Hostage Rescue with IED Threat

On March 8th, 2021, an armed suspect entered the home of his ex-girlfriend at 2:30 a.m. And took her family hostage in a small town in Maine. When police arrived on scene, the suspect threw a pipe bomb at the patrol officers, which prompted a SWAT activation. The Maine State Police SWAT team, as well as bomb teams from Maine and New Hampshire and the FBI, were all activated to assist with the problem. It soon became apparent that the suspect had not only taken the family hostage, but had placed explosive devices on the windows and doors of the house. What ensued was a 19-hour complicated hostage rescue that involved numerous jurisdictions and specialties. My guest today is Lieutenant Greg Roy from the Maine state police who was the team commander at the incident.

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: Greg, thanks for being here with me.

Greg Roy: Thanks for having me.

Jon Becker: So, why don't we start with you? Tell me about your career path. How do you end up at Maine State Police SWAT?

Greg Roy: Sure. So, I got hired by the state police in 2009. And the state police in Maine is a little bit different than some of the state police agencies out here out west. We're a full-service law enforcement agency. So, we provide full service law enforcement to the rural communities that don't have their own police department. So, from the normal, driving around patrolling to responding to calls for service. So, that's where I started, what we call “down East Maine”, Hancock County. And just just driving around doing the normal police work.

In 2015, I got promoted to detective and worked child abuse and homicide cases for a few years. Our SWAT team in Maine until recently was collateral duty. So it was a part-time thing. It was a specialty, one of our specialties. So in 2012, that's when I got on the team. So started out as one of the team guys, slowly kind of went into different leadership roles as an assistant commander and then eventually taking over the team as a commander in 2020. Between 2020 and 2022 we had several culminating calls that our team went to that really was an emphasis for change for us where now the majority of our team is full-time. We're better supported with different technology and things like that to prepare us for some of these calls like the one we're going to talk about today that was just unprecedented for us and and in some respects we didn't have a playbook for.

I think our team is incredibly supported by our command staff and we're entrusted a lot to make decisions and have the authority to make those decisions. So that's kind of where we came from and a little bit about our team. Our team is responsible for SWAT coverage for a good portion of the state in any of the areas that just don't have either their own police department or their own specialized teams to respond to complex incidents. So a lot of police departments in Maine are between five and 10 officers. So they don't have the resources to be able to respond to some of these more complex rare incidents. So we provide those law enforcement services for them. And then those areas that don't have police departments, which is the vast majority of Maine.

Jon Becker: The vast majority of Maine doesn't have its own police department?

Greg Roy: Yeah. When I was a patrol trooper working in the county, I patrolled 13 towns. So 13 towns that didn't have police departments. We're in LA, so, that it's all it's all in it's all relative. So, when the town I live in has a thousand people, so it's it's all relative. But yeah, it's not uncommon for, a trooper to be patrolling, 13 to 15 towns and that's their coverage area.

Jon Becker: Wow.

Greg Roy: Yeah.

Jon Becker: How big is the Main State Police?

Greg Roy: We're about 350 sworn. So we're a relatively small state police agency and then our team in comparison is at 25 members. So it's relatively speaking it's a big portion of our agency.

Jon Becker: So 25 members are now mostly full-time.

Greg Roy: Yeah.

Jon Becker: What's the uptempo of the team look like?

Greg Roy: Yeah we run between average about 115 to 140 calls a year.

Jon Becker: And what's the majority of your work?

Greg Roy: Barricaded subjects and high-risk warrants. So, we serve, we're pretty strict on the warrants that we screen and we'll execute. But if they rise to the level of a SWAT deployment, we'll execute those warrants.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. So, walk me through this thing went because I mean you said this you didn't have a playbook for this. Other than a few very large municipal agencies, I don't think anybody has a playbook for this case.

Greg Roy: Yeah.

Jon Becker: But walk me through how this thing kicks off.

Greg Roy: Yeah. So, I'll remember this call because I was actually sitting in my driveway. I was just about to leave my house when I got the call on this to go do a debrief on another hostage rescue call we had a few months before. So I'm leaving the house to go do that. My phone rings. I was the team commander at the time. And it kind of gets reported that there's this standoff happening in a town called Livermore Falls, which is a small town, 3,000 people, small full-time police department. So just kind of like we were talking about earlier. So, they had an incident that was reported as an armed home invasion. And when the police showed up, they weren't sure exactly what happened. They were not sure if a firework was thrown at them or there was a gunshot, but essentially they knew that there was an armed person inside. There were multiple other potential victims inside and they thought they were either shot at or there was an explosion when they arrived. So, they were calling for assistance. So, that was kind of the initial brief that we got in and deployed to. So, not a whole lot of information.

Jon Becker: So, what time does it actually kick off and what time does the PD get called?

Greg Roy: Yeah. So, we didn't know this at the time, but the incident itself kicked off around 2:30 in the morning. Yeah. And we got called about quarter to 6. So, several hours later. So, the incident had been going on for hours before the police department even knew about it, before any calls for service or 911 calls were even made.

Jon Becker: And so, then patrol from Livermore Falls.

Greg Roy: Livermore Falls. And then the sheriff's department that covers that area was the backup agency.

Jon Becker: Okay. And they show up with a few cops and experience what they think might be a firework, but we now know was a pipe bomb.

Greg Roy: Correct. Yeah.

Jon Becker: The suspect threw it at them or what did he do?

Greg Roy: Yeah. Yeah. Threw it at them upon their arrival. So they were basically pulled up, treating it like a high-risk barricade. Start trying to hail from a PA, from a cruiser, and that's where the device is thrown.

Jon Becker: I mean, you're looking for a response. You got to respond. Pretty clear.

Greg Roy: Yeah.

Jon Becker: If you're looking to qualify the call.

Greg Roy: Yeah.

Jon Becker: There you go. So, okay. So, the suspect does that and at that point then does the local PD activate you guys?

