we get to the top of Berry Creek, which turns into Brush Creek. Then, basically down to Millsap Bar Road. Millsap Bar Road is known for a lot of marijuana grows, criminal activity, I guess, of all sorts. It's pretty much the middle of nowhere. It's a big deep hole. When you get to the very bottom, I think there's like a swimming hole, a little campground. Nothing good usually goes on down there, but once you're out there, you're on your own. It's pretty much the middle of nowhere.

Jon Becker: So, the suspect is on this property. How are you guys able to ping him to the location? Do you ping his phone? Do you…?

Josh Brazzi: Yeah, it's through phone pings where we have a pretty good size ping up there. But based on the family-friend association that he has, we know it's covering the property in question. So, that's how we put him there, but we're not 100% sure, which is why, when we talk about our plan to go down there, we have to confirm that he's there before we actually serve the warrant.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Josh Brazzi: That's part of that plan is we have the cell phone information, but now we want to either get eyes on him or hear him or find his vehicle. We know what vehicle he's driving, supposedly driving. So we're trying to find those things before we actually execute the search warrant.

Jon Becker: But this is down in the bottom of a canyon.

Angelo Tavelli: Yes, sir.

Jon Becker: On a remote road, so you're not just going to go do a drive-by.

Angelo Tavelli: No, you can't.

Jon Becker: I think the property is approximately 88 acres or something to that size.

Josh Brazzi: It's a pretty big property.

Angelo Tavelli: I think like from the pavement before you take the left onto Millsap Bar, you're about 2.3 miles to what ends up being the target location. It's not an easy two miles or 2.2 miles, whatever it ended up being.

Josh Brazzi: It's a windy dirt road.

Angelo Tavelli: It's a windy dirt road. It's not well maintained.

Jon Becker: It's covered in trees.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah, it's very thick. Yeah. Poison oak, all the wildlife.

Jon Becker: So, were you guys able to do any kind of aerial surveillance before you?

Angelo Tavelli: We did some aerial surveillance once we learned about the phone. The phone information came in, kind of gave us a target. Then gave us a general area of possibility. Then some friend information comes in. The pieces are starting to come together. So now we have this location. It's kind of an anomaly at first. We have a phone call where it's believed the suspect drove out, made a phone call, which we got a different hit. So everything kind of is now pointing to based on lots of hours of work, not in a matter of minutes, but it's now coming together that this is probably going to be a decent area to look at. So in our aerial unit, we have three helicopters and a fixed-wing. We utilize the fixed-wing to photograph what we believe to be the property. Like you said, it's about 88- 90 acres. We get some pretty good photos the best we can. We definitely missed some things based on the canopy. The canopy is super thick down there. But the photos did end up helping us develop the plan and how we would attempt to attack it.

Jon Becker: So as you're looking at this thing, I mean obviously you've got to first confirm he's there, but what are your concerns with this location as a target location?

Josh Brazzi: I mean there's a few of them. You already talked about one thing: you can't just drive by. You can't just drive there. It's gated at the top of the road. So getting onto the property if you're trying to do it quietly is not going to be very easy if you want to take vehicles down there. Communications. As far as radios go, we know from just beat knowledge up there that there's holes in our radio system just due to radio towers being blocked by mountains and things like that that our communications with our radios to dispatch to other team members isn't going to work very well. So, those are things we have to think about if we do go onto this property, how are we going to communicate? How are we going to relay information to dispatch? If we need medical aid, how are we going to get that information out to get all the resources that we might need. So, communication was probably one of the biggest things that we talked about as far as hurdles go prior to going onto the property.

Jon Becker: Yeah, because you may fall into a dark spot where you don't have a cell or radio.

Josh Brazzi: Yeah. And we knew Millsap Bar was that spot like we knew once we got off of Bald Rock Road and down Millsap Bar a few hundred yards that radios just weren't going to work.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. So what's your initial plan as to how to approach this thing?

Josh Brazzi: Well, initially it was brought up through the investigations unit to send a couple of SWAT guys up there to get those eyes on. So with the communication issues and the remote location we're miles from town, miles from hospital, miles from anybody else coming up, we quickly changed that plan and we pushed up that if we're going to go onto the property, we're going to need to take the entire SWAT team. We're going to need to take the Bearcat and stage it up there. We're going to need to relay communications from the property all the way up to the top of the road so we can relay to dispatch. So we expressed those concerns to the sheriff and the command staff. They agreed once we laid out all the issues that we might have up there. And that was essentially what our plan was to daisy chain basically SWAT operators along Millsap Bar Road, get a team on the property, observe the property, try to confirm that the suspect was on the property through the nighttime hours and then, once we had night service on the search warrant, once daybreak hit, we would serve the warrant. So that was the initial plan.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. So, talk to me about when you guys are making entry. What does that look like onto the property?

Angelo Tavelli: So once the plan is set in place, like Josh said, the entire team goes up. And then we have a driver and two guys end up taking four of us, myself plus three, as a four-man element. We leave the LZ. We're first in just riding in the back of a truck. We're going to get dropped, I don't know, 300 or 400 yards from the upper gate. The upper gate makes your initial access to the property. And then like Josh said, there's going to be operators that are following us, and they have specific points of where they will stop, and that is who we will daisy-chain communications with as we progress down onto the property, observe whatever we observe, push it back to Josh as commander, and then our initial plan, hey, this is what we see. This is what we found, and we're either going to come out, we're going to remain, and then daylight comes up, we're going to push the team in.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So you find his car. He's here.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah.

Jon Becker: We have the team come in.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah, we had a couple things that we were looking for. I think there was a vehicle. We can get to that later, but there was a vehicle we're looking for. And then just signs of life. What did you see? What did you hear? It's going to be dark, so we're going to utilize the cover of darkness. Sneak in, kind of just become part of the wildlife. See, hear, observe, and kind of go from there.

Jon Becker: “Become part of the wildlife.” That may come into play here.

Angelo Tavelli: Yes. Okay.

Jon Becker: So, what time is it when you drop off?

Josh Brazzi: It was about 2200 hours at night. So, it's June obviously. So, it gets dark pretty late. The sun goes down close to 9:00 p.m. So we got our plan together. That's one of the things about a community like Berry Creek, we have a lot of these small mountain communities. If you start taking a bunch of cops up into some of these communities, they have their Facebook groups and their phone trees that say, "Hey the armored car is coming up here or there's five deputies coming up here. What's going on?" So we wanted to get up there in the darkness, basically get it through town in the darkness just so we wouldn't tip off anybody. So we got up there around 10-ish.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah, it was probably between 10 and 11. We were I think we were delayed.

Josh Brazzi: on the property close to midnight probably. Yeah. So, the idea is to park the armored vehicle up at the top.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So, there's a Forest Service station up there.

Josh Brazzi: So, it's a pretty big one. So, we were able to hide a bunch of stuff at the Forest Service station and it was vacant at the time. So there wasn't anybody there. We had our LZ there.

Angelo Tavelli: We pushed everything behind the buildings. So, once we made it there and we were through the gate, it's like we're out of sight, out of mind. We just had to get there.