Greg Roy: Yeah. So, they'll call, they brief us on it and then the way our team works, it's pretty unique now that I've traveled the country speaking to other SWAT teams about this. We have a very unique activation process where the sergeant runs the team. They'll get the call and they alone make the decision to deploy the team and there's no running up the chain. There was no sergeant of the team who made a decision will deploy the team if he felt it's necessary. So that's what happened. So I get the call kind of defining it. We think maybe there could potentially be some hostage in play even though it's not clearly defined yet. So we start launching our full team at the time we had 20 guys available. Our negotiation unit is separate from our SWAT team. So we deploy them as well. And then we got our bomb team for assistance and we didn't know the extent of the explosive connection to this call yet. But that's kind of SOP for us. On any hostage call, we'll deploy our bomb team with us just in case and also they have different technology that we don't have that we may need.

Jon Becker: Okay. So, when you're rolling up to this thing, what do you guys know initially?

Greg Roy: We know that because the other aspect to this is the first responders at the time that they called me on the call, they hadn't even interviewed the victim yet because the victim had evacuated the primary house and gone to the neighbor's house. So, they hadn't even interviewed her yet. So, they didn't know the full details.They just knew, on the 911 call, that an armed person had gone into the house and had taken people hostage at gunpoint. That's what we have, and we didn't have the full story. We didn't know the nexus. We don't know how this happened because what we know from SWAT is that most hostage calls are not planned-out kidnapping hostage calls. They are spontaneous incidents, right? We're responding to a domestic violence call, and when the police arrive, someone is taken hostage because the police showed up. This was not that. This was a planned hostage taking/kidnapping.

Jon Becker: Okay. So, let's roll back in time to what actually happens, now that we know the timeline, and what the relationship of the suspect and the victims is.

Greg Roy: The suspect showed up at this house, which is a two-story single-family residence, around 2:30 in the morning. He basically enters the house with a firearm, goes to the adult homeowner's bedroom, and at gunpoint takes him hostage, zip ties him after some type of physical confrontation, and that's where the incident starts. He's doing this, but the other occupants of the house were two other adults, an adult female, which was the homeowner's daughter, the homeowner's daughter's boyfriend, and the homeowner's daughter's daughter, a 17-year-old child. Those three individuals are upstairs and completely unaware this is happening downstairs.

Around 5:00 in the morning, people start waking up. The boyfriend goes downstairs and is now confronted with an armed man. He orders him to the ground and starts to zip tie him. That kind of spurs the next series of events that happen at the call.

Jon Becker: Keep going.

Greg Roy: There is a confrontation there. The boyfriend comes downstairs and starts getting zip tied. His girlfriend hears the commotion, goes to the top of the stairs, sees what's happening, and realizes it's her ex-boyfriend who is our suspect, the one that came there and did the home invasion. She gets her phone out to call 911, dials 911, and it starts to ring. The suspect then takes the phone away from her and intervenes. He takes her downstairs and starts trying to zip tie everybody. His attention, though, things have started to kind of spiral here and get a little dynamic. His attention is pretty divided between the three individuals.

He starts zip tying their hands behind their backs like hostages, and she's able to see a window of opportunity and flee. She runs out of the house and goes to the neighbor's house. That's where the first successful 911 call describing the incident happens.

Jon Becker: What time is that?

Greg Roy: It's like 5:45.

Jon Becker: Okay. So, there are four people in the house initially?

Greg Roy: Yes. Four victims.

Jon Becker: Daughter, her boyfriend, and her kid.

Greg Roy: Yes.

Jon Becker: So, three generations. Dad, granddad, basically. Mom and... Okay. This is the daughter's ex-boyfriend.

Greg Roy: Yes.

Jon Becker: And the other guy in the house is the daughter's current boyfriend.

Greg Roy: Correct.

Jon Becker: Okay. I think I got it now.

Greg Roy: We need a chart.

Jon Becker: Yeah. We need a flowchart on this. The daughter, the suspect's ex-girlfriend, sees a window of opportunity and flees about 5:45, goes to the neighbor's house. Now we have a righteous 911 call where she describes what happens.

Greg Roy: Exactly.

Jon Becker: Okay. This is where you guys are? You're rolling up or--

Greg Roy: We didn't even know about it.

Jon Becker: Oh, so that's the first 911 call.

Greg Roy: The first 911 call, the first time the police even know there's anything happening. They then respond with the information they have, and that's when the device is thrown out at them. The explosion happens. They weren't sure exactly what it was. They're basically going into, "Hey, this is an actual legitimate thing," and they call us.

Jon Becker: Okay. The daughter is now free. We've got dad, let's call it granddaughter, boyfriend, and suspect ex-boyfriend in the house.

Greg Roy: Yes.

Jon Becker: You guys get there about what time?

Greg Roy: We roll as you are. We have some guys there within 15 to 20 minutes and some guys there within two hours. We're geographically spread out through the state. All of our equipment is taken home, and cars are taken home. We have everything that we're going to deploy with us at all times. When the emergency page goes out, which at this time was about quarter to 6:00, most guys are responding from home.

Jon Becker: Okay. When the team starts getting on scene, walk me through the evolution.

Greg Roy: On a hostage call, our standard operating procedures are to get people in place, get our emergency crisis entry team and reactionary teams in place, get our sniper units out in place, and then start gathering intel as rapidly as we can to inform decision-making. I didn't live anywhere near this. Our assistant commander got on scene first and our negotiation commander, and they started really working the call. That's when we're starting to learn this was a legitimate explosive device that was thrown out, not a firecracker or a firework. This was a legitimate explosive device, which ups the ante for us. It ups the hazard response. At this point, we kind of queue into getting some more resources started there.

Jon Becker: Who do you guys call?

Greg Roy: We have a unique relationship in New England. It's a New England State Police Administrators compact. It's basically a big mutual aid agreement that we have between New England states to be able to deploy resources from throughout New England that we may need. Some may be manpower, equipment, or specialized trained people. In this case, there are tactical bomb technicians who are certified and trained to work with SWAT teams. We didn't have that program in Maine yet. We do now, but we didn't at the time. New Hampshire State Police did, and they're actually on the cutting edge of this and super advanced within the TBT community. We requested them to respond to Maine to assist us, along with a good portion of their tactical team as well. We go to the same basic and advanced SWAT schools in New England, and so it's much easier for them to integrate with us.

Jon Becker: Which states? Forgive me. I live about as far from New England as I possibly can other than Hawaii. New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine. Anybody else? Connecticut.

Greg Roy: Yep. Massachusetts, Rhode Island.

Jon Becker: Oh, really? Okay. So, all of those states are in this compact. You kind of have access to those resources. It's what we would consider a mutual aid agreement in California. It's just at a state level rather than at a city or county level.

Greg Roy: Exactly. For us, it can be a huge force multiplier. We can take our team of 25 and pull 15 operators from New Hampshire, and it's a sizable up for us. We do have similar relationships with some of the SWAT teams in Maine. On that call specifically, we just needed the specialized resources.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you need the tactical bomb techs. So you call New Hampshire State Police, they send tactical bomb techs up. What's their initial reaction as resources start to get on scene? How does this thing evolve?

Greg Roy: As the incident is progressing, and a big part of the initial phases of these hostage calls is really just gathering intel, that was a huge piece of this one, especially with the explosive component. We had no idea what we were dealing with. We didn't know the level of sophistication. We didn't know if this was just kind of a one-off crude device that he threw out or what was happening. We're really pushing our sniper observers out, trying to get as much intel on the house as we can. It takes a few hours for the New Hampshire guys to trickle in. As they start trickling in, we're able to brief them on a lot more that we've learned.

Jon Becker: What's the next major piece of information you guys start gathering?

Greg Roy: As our perimeter teams and sniper units are being pushed out, they start reporting back to the command post, "Hey, we're seeing some weird things here." They start to really focus on that. They started seeing pipes that were duct taped to doorways and windows that had fuses out of them. Now we're like, "Okay, this wasn't a one-off explosive device. This looks like there are several."

The thing that turned the corner for us a little bit is one of our units on the back of the house reported seeing, on a doorway, this box with an antenna sticking out of it that was duct taped to the window and then had a connection to what ended up being a pipe bomb. Instead of this being a crude device, we're now like, "These are radio-initiated devices," which is a whole other level of complexity that we're dealing with.

One of the great things that unit did is, through their magnified scope, they actually took a photo with their cell phone and sent it to the command post. As he's describing what he's looking at, I'm sitting in the command post like, "This doesn't make any sense to me." When he sends me the photo, I'm like, "Oh, I mean, that's very clear now what this is or potentially is."

Jon Becker: He's describing it and you're going, "No, it's probably not." The picture comes in, and you're like, "Oh, 100%. No, that's a remote-control bomb."

Greg Roy: Yeah. He starts sending that back, which I thought was genius. We start working through some of that, and then, around 9:30 in the morning, once we're all set up and ready to go, we initiate phone contact with the suspect. That's when things get weirder.

Jon Becker: You're not getting any indications? Is the sniper team seeing the suspect? Are they seeing anything inside?

Greg Roy: No. The most that we'd see is shadow movement inside. All the blinds were covered. It was dark inside. We weren't seeing any movement other than some kind of shadowy figure moving across a window or something like that, but nothing identifiable.

Jon Becker: No indication of physical violence or anything that would prompt you to go.

Greg Roy: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay. So, you say you make contact with the suspect and it gets weirder.

Greg Roy: We made contact with him, and he's very calm, very collected. Like I said earlier, a lot of these hostage calls are kind of spontaneous. It's a drug deal gone bad or a domestic violence situation gone bad. This was a planned hostage taking. He went there with the intention of this being a hostage kidnapping. He was very calm, very controlled, using some very suspicious verbiage. He was referring to it as a hostage situation. He said he wanted to speak to a crisis negotiator. He was using all these terminologies that were like, "All right, this is super unusual."

We find out after the fact that he had actually brought with him a crisis negotiation manual that he had printed off the internet and had studied. He said, "I know what you're going to do. I know you're going to do this, this, and this." It was a pretty accurate strategy negotiation 101. He was labeling it off. Our negotiators are trying to work through what is kind of an unconventional negotiation. That is just another layer of sophistication into this incident that was unusual for us.

Jon Becker: It just keeps getting worse.

Greg Roy: Yeah. He actually wanted to talk, and so we're talking. We're on the phone with him for a while. We've been on the phone with him for about half an hour. Now we're about 10:00 in the morning when our units on the front of the house report that two people had just jumped out a second-story window. In the front of the house, there was a covered porch. These individuals had jumped out a second-story window onto the roof of this covered porch, and it ended up being the boyfriend, the victim's boyfriend, and the daughter, the granddaughter, the 17-year-old. They jumped out. The male jumped out onto the screen porch roof and then jumped off. Again, this is March in Maine, so we have a couple feet of snow on the ground and it's cold out. He jumps off into the snow, but the daughter freezes up on the roof. She's too scared to jump off.

We're now in this, "We've got to do something." We've got to try to help the situation. We were currently on the phone with the suspect. He has no idea this is happening. We need to keep it that way. When you start talking about negotiators not leading into what the tactics are going to be, this was a prime example of that. We can't lead on to what's going on, and we want to keep him talking. We want to keep him distracted because we're now going to have to make a movement up to this residence to extract these people. That's what happens.

Our team members make a movement up to the residence and are basically coaching this 17-year-old, who is terrified, off the roof. They're saying, "We need you to come down and jump." We couldn't go get her. We needed her to come down and jump. We're able to evac her to cover, and then that proceeds into the next part of this incident, which is again more intel gathering. That intel gathering is a constant process in this call, trying to get a grip on what we're dealing with. We like to talk about hostage rescue theory, like, "All these things are happening. We're going to stack on the door. We're going to blow the door, and we're going to go in. We're going to do all these things," right? In real life, when these complex incidents happen, and especially things like this, it's not that simple. We just need more information to inform that decision-making.

One of the things that we did is, by this time in the call, we're now 10:00 in the morning. The incident had been going on for a few hours. We had resources from all over the place there. The FBI out of Boston had shown up with their bomb techs, which was super clutch in helping in this incident. They were able to bring up some resources and technology that we just don't have. Typically, when we get any individual out, whether it's a barricaded subject or a hostage call, our negotiators will do an intel briefing with them. But in this call, given the complexity, we actually had the bomb technicians sit in on that debrief of the people. I said right to the FBI bomb tech on scene, "I just need to know what we are dealing with. What is the level of sophistication?"

Jon Becker: Yeah. Is this real? Will this kill us?