Jon Becker: Got it. Without getting detected.

Angelo Tavelli: Without getting detected. And we didn't know based on like he explained to the community we don't know who this guy knows, if he frequents here, or if he has friends so we didn't want the phone tree to go off and it's like, hey, there's armor, medics, and 20 cars in line coming up the hill.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I'm guessing on this kind of rural road too a car is noticeable.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah especially once you hit Millsap bar it's like, well, what's that and who's that? Got it..

Jon Becker: Okay so you guys hit the gate.

Angelo Tavelli: Yep. So, we make our way down the mountain. I don't know, probably like three or 4 hundred yards prior to the gate. There's a bear that's walking down the roadway in front of the truck. He at the time appeared to be the same size as the truck. It's super dark. There's no ambient light. The other guys with me are perfect. So initially he dives off into the brush. We make the first gate. We get dropped off. We wait for that vehicle to turn around, make its way back up, which is then going to be part of the radio daisy chain. The two operators inside that truck. We begin our walk. Checkpoint number one is just make it to the gate. We make our way through basically pretty steep terrain down the mountain. We hit a couple other vehicles. End up being like yard car type things. They were all wrecked and not running. We quietly clear those, make our way through another gate. There's a structure, old like it appeared to be like an old farmhouse. It'd been there forever. It was pretty dilapidated, covered in berry vines and stuff like that. To clear that and then the roadway kind of bends to the left. We're conversing in our sets of two groups and communicating with each other as we progress through this thing. It's not, it's definitely not a fast walk. We took our time. We wanted noise discipline to be very important because I think more than other people knew that he was there and expected him to be there and others may have thought ah, I don't know if that's really the case. It's just a ping. it's not a bunch of information. It's just a couple things. I think we were very committed to the plan that we put in place and we were 100% like he's going to be there. So noise discipline was pretty good.

Then everything seems to be going great. We make it to our objectives. This is where we want to get based on the aerial stuff that we had from the photographs which we could see from the aerials. There obviously ended up being things that we couldn't see in the aerials.

Jon Becker: So describe for me the actual property as you're moving down past the gate, you're going downhill into the property.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah, it's pretty it's pretty steep. It's like I guess we'll call it like a driveway under the property. It's a roadway. Lots of rocks and down trees, things like that. They kind of get pushed to this side. On the right side is kind of just like a drop-off which goes down into just nasty berry briars. There's a creek that runs at the bottom. Then left with nowhere to go, it's just a hillside and then the road stays above you pretty much the whole time which was the initial drop off point. But yeah, super steep. Then as we progress, there's less light and less light due to the canopy. So, yeah, we're running NODs, we're running dual tubes. We were green at the time. We could definitely see we were using our illuminators and things like that to assist, but you could definitely feel as you progress down the mountain like you're losing light and your NODs, they're working pretty hard and which inevitably slowed us down, I think, initially to get through the first two gates, the cars and things like that.

Jon Becker: Sure. So, as you come down into where this house, burned out house is, is it coming to a clearing like a flat area or what does it look like?

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah, it's a bit; it just kind of opens up on both sides. The creek is now gone. We end up in kind of a flat. The house will be on our right. We hold the house to the right. There ends up being a trailer. It's like a house trailer. And then our roadway continues to the left and then some other miscellaneous junk. So we post two on the trailer to kind of flank the trailer, clear the house very quickly, almost lose a guy as he just disappears through a floor into some berry briars. So he makes his way out because the house is just barely standing. We don't know that though.

Jon Becker: So he walks in and falls through the floor.

Angelo Tavelli: So it's like, “Oh, he’s gone.” So, we've navigated through that little issue and then back to the trailer. Clear the trailer ends up being open. Very quietly clear some other junk on the side of the road. Kind of take a pause. I think we tried to push at that time, which was like checkpoint number three, right? We need to get to the house. As we get to each point, we're going to relay. “Hey, this is where we're at. We made it to the gate.”

Jon Becker: Got it.

Angelo Tavelli: We made it to X. We made it to Y. We're pushing that to Josh at the top of the mountain. So, he kind of has a general idea of if something happens, I know I have a general idea of where they're at.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I know it's not going to be very easy to get to them in a quick and timely manner, but I at least have a general idea. I saw that in the aerial photographs. I know where they're at. So, at this point, what is your backup? What is your backup if you end up in a gunfight, how far is Josh and the rest of the team from being able to get to you?

Josh Brazzi: So part of that daisy chain of communication, it wasn't just one operator standing by to relay the radio, it was an actual rescue team. So, the closest one to team one that went down in there. So team two, there were three operators in that vehicle and they were just at the initial drop off point. So drive time from there would have been a couple of minutes. I mean, they would have to get through a couple gates, but they could have been there within a couple minutes in a vehicle.

The next one, you call it team three. They were probably a mile up the road from team two. So, a little bit farther, a little bit of a windy road. Myself and team four were at the top of the road. So, we're about two and a half miles away. At the top of the road though because one of the contingencies for this was we believed that he had left the property at some point within a couple days he was up there to make a phone call. So one of our contingencies was if he leaves in his vehicle in the middle of the night to make another phone call, we have the Bearcat at the top of the road. marked patrol cars at the top of the road and spike strips at the top of the road. So we could do a vehicle takedown at the top of the road because on Millsap Bar he's not going to go anywhere. There's nowhere else to go except to Bald Rock Road, which is where all that stuff was staged. So, if we could keep him off of Bald Rock, we could do our vehicle takedown there.

Jon Becker: So, was your thinking that he would like to drive up to the top of the mountain to get cell service?

Josh Brazzi: Yeah. And that was just a contingency. We didn't know if he would do that or not? He ultimately did not do that. But we did know that a phone call was made in that investigative period of time when we were figuring out if he was up there or not. And knowing that there's no cell phone service down there and the fact that the ping moved a little bit, we just inferred that he had to have driven to the top of the road.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that makes sense. So, okay. So, you got four guys in your element. Team one's got four guys, team two's got three guys, team three…

Josh Brazzi: Four guys.

Jon Becker: Four guys, another five guys and team four.

Josh Brazzi: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay. All right. So, like your backup is 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes is okay.

Angelo Tavelli: And we had talked about that with the initial team one. I mean, we talked with Josh obviously. We kind of knew, hey, if something happens, we're going to be on our own initially. They're all going to come, right? But just understand that it's not going to be normal, where they're right down the road or like you say, your normal drive-by. It's like there's a lot of things that are different than your normal op. So, I mean, we understood that and we figured based on the terrain we'd be fine and everybody kind of accepts the mission.

Josh Brazzi: Yeah. There's multiple times too in the past where we've done missions similar to this where we've gone on to properties well into the nighttime hours using NODs and using the terrain and the trees and things like that to conceal us until we serve a warrant. So, and especially the four guys in team one were the most experienced in that. Which is why they were in team one and why they were the ones that were the first ones on the property. So, we felt pretty good about what we had going.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, you guys are used to working in a rural mountainous environment, right? Yeah. If you took me and put me in that environment, well, I'd just run away, but like you guys are used to working in this environment.