Greg Roy: I said, "How bomby are these bombs? What are we talking about here?" He's able to sit in on that debrief and get a ton of information because what we didn't know at the time is that the suspect didn't build these bombs before he came there. He built them there. He brought all the supplies to make these pipe bombs and constructed them all during the incident. Because of that, we were able to get a ton of intel about them and what the construction was like and the level of sophistication. After that debrief, the bomb tech representative came into the command post and looked at me. He said, "Greg, it seems legit. It seems like a pretty legitimate setup."

Jon Becker: They're pretty bomby.

Greg Roy: They're pretty bomby. Yeah.

Jon Becker: On the 0 to 10 bombing scale, they're pretty bomby.

Greg Roy: Yeah. They're pretty much a nine or 10. They're describing some radio initiation where the suspect was carrying around a switchboard or had some type of remote control in his hand that seemed to be connected to these devices. We didn't know exactly what it was at the time, but he's like, "It seems legitimate based on what the victims are describing and the construction."

Jon Becker: This call just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.

Greg Roy: Yeah. We talked about it. I talked a little bit about the theory of hostage rescue and whether we are going to do a crisis entry. The reality is, around this time, we made the determination on scene that some of the typical hostage rescue entry triggers that we talk about in hostage rescue 101 just are not going to be present in this call. At the end of the day, if we hear something that makes us initiate an entry and then the house blows up, what's the point? What do we gain from that? Nothing.

So, we made the determination, and kind of made the instruction to our crisis entry teams, that the only entry initiation is going to be from a command post. That is a little atypical for us, especially on a hostage call, but given the level of sophistication of the devices, we just wanted to make sure that we weren't triggering something that we weren't prepared to face the consequences for.

Jon Becker: Had you guys identified there were devices on all of the logical entry points into the house?

Greg Roy: Almost every first-floor entry point that we could see. We could see explosive devices on almost every first-floor window and one on every door. We didn't see the ones on the second floor. There were ones placed on the second floor that we learned about after the fact, but we couldn't see them. There were other ones that we couldn't see, but yeah, we were looking right at them.

Jon Becker: Describe for me what the devices are looking like at this point.

Greg Roy: They're galvanized metal piping, screwed-on end caps. Some of them had fuses out of the end. Some of them were connected to those boxes with the antennas that I described earlier. One was placed on the top of a couch that was by a big bay window. Some were duct taped to the door frames. We're seeing all kinds of them, but they all seem to be strategically placed to dissuade us from entering or at least protect from an entry. At this time, the suspect is still on the phone and he's describing, "I've got a dead man switch. I've got the house wired to blow." What we're seeing and what we're hearing are matching up.

Jon Becker: He's threatening to blow up the house and he's putting explosive devices all over the house.

Greg Roy: Yeah.

Jon Becker: The devices on the doors, if I remember correctly from the pictures, are mounted basically at about face level.

Greg Roy: Correct. Yeah. Duct tape. As the call goes, we're now a few hours into negotiations, and the complexity of the call takes another step. The suspect now is saying things that make us think maybe this incident is a little bit bigger than just this residence. He starts making comments on the phone like, "Hey, school's in session today, right?" We're hearing things like that in the context of him talking about explosives. We're now thinking, well, did he plant something at a local school that's in session? In combination with this one isolated active incident we have going on, which at this point in the call involved four hostages--one was able to escape before we got there, and now we've got two to escape--we've kind of shrunk the problem a little bit. So, we have the suspect and the adult homeowner. That's all that's in the house. That's our isolated incident at this point. But now we're having to do emergency evacuations of every school in the area, along with bomb sweeps of residences. The suspect says that he planted an explosive device in the local Walmart, which was in the neighboring town. So now we're doing a forced emergency evacuation at a Walmart and a bomb sweep of a Walmart. Not exactly our SWAT resources, but our overall resources are getting thinner.

Jon Becker: From a command and control standpoint, at the point that this guy is now starting to trigger things outside of the problem, do you stand up a secondary command post, or is it your single command post? Talk to me about what the command and control architecture looks like.

Greg Roy: This was a huge learning point and takeaway from us because typically how we'll run a SWAT operation is, when our tactical team arrives, we assume control over what we'll call the inner perimeter, the actions happening at that incident. But we don't take over the case. We're not taking the suspect to jail. We're not doing the prosecution. That's the primary requesting agency that is going to handle that, which for us is often another jurisdiction, another agency. Sometimes we're supporting our own agency, but most of our calls are for other departments. They're maintaining control of the case and assuming authority over that. We were maintaining control over the tactical operations.

In this case, when the incident started expanding out of jurisdictions, we still had the local police chief or lieutenant running the overall operations, dealing with traffic control and outer perimeter stuff. We had leadership from our agency there just because of the high-profile nature of the call.

Some of this is happening in the background, but we are typically a one-command-post unit, and that's how we ran it. As additional personnel and agencies came in, and the incident started expanding, we didn't expand the command structure quickly enough. That was one of our huge takeaways. As the incident size grows, we need to grow the command structure as well. We should have created an off-site command post to manage some of these other incidents and reduce the noise in what may be considered the tactical operations center. It was also the command post. We could have split those two functions, and we didn't. That was a huge learning point for us.

Jon Becker: So, the minute it exceeds the scope of this event and starts being external searches, split off the TOC from the command post and run that.

Greg Roy: Exactly. The other thing that we had going on is that the suspect started making comments about his residence, his apartment. He's saying things like, "How come you haven't searched my apartment yet?" Now we're kind of going into, "What's happening here?" It turns out he had typical Wi-Fi cameras set up in his house, and so he knew we hadn't gone to his house yet. He's getting curious. As a tactical commander, I'm thinking, why does he want us to go to his house? Is this place rigged to explode?

Now we've got another problem. I went to my investigators and said, "We need to get into that apartment as quickly and safely as possible." I don't want to rush it and get somebody hurt, but I also need to know because it could be another big intel piece for us. Is he building the devices there? Are we going to get more intel about the sophistication of this call from that apartment? Our bomb team split, and they're going there to do what they do, remote operations, working robots into the house, making sure it's safe, and then entering slowly and controlled. They're able to report back, "Nothing here," other than some literature and things like that. It didn't look like the big movie-caliber bomb manufacturing lab or anything like that.

Jon Becker: He's asking you why you haven't been there. You have to be wondering, did he booby trap the apartment?

Greg Roy: One hundred percent.

Jon Becker: Didn't you guys evacuate that when you went to search it?

Greg Roy: Oh, yeah. The whole building. It just seems like I keep rolling into complexities here, but then, on top of all that, we had a car parked out in front of this residence where the incident is going on. We had reports that there were suspicious packages inside this car. We learn it's the suspect's car, so now we're thinking, is there a vehicle-borne device outside? We're trying to work through that problem, flying drones up there, looking inside. We see a cooler with wires sticking out of it, and we're like, "Holy..." It just seems like every time we think it gets worse, there's just another problem. Now we have to worry about if there is a vehicle-borne device and we have operators on perimeter, we have snipers in place. What is the risk to that? We're trying to do shielding with BearCats and all kinds of different pieces of armor to try to preserve life as much as possible if that does go off.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Because if it's a VBIED, that could level the team, right?

Greg Roy: Right.

Jon Becker: Where's the command post relative to the house location?

Greg Roy: That's a good question. A couple hundred yards away.

Jon Becker: Far enough away that you can't see the residence, but close enough that the blast radius of the car is going to be an issue.

Greg Roy: One hundred percent. Yeah. But close enough that we could brief our guys there and then deploy on foot. We're not driving to the scene.

Jon Becker: Okay. So, just to restate complexity here, we're clearing Walmart. We're evacuating schools. We're searching a suspect's apartment that he wants you to search, which makes you think there's a bomb in it. We've got a potential VBIED sitting in front of the house. The suspect is on the phone still being super helpful. Explosive devices are on all the doors and windows. One hostage left. It's cold outside and there is snow on the ground.

Greg Roy: Yeah, that's about it.

Jon Becker: So that's it?

Greg Roy: Yeah. So, the negotiations take a turn when he realizes that the two people had fled. That's when he realizes he's not really in control of this call anymore. We hear him. It sounds like he probably had to break down the door to the bedroom that they were in. We can hear the crash inside, and then we hear an audible expletive that he screams out. We can hear it from outside. Then he makes some comments over the phone and hangs up. That's when phone contact ceases, and it wasn't really established again for a while. He would message us, text message us, do these different things. He actually called the media at one point to talk to them. That slowed down the phone contact for a little bit, but we were able to reestablish it at some point.

Jon Becker: Do you have a media presence on the scene?

Greg Roy: Huge. Yeah. Big media presence. We had set up an area for them well out of sight of the location.

Jon Becker: Are they being a pain in the ass or are they being cooperative?

Greg Roy: Mostly cooperative. What was another big learning experience for us is when he called the media. The reporter on scene had the suspect on the phone. Good on them. He approached law enforcement and said, "Hey, the suspect's on the phone if you guys want to talk to him." Obviously, they didn't know we had been talking to him for hours. When they did that, they gave the phone to our negotiators and we started talking to him on that device. What we didn't know at the time is that that particular media outlet used an application on that phone to record those phone conversations.

Jon Becker: So, at that point, all the negotiations that happened on the device were recorded and the media had them afterward. I'm gathering that Maine is not a two-consent state.

Greg Roy: No. No. It's a single-party state.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So now is that only rolling while they're on the phone, or do we now have a media telephone in the command post?

Greg Roy: The latter. For as long as the phone was in there.

Jon Becker: Oh boy. I'm going to guess there was probably a spirited discussion that followed.

Greg Roy: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And a quick decision to delete the file, hopefully.

Greg Roy: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay. So it just keeps getting worse. I'm waiting for the part where we start going downhill. Right now, we're still climbing the hill, buddy. What time is it now?

Greg Roy: We're midday. Noon. We're able to get him back on the phone at some point in the early afternoon. This whole time, we're just working intel gathering. Given that we made the decision that an entry of any type, planned or crisis entry, at this point would be incredibly risky both for us and also for the hostage, that's our win. If we're initiating something that ends up injuring the hostage, what is the point?

Jon Becker: If you implode the house, it doesn't matter that the hostage... So, at this point, you're just bolstering your sniper positions, getting more units up there, trying to get as many angles as you can on the house, and just working through that process while you're trying to get other resources there to give you more information and intelligence.

Greg Roy: Exactly. So, when we get him back on the phone, he's actually talking about coming out. He kind of plays this game for a couple hours where he's like, "I'm going to come out. I just need to do this," the typical stalling tactics. We actually think we might get a win here. We're letting that play out given the circumstances and asking, what are our other options at this point? We're letting the negotiators work through that problem. But it becomes very apparent that that's not going to happen and he's just playing games.

Where we really get our next piece is when we get the hostage on the phone. We're able to get the hostage on the phone in the afternoon. He's speaking very freely, and we were beginning to believe--I'm in the command post and listening to the negotiations live, so I'm able to hear all this, which helps me with my decision-making--that he's not with the hostage taker. He starts talking freely like he's not with the suspect. We're thinking, well, maybe he's in a bedroom or somewhere by himself, and he's able to talk because he's saying, "Yeah, the suspect has a handgun in his waistband. There are devices on every door." He's basically giving us a ton of information about what the picture inside looks like. We think he may be separated, and that may be a window of opportunity for us to affect a rescue.

We start developing a theory, just a working theory based on the information we have at the time, that he's in his bedroom. His bedroom was on the back corner of the first floor of the residence. We thought there might be an opportunity to do an approach and do a window entry and extract him. If we were able to do that and get him out of the house, then we have a barricade. That's easy. We can do that all day. Given the complexity of that decision, or if we were going to do that tactical intervention, we really wanted to rehearse it.

I get with our crisis entry team leaders. I say, "Hey, I don't know if we're going to do this, but I want to have a plan if we're able to do this. If we're able to determine that he's separated from the suspect and he's in that bedroom, we may try a window approach. We knew the window of that bedroom wasn't one of the windows that we could see an explosive device on. We might try to break and rake that window, get the hostage out of that window, fall back to cover, and work a barricade."

There was a residence next door that was almost the exact replica of this residence. We spent the next half hour, 45 minutes, rehearsing that movement. We're trying to see how quickly we can get that done. I asked the team leader, "I want you to time it, and I want you to tell me what your fastest time is from your last position of cover, moving up on foot, simulated break and rake, and then evacuation." They rehearsed it and rehearsed it, and we were able to get it down to a pretty quick time. At the same point, we were trying to work some different technology angles to identify where exactly in the house he was on the phone, using some different location information.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Greg Roy: We had resources there from different federal agencies helping us. If we could pinpoint exactly where in the house he was, we might have been able to do that. We ultimately weren't able to do that and didn't affect that intervention. But that was another big takeaway from us: that rehearsal would have been huge had we had the opportunity to do that.