Josh Brazzi: Yeah. Butte County is an interesting place. We've had a number of murder, suspected murderers hiding out in similar places like this on similar properties and properties not too far from this one. So, I don't want to call it a common occurrence, but it's happened before.

Jon Becker: Got it. Nice. Okay. So, you initially lose one guy to the floor, pull him back out of the house. Yeah, you're two and two moving from the house towards the trailer.

Angelo Tavelli: We clear initially the outside of the trailer. We clear the outside of the trailer and then we also take the trailer. We make an entry. But it was not; I mean we're talking like a 15- to 18-foot travel trailer. Nothing crazy. Pretty small. By using the windows, we could see in there. We're pretty confident it was clear. We didn't want to progress past it, get our backs to it. So, I think one guy held long and then we ended up just very slowly and methodically taking it quietly. In about 2 seconds it was clear.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Angelo Tavelli: A guy goes left, a guy goes right. Hey, we're clear. We're back out to you. We clear all the other kinds of junk and stuff around there. We then just, hey, this is where we're at. Radio back up. Get the daisy chain back to Josh that we've made it to kind of like the center of the property. Like it's opened up now. We're not on this little mountain road where we can't go left and there's a cliff on the right. Which was kind of like a checkpoint for us.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So, now you're in kind of, for lack of a better term, an open field.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah. We're in an open field, and now this is where we want to start. Okay. We want to take a tactical pause. We want to observe. We want to listen. Like, do we hear anything? Because now we're looking kind of like we're looking down. We know the road goes to the left and then you're kind of looking down on this field and then it gets super thick again.

Jon Becker: So, the property's kind of sloping down away from this trailer.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay. So, you're continuing your descent down into this valley. Got it.

Angelo Tavelli: It's just kind of as we keep progressing it's just flattening out.

Jon Becker: Okay. Okay. Kind of basically the bottom of the property. Got it. Okay.

Angelo Tavelli: So, yeah, we made a couple of communications. We have a hard time getting out. Like we end up getting out our message basically like this is where we're at and then just out of nowhere it's like a blood-curdling scream and it's obviously the darkest that it's ever been like there's no ambient light you can't really see anything with your illuminator you can, right, but it's very quiet. I mean we were getting nervous the smallest twig break or the smallest piece of gravel it's like magnified by a thousand you're like, “Oh, that was so loud”. We blew it. And it's not, but there's literally no noise.

Josh Brazzi: There's no wind. There's no nothing.

Angelo Tavelli: You're just in a dark hole. Yeah. Yeah. There's no moon. There's nothing. But it's literally the stillest and quietest. Like an eerie quiet, but you know, it's quiet. Then out of nowhere, there's just this crazy scream. We all just kind of looked at each other like NODs are going left, NODs are going right. Like everybody heard that, right? And the gentleman to my right was like, "No, didn't hear anything." And I'm like, "Okay”.

Jon Becker: See, he's the smart one. He's the one in the horror movie that leaves the house.

Angelo Tavelli: Like, he knows how this ends. Where's he going? You know, “Hey, get back over here”. Then we're kind of separated a little bit. There's probably like I don't know 5 to 10 feet. It's me and another gentleman and then two other gentlemen to my left. And I could feel I'm looking at them and they're looking at me. You kind of just see the green in our eyes and I'm nodding and they're nodding and I'm like what's wrong with him? Like and I'm like “Did you hear that?” And he's like “It was a dog”. And I'm like, “I don't think it was. Clearly human and it was screaming for help, like blood-curdling”. And it’s like, “Okay, well, I guess we'll let that ride and we'll see what else we hear”. And then it happens again. There's super loud banging. We can see absolutely nothing. There's no light. There's nothing. We can only hear. And we're looking, the road bends to the left, and we're just looking at, like I said, just a small descent, as you said, into like this little, I wouldn't even call it a valley. It's just a shelf, but the shelf is not very big. And just beyond the shelf, it's just thick. Just a wall of trees. And there's literally absolutely no light. And so I look again to the guy to my right. He kind of bumps me and he says, "Did you hear that?" And I'm like, "Man, what am I talking about?" Well, that was that was that yelling I was talking to you about. And he's like, "That is definitely human." I'm like, "I am aware." and they are screaming for help, like “Help,” “Please don’t kill me,” things of that nature.

So now we obviously transition our mindset a little bit because we were basically in an observation role. We're there to push information to the team, excuse me, to Josh as commander. Josh isn't going to make the decision of we're going to execute our plan as, hey, the sun's going to come up. Those guys are going to hold in place, become part of the forest. Hey, the sun's coming up. We're going to push the element, the whole element is going. That was going to be his call. So, unbeknownst to him or the information that he was not ready to receive was, and then of course we can't get out. Our comms fail us yet again, which is, as we all know, that is the world we live in every time. So, I mean, we're like taking our radios off our kit, taking our helmet off, putting them on our head. We're trying all this crazy stuff because we cannot get out to push this and it's just nothing. So finally the gentleman to my right who heard nothing and then was like, "Oh my god, did you hear that?" He's like, "I'm going to go back." We push him back to the first gate by the house, he then just by moving, he gets out. The three of us, the two gentlemen to my left and myself, we kind of become a three-man element. We push back a little bit into more wooded areas because we're kind of just out in the open at this point.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Like there at least concealment. So we're going to let the smart one leave by the way. I just like to point out.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah.

Jon Becker: He's walking up the road.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah. So he goes and he comes back with the “Hey, I got out.”

Josh Brazzi: It was interesting though because when he got out, I had him repeat it because he basically told me over the radio that they heard screaming and loud banging and things like that. So it didn't make any sense to me that something like that would be going on. So immediately I thought about, well, is a TV on loudly? Is something else going on? So, I asked him, I was like, “Are you sure it's not a TV?” And he says, “No, it's someone screaming for help”. And then it dawned on me, I was like, okay, this is clearly not the plan. The plan's not going to go as we obviously had planned. We have to deal with whoever this is screaming. Now one thing they didn't talk about was is it a male voice screaming? Is it a female's voice screaming? Who's yelling for help? You know, that's information I didn't have. So, one thing going back to the beginning, we're working a missing person case, a missing female who's supposedly dating this person that we're now on the property trying to find. So now does he have that person up there?

Jon Becker: Yeah, you're working an abduction and somebody's screaming.

Josh Brazzysh: So, now it's like, okay, we need to really pick up the tempo now. We need to switch gears and get down there and see what's going on. So, that's essentially what we did. It took us a second obviously to get the other three teams that were on the road down to the gate to meet the gentleman he was talking about who got the radio traffic out. So that took 15 minutes or so we could regroup and then start working the property as an entire team instead of just a small…

Jon Becker: Yeah. Instead of three guys.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah. And once we knew once we got confirmation that hey the team's coming we kind of then daisy chained ourselves back up the road so we could receive the team. So I think somebody went to where the junk cars on the road were.

Josh Brazzysh: Yeah.

Angelo Tavelli: So they know--

Jon Becker: You've cleared and moved past.

Angelo Tavelli: We didn't want them taking time like, "Oh, hey, what do we have here? We have to clear all this stuff." So we pushed back. We put the one guy at the gate. One guy went beyond the gate. Received him at the cars. Hey, let's go. Pushed him to the gate. Hey, there now we're up here. Pushed him there as quickly as we could. It actually I guess thinking back it did seem quite a while. Like it took quite a while, but I don't. I don't really think it did as one would expect. It seemed pretty seamless and pretty quick.

Josh Brazzysh: It was one of those things we still didn't want to drive onto the property. You know, now you got somebody yelling for help and a lot of banging going on. We're still from where they stopped to initially hear this. They're still quite a ways away. I mean, it's not just 50 yards away.

Jon Becker: Well, you still don't know where the person is, right?

Josh Brazzysh: Exactly. They couldn't see it. They could only hear it. So we still need that element of surprise. We still need to get to whatever's going on covertly so as to not spook them, but expediently so whatever is going on, we can stop it.

Josh Brazzysh: I'm going to guess that to the guys that are coming into the problem, time is moving quickly. To the three guys that are down in the area where the people are screaming and it's pitch black and there's nothing around them. Time is moving a little more slowly.

Angelo Tavelli: It's a little slower. When we talked about myself and the other gentleman with me. I think we had some really frank conversations whisper conversations in the dark while waiting because we were like, "This is going to be an HRT situation because I don't think we really touched on it, but as they're progressing down, we can then clearly hear it's two people and there's there's two different voices. Very clear that is two different voices and that's two people and one is highly agitated and one is basically screaming for help. So, you have two different people doing two different things down here. We don't know where they're at. But we know it's not just because initially it was like, well, maybe the suspect is just having a crazy episode.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Angelo Tavelli: And he's down here, I don't know, banging on a car and he's here by himself, you know. We don't know. But then as we were waiting it was very clear to us that we have two separate people here, one has a problem and the other one has a problem.

Jon Becker: Yeah. One has a problem, the other one's causing it.

Angelo Tavelli: Yes. We have a cause and effect here. Where are they? Which was kind of where we waited and we definitely wanted more people, more eyes, more sets in the huts and we didn't know what was around the corner.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Angelo Tavelli: And we just been holding this road knowing it goes to the left where it goes nobody knows yet.

Jon Becker: Okay. So, as you keep moving down, so now the team comes together. What happens next?

Josh Brazzysh: Yeah. The team comes together and then we start moving down the road as a team. We're strung out, so we're not just a bunch of guys marching down the road. But we're strung out making our way down kind of around. So the road goes to the left, but it kind of bends back around to the right. So it's a windy road going to the bottom of this property. We knew from the aerial flight photographs that there was a structure down at the bottom. So we knew we were going to make our way to that structure eventually. But again, we couldn't see it because of the trees and the brush on the side of the road. So, as we make our way around the corner, we're getting the yelling continuing. The banging on metal is continuing. Our tempo is quick but quiet. We get to a point where I think we're pretty close. I feel like we're probably 50 yards from whatever's going on. But we see something kind of on the left side of the road. So, start to flatten out. We see something on the left side of the road that we're not quite sure what it is.

So we post up there and I send Sanquest and Marshall essentially to move up the road or further down the road and see what that is. It ultimately turned out to be the suspect's vehicle covered by a tarp. We didn't know that until well after the fact. Because they didn't make it quite to that point. As they were moving down to observe that we saw a flashlight coming from where we could hear all the yelling and banging start to make its way up the road.

So Sanquest and Marshall moved to the left side of the road up kind of a little embankment as the hillside went up. And then that light went off, but we could see the silhouette of a subject still walking up the road. So, and talking to Sanquest and James after the fact, they couldn't get very far off the road. There were shrubs, there were trees, things like that. So in Sanquet's mind, he thought, if we can get in the shadows of the trees, whoever's coming up the road shouldn't be able to see us or hopefully won't see us. So that's what they did.

They kind of hunker down in the shadows of a pine tree. As the subject walked up the road, he walked, I want to say, within 10 to 12 yards of where Sanquest and Marshall stopped, which was triangulated with where Tavelli, myself, and Cochkins were on the road still, probably another 15 yards from us. So we had kind of an L-shape on the subject at that time and we had probably 15 yards behind us, another three or four of our teammates, and then probably another 15 yards behind them, the rest of the team.

So we had a good L-shape on the subject. We had gotten down and kind of off the road, let him walk up. He stops in the road. Sanquest illuminates him with his higher illuminator. Which I still remember. It's interesting. We got the green nod. So, it's got this green like hue on them. And you could see he's holding something in his left hand, which I think is that flashlight. And you can clearly see him holding in his right hand a hatchet. He leaned forward peering looking for whatever he probably heard. We probably made some noise on our way down. He probably heard it. He probably walked up the road to see what it was and he's standing there looking around for what is that noise.

Angelo Tavelli: Which felt like an eternity.

Josh Brazzysh: It seemed like.

Jon Becker: When you got a guy with a hatchet in his hand looking for you. Yeah.

Josh Brazzysh: And obviously when he's doing that, the banging that we had been hearing before is no longer. So, he's probably the guy that was causing all the banging. We can still hear what ends up being somebody in the trailer yelling for help. So, we can still hear that, but we no longer hear the banging. At that point, I felt like we were in a pretty good spot to take the subject. He walks out to the road. He's got a hatchet in his hand. We have good angles on him. We're in pretty close proximity. He knows something's there in the darkness. He doesn't know it's us, I think. So I try to get out on the radio for the team to take them. So, I'm trying to essentially say switch to white light. Let's take him. But nothing's getting out. Nothing's getting out. And then I can hear them in my earpiece, so somebody had an open mic somewhere. I'm assuming. So my order didn't go out.

He looks around for probably 30 seconds. Probably not longer than that. And then turns and makes his way back behind the trees where he came from, which we still can't see. We don't know that the trailer's there. We presume it's there, but we don't know it's there. We can't see it. He disappears behind the trees and then we hear the banging again. Metal on metal banging. The guy inside the trailer yelling for help. So very quickly now we're pretty close. Like I said, we're 30, 40 yards, 50 yards from that noise. So now it's like, "All right, guys. Let's pick up the pace. Let's move up. Let's take this guy into custody."

So obviously, there's some hurdles with that as we're moving up. It's still dark darker now. We still have nods on. So quickly we come up with a plan. A couple of us will switch. We'll just take our nods off, let our eyes adjust as we move with teammates under nods. So, essentially--

Angelo Tavelli: Built a wall.