Jon Becker: Yeah. We won't go into technology, but you have federal resources on station now that are providing you with some additional technology--

Greg Roy: Exactly.

Jon Becker: --that is not only gathering, but is there anything proactive taking place also?

Greg Roy: Some of those, given the complexity of the devices and things like that, the federal agencies there had different technology on scene that would be able to help us had we needed to deploy.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. So we think the hostage is in his bedroom downstairs. What's the next thing that happens?

Greg Roy: We ultimately aren't able to get that confirmation that he's in there, so we back off that entry point. Now things are starting to get dark, but throughout the day, especially the latter part of the day, our observers on the back of the house had been seeing somebody come to that back door. That was our last known. It's this back door to the residence, which had a big window on it, but now it's dark inside. Someone kept approaching that back door and manipulating that box that I talked about earlier, the one the sniper took a picture of with the radio out of it. He was manipulating it, but doing it very cautiously, kind of standing behind concealment, reaching his arm over, manipulating the device, and then he would leave.

Our sniper keeps calling this out, talking about, "Hey, there's somebody at the back door. He's at the back door manipulating the device." We're thinking, this might be a good window of opportunity to take a shot here and end this situation. But it just never happened. It never developed. There were some struggles with target identification and confirmation. Is this him? Because the last thing you want to do is--

Jon Becker: Shoot the one hostage.

Greg Roy: Shoot the hostage. Without that confirmation, we're really working through that problem. The lesson learned part of this call is that this was a big frustration for a lot of our team guys. They're hearing what they're interpreting over the radio as someone seeing the suspect, and it's not happening. What we're expecting to happen is not happening. There is a lot of frustration building with that. Ultimately, we're a very honest team in our debriefs and after-action reviews of these calls. We talked about it. "Hey, what were you seeing? What were you doing?" At the end of the day, that sniper just couldn't be 100% that it was the suspect. That is the decision that was made.

We talk a lot about this. Our team did a lot in scenario-based training after this. Marksmanship is just one part of shooting. The decision is just as big a part of that decision. Sometimes that 100% identification is not going to be that driver's license photo image of them in the window. Some of that is going to have to be constructed through the call, through what you're seeing, clothing description, is the person bald, do they have hair, do they have facial hair? Some of these things can be constructed, and some of that is changeable, and you have to be careful with that. But at the end of the day, what resulted in this call ending was that the person who was in that position was able to take in all that information and make that decision.

Jon Becker: Is there a significant physical difference between the suspect and the hostage?

Greg Roy: Yeah. Age difference, facial hair difference, size difference. There was a significant enough difference that we could put that together. Now it's getting dark, and those identifications are a little bit more challenging. We're under night vision. It's not as clear as it was in the daytime. Now we're several hours into this.

One of the other big takeaways we had is that we didn't really, early enough, come up with, what are we going to do when this goes 20 hours? What is our replacement plan for our team? What we had done, and kind of our SOPs to this point, was we went into rest cycles. We started cycling people off, "Go take an hour nap in your car, come back, and we'll plug you back in." That's typically how we'll do our call outs because, when we're at a barricade in the middle of nowhere in Maine, the closest officer may be hours away. It's not always easy to get a full team swap out for us. So we'll do this. We'll cycle people in and out. That's what we started doing. Our team leaders, our snipers, our entry team guys just started cycling them out for rest cycles. That's the process we were in at this point, going into the long haul of this operation.

Jon Becker: Do you have another team? I know you've got bomb resources from New Hampshire and the feds, but do you have another--

Greg Roy: We had probably a dozen of the New Hampshire State Police tactical team guys there, too. That's what is leveraging us the ability to do this.

Jon Becker: Are the two teams integrating then? Are you putting their snipers into your positions?

Greg Roy: Snipers out, putting their entry teams with our entry guys, with our entry team.

Jon Becker: Oh, wow.

Greg Roy: Okay. Yeah.

Jon Becker: All right. So, we're 10 hours in this thing? It kicks off at 2:30 in the morning, but for you guys it's 5:45. What time is it now?

Greg Roy: Now we're kind of in 10:00 at night, and we're well into these rest cycles. We're starting to figure out what our next decisions are going to be. We started replacing some of our snipers. They had been out there for hours. We put one of our senior guys in a position at the back of the house so that they could see the back door. It wasn't long after that that he got a visual of who he believed was the suspect based on what he was seeing, and he took a shot.

Jon Becker: So is the suspect at this point still communicating? Is he off and on?

Greg Roy: Not as consistent.

Jon Becker: Has his behavior changed at all?

Greg Roy: His communication is changing. His communication is changing to lead us to believe that he is not planning on exiting this call alive. He's starting to talk about, "I'm going to die out of this. We're going to die out of this," talking about the hostage. "I'm ready for you guys. Come do this whenever." He's starting to have end-game conversation, which we have to take in as information to make decisions based on.

Jon Becker: Yeah. That's a very different scenario than if he's negotiating. "We're going to die" is pretty clearly a threat to the hostage, and obviously with a house full of bombs, it is always a threat to the hostage. As you're doing this, the two hostages escape. Was there any thought given to that second-floor entry point, and what were your thoughts there?

Greg Roy: One of the things I pushed out to the entry team leaders was, "They jumped out that second-story window and they didn't blow up, so maybe if we needed to go in, we could go inside that window and hopefully we wouldn't blow up either." That was the very rudimentary logic that we used. We started developing a plan. We're not saying we're going to do this, but if we were to do this, how would we affect that entry up there? Again, on paper, it seems super simple. When you start saying, "We're going to trudge through two feet of snow with a ladder and a team, and go up there and place it on the house," it took a little bit of planning. At the time, we didn't have any of these fancy ladders or anything like that. The ladder we used was your typical aluminum ladder that you get at Home Depot. They started coming up with this plan. That was kind of in our back pocket. The intention of that entry plan was not a crisis hostage rescue entry. It was, "Hey, if we take a sniper shot or think the suspect has committed suicide and we need to do an entry for clearance purposes, that's probably going to be our approach point rather than the door that has the bomb on it." It made sense to us at the time.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, or even stealth to contact.