Josh Brazzysh: Yeah. We build a wall of about five five of us as we make our way down the road. A couple of us without our nods on so our eyes can adjust. We're going to be the ones who illuminate the sus suspect with our white light and then try to take him into custody. Announce our presence, all that kind of stuff. So the guys under nods, they lead us to where we're within 10 yards, less than 10 yards of the suspect. In the darkness, I could see him actively hitting the trailer. So I give the order “white light”. Obviously illuminate the suspect with my rifle light, yell at the sheriff's office. I remember he turns and looks back he's like mid swing. He turns and looks back and he's got this “what the fuck” just happened to look on his face just where did these guys come from? Look at his face. But then he ran off. Which caused a whole another host of problems. So, he was quick. He didn't, is that deer in the headlights look. And then he bolted around the backside of the trailer. And obviously Tavelli can talk about the initial chase of them. Because, Tvel and Sanquist, took part in that. But you don't want to just go blindly chasing after somebody around a corner who's got a hatchet because you don't want to catch one. They worked pied around the trailer and then saw that he was running up the hill. So, he can cover that.

Josh Brazzysh: Yeah, definitely. The look that he's talking about from the suspect is probably something that I don't know whoever noticed it or observed it whether wherever they were at in the stack or which side of the wall they were on white or green but it was very evident that what we thought he that we thought heard us. It was very evident in that split second when he turned around that he had no clue that there was a SWAT team and that a whole SWAT team was 10 yards from him.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Yeah. He hears something. Maybe he thinks it's the bear you guys saw or something. Go out there with a hatchet. If he did think it was a bear, he's an idiot because a bear beats a hatchet every time.

Josh Brazzysh: Yeah.

Jon Becker: But then all of a sudden there's guys pointing white lines at him and screaming at the sheriff's department.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah. But yeah, like Josh said, he had his half a second and then he foot bells. He hits the end of the trailer, he takes a right. Me and Sandy just end up being closest. And there's still a trailer to our right that is not cleared. There's a person definitely screaming, but we don't know if there's more people in there.

Josh Brazzi: But it was good on the team at that time because we had the guys that went after the suspect, which was a couple of them. A couple guys immediately went right back up the road to try to cut off that angle. A couple guys went out to the west to cut off that angle. And then you know, James Marshall, who was one of our team medics. Sean Brandau and I don't remember who else. They immediately went to the trailer and made entry into the trailer because there was somebody in there screaming for help. You could clearly see that half of the trailer door was peeled back, cut open, peeled back. Someone was trying to get into it. So, they were able to announce to the “Sheriff's office we're here to help you”. The injured party inside the trailer was able to unlock the door and we can talk about what happened in there a little bit later, but we're able to get him the medical aid that he needed, which he needed immediately. So that worked out pretty well.

Josh Brazzi: Let's just actually let's just pause there for a second and talk about what was actually going on now that we're past the trailer, what was actually going on in the trailer while you guys were closing on it.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah. So, essentially what happened, I mean, we'll kind of back up earlier into the night, probably before we even got onto the property, is the suspect and the victim, they were you know, in the trailer together. Everything was going fine. The victim was tired. You know, it was getting late at night, so he wanted to go to sleep. The suspect was scared of bears. He actually had been staying on the property in the first trailer that team one came across. So that was where he was supposedly staying the last previous few nights. He didn't want to walk back up to the trailer because there had been a bear that's been floating around. So he asked if he could stay in the victim's trailer that night. And the victim said, "That's fine. I'm going to sleep. You stay here." So the victim rolls over to go to sleep. As he's dozing off for 20 minutes or so, he wakes up to the suspect on top of him, slashing his throat with a knife. Immediately, pushes the suspect out. The suspect's not a very big guy. So he gets on him, stabs the victim in the neck. The victim pushes him off, gets some defensive wounds on his hand his arm. They wrestle around in the trailer. The victim is able to push the suspect out of the trailer and then close the door behind him and lock it. And then the suspect spends the next probably 45 minutes or so trying to get back into the trailer to finish the job that he started, which was trying to kill the victim.

Josh Brazzi: All of that had to transpire when we were pretty close to making it to the second gate to that upper trailer or the house area. Yeah, because it took us another half an hour, easily half an hour to where he pokes out, he turns his light on and off, he thinks he sees something, then he goes away, then we make our plan green, then we're going to go to white.

Angelo Tavelli: All of that took like 30 minutes. So I guess those initial screams that they heard the yells for help is probably when that started. That's probably when the attack happened based on what the victim had told us later.

Jon Becker: So how many times did he end up stabbing this victim?

Angelo Tavelli: I want to say it was three or four. The worst one was the wound to the throat. You know, give credit to James Marshall and his medical training. He's obviously the chief pilot for one of our trauma centers in Butte County. So, he's been around medical stuff his entire life. He stopped the bleeding. He basically puts his finger inside the hole in his neck, stops the bleeding as best he can there, and causes it to clot. At the same time that Tavelli and Sanquist are chasing after the suspect, we get a vehicle that we left up on the road with, deputies to drive down so they can extract the victim, get him up to the LZ, get the helicopter there to pick him up. So that all happened relatively quickly. But again, credit to James Marshall for having that medical training and being quick with it and stopping the bleeding enough to get him to the hospital to get the surgeries that he needed.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Josh Brazzi: James 100% saved that man's life.

Angelo Tavelli: It sounds like he was minutes away, and there was blood. I mean, inside that trailer, basically what he was doing, the victim was doing to his credit as well as after he'd fought the suspect out of there and closed the door and locked it and he took a blanket and was obviously holding pressure to his neck to help stop the bleeding then. But that whole time after getting statements from him and things like that, the suspect was doing a pretty good job of harassing him. So the entire time that he's trying to keep the door locked and the suspect's poking inside with different things and he's able to keep pressure on that, which also definitely helped save his life as well. So, credit to him as well.

Jon Becker: So, we've gone from like a Friday the 13th movie to like The Shining, right?

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And it's just going to keep getting worse.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay. So, you guys are extracting the victim. You guys are chasing the suspect.

Angelo Tavelli: Yep. Myself and Sanquist. As we clear we clear the hard corner first on the rear of the trailer because we kind of figured out he's probably just going to be right there. He wasn't. So we clear that together. It appears we're still white light right now. We could definitely see him. He's a bit ahead of us. He's probably got 20 yards on us. We give chase. We can see some lights moving back up the way that we came. So I think I got on the radio and said, “Hey whoever's on the upper row that we came in and just keep progressing in towards the house the dilapidated house in that trailer because that's going to be the high ground if he chooses to go up which that normally doesn't happen but in the event someone will have eyes above us and we are now running into an unknown”. We haven't been down this road or anything right to see his silhouette. We're chasing him. We chase him for quite a while, putting out random radio traffic just for the team in hopes that they get it. And, we kind of just veer to the left. We end up in an opening which ends up being just below that dilapidated house. The bar is super thick berry briars. I mean, probably like waist high. So, you can clearly see that someone has pushed through ahead of us.