Greg Roy: Yeah, exactly.

Jon Becker: That's a place to end. Now, not to foreshadow too much, but retrospectively.

Greg Roy: Yeah.

Jon Becker: That window was not going to be a good decision.

Greg Roy: Yeah. I don't know if he had that area of the house rigged before or after they left, but we now know that, right outside that bedroom door, there was an explosive device planted there and would have been waiting for us.

Jon Becker: All right. So, the suspect comes to the window.

Greg Roy: Yep.

Jon Becker: Sniper is able to identify him.

Greg Roy: Yep.

Jon Becker: Sniper takes a shot.

Greg Roy: Correct.

Jon Becker: What happens next?

Greg Roy: We hear it. I was outside the command post. I could clearly hear suppressed rifle fire, which I know is us. I hear that gunshot go off. The sniper calls the shot, says what it was, says what he saw and what he saw after. He said where he shot, which was kind of upper torso, and said the suspect went out of sight. We don't know if it was fatal, if it was a miss, or anything at that point. He said he heard the suspect scream out. So we have a pretty good idea there was a hit, but we don't know the extent of it.

We're now pushing up into the next stage. This situation has escalated again, and we're now having to affect our next call. We had plans for this. We were kind of anticipating this is how it would go, or hopefully it would go, as a sniper-initiated event. We start working on technology to see what we can see. We start calling up the entry team to move closer in case we need to extract the hostage or do some type of intervention, and we start getting drones up to hopefully look in that back window and see what we were hoping was him down in the doorway.

As that entry team gets closer, they have some equipment with them that was provided for us and would be used in a call like this. The consequence of some of that equipment is, once it's initiated, it can have some consequences to technology and signals and things like that.

Jon Becker: So disruption is disruption of your technology or theirs.

Greg Roy: Yes. At some point, they make the decision to initiate that technology, and then radio communication from the command post to the entry team is essentially severed. The drone that we had flying up to the back window lost signal and went into its go-home mode. It starts taking off and heading to outer space. At the command post, we don't know what's going on. We don't know what has happened, but we were inferring maybe what had happened. Now we have a very complex incident where the level of complexity jumped because now we can't talk.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Greg Roy: Our team leaders at that point are very capable and are empowered to make decisions in situations like this. They start asking, "What are we going to do here?" They're going to enact that entry plan that we had talked about earlier, which was going to be through that second-story window. They start briefing that out among their group. It was a joint team of members of our team and New Hampshire's team. They make an approach up to the residence and start to do that entry.

Jon Becker: What happens?

Greg Roy: Just like Murphy's law, right? We have this nice $100 aluminum ladder, and we set it up against the house, and it makes this big clang noise. Nothing's like the movies where you're tiptoeing up to a scene and everything goes perfectly. This big clang happens. Our number one man starts traversing the ladder, climbing, and we hear a gunshot from inside the residence. That round goes out the front, right by where some of our entry team members were stacked up, and actually lodged just below the window frame of where we had a sniper across the street in a window. That round strikes the residence across the road.

Jon Becker: So the suspect is apparently shooting at you.

Greg Roy: That is our thought at the time. Again, that entry plan was not a probe to contact crisis entry plan. It was, "Hey, we have something where we need a safer approach. This is how we're going to do it." But it's still going to be a slow, methodical entry with our TBTs clearing as we go to make sure we're not tripping something and making the problem worse. They essentially cancel that plan. That plan is nonviable. We had talked about if the suspect is alive and has a command-initiated type system in there, this is not unless we can own this situation right away. But clearing an unknown is going to be extremely dangerous for both us and them.

Jon Becker: So they kind of cancel that plan.

Greg Roy: The team leader kind of joked about it. He does a lot of these debriefs with me when we talk about this call. He says you have this plan in your head of what it looks like when you start getting shot at and you're breaking contact. It just wasn't. You're dealing with two feet of snow. It just goes to the winds. Half the people made it to the front of the house and are now using the potential VBIED car for cover until they're like, "Wait a minute. This is a problem." The situation got pretty, again amplified by no radio communications. We're able to work through that and reset. Now we're able to turn off that technology, and now we have our technology back. We can start working drones and robots and things like that. We can't see the individual inside the door.

We start having verbal communication with the hostage from inside. He's yelling outside, and we're yelling back at him from the driveway. We're asking him, "Can you come to us?" He's saying no. He's like, "I can't move." We're wondering, does he have an explosive device on him? Is there something else here? He's basically saying it's not safe to leave.

It takes a good 30 minutes to coax him out of the house. We have negotiators in our armor that's in the driveway, and they're talking to him over the PA, basically coaxing him out of the house. We're able to get him out. Again, we're super cautious at this point. We don't know if he has any explosives that the suspect has placed on him. We basically do your standard pat down, make sure he's got nothing on him, and then bring him back and start debriefing him.

What we learn is that when our sniper took that shot, the hostage tells us that the suspect was shot under the armpit. That's kind of where the injury was. Then all he heard of what happened next was another gunshot, which at the time he didn't know where it came from. He didn't know if it was us or whatever. Then the suspect slumped over on the couch, motionless.

At this point, we've got no more hostages inside. We've got what sounds like a potentially deceased suspect inside in a house rigged with explosives and an officer-involved shooting. Again, another layer to this call, or at least the follow-on after the call. It's not something where we just pack our stuff up and leave, high five, and go to bed. We still need to work this call and make sure it's safe. This is where we really kick it to our bomb team and say, "Hey, we need you to basically render the people portion of this call safe and make sure that he is deceased." They're using their robots. They do a great job making entries with their technology. They find the suspect deceased from what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in the living room.

We're having to make the decision that we're 19-20 hours into this call. Our resources are pretty depleted and exhausted, and it's dark out, which complicates everything. We make the decision at this point that we're not going to try to do render-safe procedures tonight. We're not going to work on these devices. We're not going to spend hours in a bomb suit and do this call right now. I think that was a really good call by our bomb team guys. Essentially, we're going to leave it for the night. We're going to put scene security out and leave it for the night.