So, I just made the decision, “Hey, we're going to stop.” because he's there's no way that's going to be quiet. So, put it over the radio just, for the guys above us just to stop. The gentleman Sanquist, hey, we're just stop and told everybody, hey, we're just going to go. We're going back to NODs, right? Kill all the white lights. Whatever they're doing at the trailer, like, that's fine. Do your thing. But everybody else kind of in pursuit of this suspect, we're going to go green again. So, no lights, killed everybody's lights, went straight back to green, and just kind of observed and listened and could hear a couple things. As we do that, we kind of hear some stuff in front of us say, "Hey, we're going to go back to white. You guys above us, stay green if you like, but down below myself and Sanquist, we're going to go back to white light." As we do we had moved up probably another I don't know five to 10 feet under NODs, but we're getting wrapped up in the bars kind of getting eaten up.

Jon Becker: Describe for those of us who live in a desert berry briars.

Josh Brazzi: These berry briars were just a big patch of berry briars, super thick. Like walking through rope. They're grabbing our pants. They're just kind of grabbing you.

Angelo Tavelli: It's like a vine, like a berry vine, but they have thorns on them. Small thorns. So, the thorns will catch your clothes and give you a small.

Josh Brazzi: These aren't the normal ones where you stop with your grandma and pick a little basket of berry briars. These are just like mountains. They've taken over this hillside basically.

Angelo Tavelli: Yes.

Angelo Tavelli: So it's really hard to traverse through. And so we see that, we go from green, we go back to white. As we progress, Sanquist kind of steps in front of me to my left, so I kind of come off him, to the right. So we, I guess, have good fields of fire or whatever in the event because we don't know where this gentleman is. And, as we go to literally take our first, I don't know, one to two steps. You could see movement just 5 to 10 feet below us and it's the suspect. And he is, I don't know if while running he fell. I obviously didn't see him go into these berry briars or whatever happened, but he's in like a hole and he's covered in berry briars and we're probably like I don't know, like I said, maybe 5ft. We were going to step on him because we're following his trail. So, one of us was probably going to step on this dude and he's got his hatchet, but he fell in this hole and he's just entwined. He's wrapped in these thick berry briars and he just never said a word. He's clearly upset and he's trying to hit us. He's trying to swing this hatchet, but he basically ate shit and he's now wrapped in these vines cutting himself. So we get loud. I think everybody knew that we found him. So we're giving him commands. We knew he had a hatchet. We obviously expected that he probably had some other u weaponry and that he wouldn't just be out there with a hatchet. Figured he had a firearm. Assume everybody's armed. Until you deem them not to be. But he had this hatchet. We got loud. We didn't need to use our comms, so everybody knew, hey, we found him.

So they start making their way to us. People stay with the victim. Medical aid is still going on. The guys above us, they eventually make their way to us. Josh gets to us. We kind of just held him at gunpoint. Josh gets there. We're having a real hard time getting him out of these.

Josh Brazzi: Before I got there, because I could smell it in the air. But before I got there they were giving him commands trying to get him to drop the hatchet, trying to give himself up kind of thing. Sanquist actually sprayed him with OC spray hoping that that would get him to comply with his command. So it didn't. I got up to him and I stepped up next to Sanquist and he said I OC’d him, but he's not giving up. He was in the berry vines and he was laying you know, kind of perpendicular, I guess, to us. On his back, the hatchet was in his right hand his left side was presented to us. So, he's laying there with the hatchet kind of cocked back like this. He's not like T said he's not saying anything. He's not doing anything. He just kind of has this agitated way about him.

Angelo Tavelli: He's actively resisting us.

Josh Brazzi: Yeah. He's not just laying there, is what I mean. So, it's not one of those things. He's there. It's like he's waiting for us to go hands-on. So then he can fight us. The OC didn't work. So, I pulled out my taser. I just told the guys, "Hey, I'm going to tase him." was able to get good. Tasers, they never work. You know, it's kind of the joke. Tasers never work, but the taser worked. Got two probes in him, locked him up. I kept the taser running for a 5 second cycle, and then if you pull the trigger, take your finger off, it'll run the 5 seconds and it'll stop. U in my mind, we needed more than 5 seconds, but if you hold the trigger down, it'll continue. So, hit him with the taser, hit him with the probes, kept my finger on the trigger, and yelled, "Move up to detain." So, we can detain him under the power of the taser. So we got up to him. I kick the hatchet out of his hand T drops down to grab an arm. Sanquist goes to grab his legs. I go to grab his arm. If I remember right, I think he got crossed on the taser wires.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah, there's a few holes there.

Josh Brazzi: Right. Which will if you get within the taser wires it's going to give you a little shock. So, when that happened, I let off the trigger, which then now the suspect is no longer under the effects of the taser. So, he immediately starts resisting and fighting and trying to not be handcuffed. So, drive stun mode with the probe still in him, drive stun to the shoulder of them again. Now, back under the power of the taser, which is good. So now we can work on getting them detained. Which we do after a brief struggle. Probably I want to say the total taser time he was under I think was 14 seconds. So, not a super long time. And we got him detained within that time frame. But again, we're all tangled up in these berry vines.

Jon Becker: Angelo's getting tased.

Josh Brazzi: He's getting tased.

Angelo Tavelli: And pepper spray everywhere.

Josh Brazzi: Pepper spray everywhere. You know, it's typical it was kind of a mess. But he's handcuffed. Now we've got to pick him up, walk him back. Sanquist and Tavelli walked him back to the trailer. You can talk about his demeanor when that happened, which I think is interesting.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah, he never said a word. He kind of almost had to carry him. We had to obviously tell him to walk under his own power and help us out here. The best we could, but he literally never said a word. He never said a peep. He wouldn't look at us. Just head down. Obviously, he'd been pepper-sprayed, so that didn't assist him in his movements. It's dark. We're trying to keep turning some lights on now. It's over. So, we're trying to have other people assist us with the lights where we were. We're trying to get back to the trailer. We seamlessly and effortlessly somehow ran through these woods which we just assumed it was a road while chasing him which ended up being like the hardest walk back. But I guess we just got lucky. It was nothing but berry briers down pine tree holes somehow. No, he never fell. We never fell. So it just worked out. But it ended up on the walk back. It was like how do we just run through this [ __ ] unscathed, and now it's like we can't even get 50 yards back to the trailer. But his demeanor Yeah. You know, he never changed. He never spoke a word. We obviously cleaned him up. We found some water, flushed his eyes and washed his face because he had been pepper sprayed. Cleaned him up the best we could. He was not priority one based on him getting medical aid, based on what we encountered in the trailer, and then what James had done with the assistance of Brandau and the other operators that were in there. So, like Josh said.

Josh Brazzi: With the victim.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah. Yeah. With the victim. We requested air, basically requested everything that we could request for him. And our main goal now transitioned to we need to get a truck down here and push the victim back out and the suspect we'll get out and get him out when it's feasible.

Josh Brazzi: He's not really injured.

Angelo Tavelli: But yeah, we just kind of made our way back to the trailer. We finally got over there. We set him down. I think there were some other things that we secured as people made their way back that kind of got bypassed when he ran. The team did the best they could, right? But kind of just took in the whole area, cleared a bunch of stuff, kind of made sure, okay, yeah, we're the only ones here because we're in the bottom of this hole in the middle of nowhere. A lot has transpired. So yeah.

Jon Becker: Yeah. The trailer sounds like a house of horrors.

Josh Brazzi: There was cats running around.

Angelo Tavelli: There were a lot of animals in and around the trailer.

Josh Brazzi: Blood everywhere.

Angelo Tavelli: There was obviously a neck wound or a head wound or whatever. There was a lot of blood in the trailer. Somehow that gentleman survived. But he had lost a lot of blood from the suspect beating on the trailer. It was basically all he could do to keep that thing closed. He had almost cut through basically the bottom half of the door with the hatchet. So there's this big gaping hole and it's like the suspect would hit and then the victim would hold the door and then he'd have to let the door go.

Josh Brazzi: The suspect was coming in.

Angelo Tavelli: So it's like almost open, not open and then he finally has a hole and then the hatchet's in. This is obviously after the fact in the interview, but and then he's just out of reach and then the hand disappears and then he bangs around and yells and screams and comes back and this huge ordeal; which is what we didn't know but that's what we were hearing in the initial right when we make our way down.

Jon Becker: It just gets worse and worse and worse.

Angelo Tavelli: But interesting to say the least.

Jon Becker: Yeah. No kidding. So after the fact, we're going to find out a lot about this guy, right?

Josh Brazzi: Yeah, we do. You know, he obviously didn't have much to say to any detectives or anybody. But you know, as time passed not a ton of time within a couple of weeks we're starting to piece together where he's been where he worked, who his associates were, who he's in relationships with, and detectives and Orville Police Department with all the stuff that they found out, including the Tehama County Sheriff's Office, because he committed some crimes in Tehama County as well. They did a good job, the DA's office as well, coming together, piecing this guy's last couple months of his life together and essentially coming up with the fact that this guy is a serial killer.

Tehama County Sheriff's Office had a home invasion essentially where two elderly people were stabbed, one deceased as a result of that stabbing. Another one survived for a period of time later passed away from other issues. The Orville Police Department had a similar type of thing, a home-invasion type incident where an elderly lady was stabbed to death. The connection between those two was just prior to the stabbings. Both of those victims had tree work done. Turns out the suspect worked for this tree company. Did work at the victim's houses. After the tree company employees all left, he returned, made entry into the house and then killed the people. Also within that couple week period of time, the missing person case that was being worked on, unfortunately the missing person was located, in Butte County, rural part of Butte County, deceased. So that it all kind of came together after the fact. When the SWAT team got on the property to try to find the suspect and make the arrest he was in the process of trying to kill a fifth person in a short period of time. We're not talking about years; we're talking about five people within a period of months.

Jon Becker: And the one that started the missing-person case had been like his girlfriend or something.

Josh Brazzi: Yeah they had a semi-dating relationship I believe. I don't know how official they were, but yeah, they had a dating relationship.

Jon Becker: And he killed her, dismembered her, and lit her car on fire essentially.

Josh Brazzi: Yes. Yeah.

Jon Becker: How did they find her?

Josh Brazzi: So, she was found. I don't want to go into too many details about how she was found, but citizens along the Feather River and Feather River Canyon, swimming, fishing whatever they were doing, they started to find body parts and a search of the area, located the remainder of the body. So, yeah.

Jon Becker: So, ultimately, he's going to jail for the rest of his life. And we won't talk about who he is, but so let's go back and look at this thing. I mean, obviously this is what I said at the beginning, it sounds like a horror movie, and it still sounds like a horror movie. In fact, it just gets worse. The more you learn, the worse the story gets. Looking back at this thing, it strikes me that you guys made some really good decisions. What are your lessons learned here?

Josh Brazzi: You know, going into it we knew communication was not going to be good. There wasn't really a ton we could do with that. We found a way around that. We found a way to work with that. So I thought that was good. If your communication sucks, what are you going to do to figure that out? You can't go into any mission with shitty communication or at least having a way to fix that. So that was one thing that we always take away. we talk about communication now on every warrant that we do, like we're going to have another Millsap bar thing where we're not going to have communication, or is this place good? To where we go out and test it sometimes even beforehand somebody goes to make sure the radio works up there.

The other thing too is we have a pretty robust medical component of our SWAT team. We have an ER doctor on our team, a physician's assistant on our team, and a couple medics on our team. You know, we feel pretty good about our medical training, and the people on our team to take care of us. One thing about a prolonged mission like that is it's hard, especially for the way our team was set up then as far as medical transportation goes. It's hard to rely on an EMS ambulance to stand by for, say, eight hours to wait to see if you need them or not. It's hard for them to dedicate a resource to that.

So one thing we learned from that and credit to BDS and Enloe Hospital for allowing our EMS guys to have an actual ambulance that is dedicated just to them for the SWAT team. So we can bring our own ambulance driven by our own people to our missions and have it there and not have to rely on a standby unit that may get called away for something major that happens. So that's one of the big takeaways from us. Now, granted, none of us got hurt on that mission, but we came across a victim that needed immediate medical attention, we were able to get the medical attention there relatively quickly. But had we had our bus there at that time that might have sped it up a little bit. So that's definitely a takeaway. If a team can build a robust medical component to their team, have a vehicle ready to transport all that type of stuff, that's a huge help. And it's one less thing for me in the position as commander I have to worry about.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Josh Brazzi: Medical guys were there, they're there every time. So, yeah. I mean, in this case, if you guys had not had an accomplished medic with you, that guy certainly would have died. Yeah.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. What else you got for me, Angelo?

Angelo Tavelli: No, I think also on the medical thing, we felt pretty good about where our team sat medically at the time, but we definitely like Josh said, we took that I think we took that to the next level to where we sit now. We're very heavy on the medical aspect. And it's paid dividends on other ops after that. So I think medically and then just train more for the operators too. That look, yeah, that guy's a doctor and that guy's a physician's assistant, but the doctor and the physician's assistant and the guys that push an ambulance or a bus every day. They're highly qualified people, but they also then came to us and said we could take you to the next level as well. So, they've then taken the team. So, the team is pretty qualified. Nobody's a doctor by any means, but we have a very, very basic, if not an intermediate understanding of like immediate medicine and what we can do and what we're capable of.

Josh Brazzi: We incorporate it in all of our training sessions. There are topics you have to cover in training and things like that. We don't just cover it once a year or something like that. We incorporate medical training in every training. And a lot of times it's spontaneous. The medics don't tell us when a medical scenario is coming up.

Jon Becker: Oh, good.

Josh Brazzi: We're doing what we're doing and then now we've got a medical scenario and you got to figure out does this guy need a chest seal? Does this guy need (I can't say the thing).

Jon Becker: Nasal pharyngeal.

Josh Brazzi: Nasal pharyngeal tube. That’s the one. Do we need to stick a tube in someone's nose again today? And then tourniquet applications all that kind of stuff so it's spontaneous we do it also under NODs we do it and that's when that happens it's one of those things all the packages look the same you're using NODs all they all look the same what do they feel like what is the QuikClot feel like compared to just your gauze things like that. How do I find these things in the darkness? So yeah, we incorporate that into all of our training. Our medics, they're good about it. They love teaching it. They teach it in all different other areas, not just to us. So yeah, we feel pretty good about that. But it's one of those things that you can't just feel good about and stop. You got to continue.

Jon Becker: Were you guys used to operating under night vision? Is this something your team does often?

Josh Brazzi: Yeah. It's another thing that kind of goes in spurts, but especially during this time frame, I want to say in the beginning, we had a handful of murder suspects or people wanted for major crimes in rural areas that we had to access the property under NODs. And we have the same type of thing. Set up, get people in place, then serve a search warrant. Moving about properties where there's unfriendly people. You know, the special enforcement units especially would not give away too many of their tactics, but that's something that they've done for years. So yeah, I mean, it's something that we're pretty comfortable with.

Angelo Tavelli: I think we're pretty comfortable. We're pretty proficient. And then we definitely learned after that that we wanted to upgrade some items, right? We wanted to update.

Josh Brazzi: Yeah.

Angelo Tavelli: That led to us being able to update our IR illuminators. We went from green and switched to white phosphor. Which then led to additional training. So I think we learned a lot from that. I think the team probably affected everybody a little bit differently, but I think we definitely grew as a team from that op and we learned a lot about what we could handle and we dealt with a lot of things that weren't written down. We didn't have a plan. We didn't have a plan to interrupt a homicide, you know. We didn't write that one down. That didn't make the napkin.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Was not on your plan. So, I'm hearing a couple things like we kind of talked about this at lunch like you didn't have an ops plan to deal with the bear. You didn't have a guy walking down the road with a hatchet. You didn't interrupt a homicide. I just feel like it wasn't that complete a plan.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah. Exactly right. We should have done our homework a little better. I think it inspired the people on our team and empowered them to be better. And then I think we took mission planning for example, that's now incorporated into the matrix. It's a tabletops. I think we have just gotten better in a lot of different ways.

Josh Brazzi: You know, it's kind of funny too at that time frame. When I first got on the team, we were talking about mission planning and lessons learned. There were a couple of people who planned missions. Those were just the guys who did it. Luckily for guys like me and Tavelli, we wanted to be those guys, you know. It was like, "No, you guys don't just get to do it. Let us do it." And they did, which was great, you know. So, we got to pretty early on in our SWAT careers and started planning missions. It started with maybe I just plan the breaching part of it or maybe I just plan the gas plan. Then it's like, all right, this is your guys' full plan. And we ran with that. I haven't planned a start to finish in a long time. That might have been one of the last ones I did. And I planned that mission just out of necessity because detectives were doing detective stuff, trying to figure stuff out. Tavelli and some of his guys were trying to figure out where we're going. We had a small time frame and I was like, I can do this mission plan pretty quick. So me and let's say Bobby Larson and a couple other guys, a smaller group of people plan that plan relatively quickly. But moving on from that, everybody comes and has a mission plan. If we're doing a SWAT plan for something, whoever's available comes and does part of the plan. If you're tied up on something, by all means, you got to do your job. But if you're not, if you're at home, come in and plan this thing. We bring as many people to the table as we can to get that experience, get the repetition. So if something like that does come up and it's like you guys got to plan something quickly, they can. Anybody can. I think that's a huge lesson.

Don't keep that close to your chest. Definitely share that because mission planning is huge. He's got ideas of stuff that I've never thought about. Brandon's got ideas that nobody's ever thought about. And it's like, well, bring it up. Let it be something that might work. Might be a stupid idea. Push that away but let's talk about it.

Jon Becker: A crowd is always smarter than an individual.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah. I think we kind of just got away from what was easy and what we thought was right or because it was easier. Hey, no, it's just that's us. Like, no, that's what we'll do. I don't need those guys because we're really good at this. Well, what happens if we're gone?

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Angelo Tavelli: And then we've we've just made everybody worse. We didn't help anybody. We didn't assist them in becoming a better person, a better operator whatever better in their everyday deputy life or whatever it may be to whatever their assignment is. I think that was probably one of our lessons learned on that too is that and like you said, it got planned the way it got planned because it was a rapidly evolving situation. We didn't have a lot of time, but now, especially on the pre-planned, it's like, nope, new guys or whoever, we're all equal here, right? This is our team. This is our op. Yeah, it's going to have checks and balances. He's a commander, right? I'm a team leader. There's people above him, right? Admin wants to look at the plan, but like this is us as a group. We're going to build this. This is our mission.

Jon Becker: So in SOF units, they call it rank-off planning.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah. I think it is for us.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah.

Jon Becker: In your training, you talked about spontaneous medical stuff. Had you done a spontaneous hostage situation?

Josh Brazzi: Yeah, we incorporate that in from time to time. Nothing to that. I mean, it's usually on a smaller scale. So, it's usually because we have a shoot house as part of our range. What I'm trying to get at is We've never had to build anything out that would have simulated this as far as a time frame goes. It felt like we were going pretty quick to rescue this guy, but at the same time, we didn't know what we were rescuing. We didn't know what we were going into. So it's hard to replicate something similar to that.

Jon Becker: This show is going to be part of season six. And for some reason, this season is the “Land of Spontaneous Hostage Rescue”. So there are three cases we're doing that have gone from, in this case, a warrant to the other two barricades that spontaneously erupt into a hostage situation and you're having to quickly resolve. So it's an interesting thing for teams to train.

Josh Brazzi: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Where you think you have the problem quantified like in this case you're basically scouting where you're going to serve a warrant and all of a sudden you're in the middle of a hostage rescue in a horror movie. just like that and have to evolve the plan. I have to think that some of the spontaneous medical stuff you had done had created a culture in the team of evolving mission sets because that came from somewhere.

Josh Brazzi: No, we definitely do our training. That's another thing we do with training. I'm sure a lot of teams do it I don't just run the training or T doesn't just run the training. Everybody gets to run the training. Everybody gets to run training. This next one is your training and this is the topic. You know, teach it. If you need help, this guy's got the expertise. He can help you. And then just like any plan, we don't stick to a strict training plan. We have the outline of the things that we want to do, some things that we're going to touch on no matter what. But within that, if somebody sees that something needs to be worked on or if we see an opportunity to throw in hostage rescue or an opportunity to throw in some more dynamic entries or something like that, we're going to do that just because. It'll be documented. It'll be all those things, but it may not be part of the actual initial plan. It's not always the same guys teaching it. So, we don't let people hide on the team for very long. They get a couple months when they first get on the team to kind of sit and watch, but they're pretty quickly thrown into now you're going to learn something and you're going to teach it to us. You're going to get up and talk. You're going to start using your brain. You start improvising and doing things like that. We have to have that. And I think most teams should have that, too.

Angelo Tavelli: Yeah, I agree.

Jon Becker: Well, guys, I appreciate you sitting down with me and sharing. This is quite an op and congratulations on successfully surviving it.

Angelo Tavelli: Thank you.

Josh Brazzi: Thank you.

Angelo Tavelli: I appreciate it.

Josh Brazzi: Thanks for having us.