The problem with that is we've got a person in there. We think they're deceased, but we haven't gone in and done the confirmations that we typically would do, taking the pulse and all those things. We're having to do that with a robot. We do some pretty creative things with the arms of the robot systems.

Jon Becker: Pinchy-grabby kind of stuff.

Greg Roy: Pinchy-grabby, and get no reaction. We're pretty confident at that point that the suspect is deceased. So we leave it. We're now at 1:00 in the morning. Again, this call kicked off at 2:30 a.m. for the victims and suspect, and for us about 5:30 or 6:00. We're 17-18 hours into the day.

Jon Becker: Assuming that you guys got out of bed and went to the call, which a lot of you didn't.

Greg Roy: Exactly. Now we're in a demobilization mode. We're coming off. We're going into our officer-involved shooting procedures. We still had a house full of explosives and a car that wasn't rendered safe on the street. We're having to do things that we typically wouldn't do, like leave our BearCat there overnight, parked next to the potential VBIED for shielding in case it did go off. There are all kinds of very unique after-the-fact portions of this call for us.

The whole next day, the Maine State Police Bomb Squad, New Hampshire, and the FBI all worked hours to render that safe. Eventually, they were able to determine there were 11 bona fide devices. Almost all of them were metal pipe, smokeless powder, and had a couple of different initiating systems: radio initiation or quick match systems wired to a common fuse point. All throughout the house there were several suspicious packages. They were able to determine that there wasn't any type of explosive in the car, but there were definitely some suspicious materials. There was a lot of dimensional lumber, 2x4s, screws, drills.

What it looked like to us is that his initial plan was to enter the house in the morning, take the people hostage, go back to his car after he had zip tied them and done all the things, fortify doors with the 2x4s and screws, and then have this big grandiose dramatic hostage taking. But when the initial hostage was able to flee, it kind of messed with his plan and threw him off of his planning and decision-making. There was also a jug of sulfuric acid in the car. We don't know what his plan was with that. That's where we actually found the manual, "Guide to Hostage Negotiations," or whatever it was called.

It definitely was a different call for us. The bombs were one level, right? That's a level of complexity, but also the level of planning from the suspect that went into this. This wasn't a crisis situation that evolved. This was a planned kidnapping hostage situation that lasted, for us, 20 hours in a pretty complex environment.

Jon Becker: Let's walk through some of the components here because I think they matter. The devices are viable devices. They test the devices, and they're righteous pipe bombs.

Greg Roy: Yeah. Obviously, in the render-safe procedures, they're all rendered safe, but the FBI was able to replicate the system and the radio system that was used to construct it, which was ordered off of Amazon. They determined it would have worked.

Jon Becker: The radio system was like a fireworks initiator, right?

Greg Roy: Yeah. Fireworks initiator.

Jon Becker: So, he's got 11 devices rigged with a fireworks initiator that are viable devices.

Greg Roy: Correct.

Jon Becker: I've seen the pictures. These are foot-long, two-inch pipe bombs, which certainly would have killed somebody standing next to them. Nothing in the car of an explosive nature, just the tools to probably finish what he was going to do. Anything else in the house?

Greg Roy: No. He was armed with a handgun. That was kind of what was used initially. But he had brought in a portable power bank. Our theory on that is that, watching the TV, he's like, "Oh, the cops, the first thing they're going to do when they get here is kill the power," right? So, he wanted to have his own power source for his initiators.

Jon Becker: For his initiators.

Greg Roy: Yeah. But we didn't do that. Ultimately, that was what he planned.

Jon Becker: After seeing the floor plan, was there a viable way into the building?

Greg Roy: It would have been really challenging. The second floor was our best option. Some of the second-floor windows weren't rigged, but there was no fast way. In a hostage rescue crisis entry, speed is our friend. Controlled speed is our friend. That was not going to be present in this. We're super grateful for the TBTs from New Hampshire, and they're certainly, I would argue, some of the best in the country at what they do. That would be super helpful for us if we did an entry. But if he starts throwing hand-lit pipe bombs at us, you can't defeat that.

Jon Becker: Or initiating remotely controlled devices. If they can't see them, they're not going to save you from them.

Greg Roy: Right.

Jon Becker: Let's get to the conclusion. You guys have cleared the house and they render the house safe. Anything else that develops after the fact as far as the location, victims, hostages, or anything along those lines?

Greg Roy: We didn't know that there was likely a gunshot earlier in the day. The adult male had an injury to his leg, we think probably from a scuffle that happened. But nothing additional other than how big the house was and when the two individuals upstairs were able to exit, he had no idea that happened. That was different for us too, when we started talking about the negotiation angle.

Jon Becker: Were you able to figure out where the adult male from the house and the hostage taker were? Were they together most of the time?

Greg Roy: Most of the time, but there were elements or opportunities for separation we just weren't aware of. Most of them stem from him going to check his devices. What we think was happening is, these firework initiators are not meant to be set up for hours with duct tape and to walls and things like that. We think they were disconnecting. To his mother panel of devices, they were disconnecting, and that's why he kept going to the door to manipulate them. He actually made a comment at one point to our negotiators like, "How did you get in here and mess with this device without me knowing about it?" He thought we had come in there, shut off the device, and left. Obviously, that didn't happen, but he's not a completely sane individual. He's got some delusions going on. Most of the time they were together, side by side. We think they were kind of on that couch in the living room most of the time. But there were elements of separation. We just didn't know about it.

Jon Becker: Okay. Obviously, this is a ridiculously complicated case that leaves probably a hundred lessons learned, but let's walk through. We talked a little bit about command and control. Let's maybe start there. From a command and control standpoint, how did this change what you guys do going forward? Looking back at it, what would you have done differently?

Greg Roy: The amount of information flowing through the command post was really overwhelming for me as the tactical commander at this call. One of the big things that I said after this is that, in a perfect world, I would have been able to pull in an assistant commander or another member of leadership, whether it's someone above me or below me, to help with that and help filter some of that noise, work through some of that information, and keep track of it because I wasn't able to keep track of 100% of the information coming in and out. That was challenging.

We have a really great working relationship with our crisis negotiators and the commander of that team, and I worked great together. She was able to do a lot of that and take some of that weight for me, which was great. That relationship is very strong and very helpful for us.

One of the things that we've grown from there is that my position now is no longer the tactical commander of the team. I got off the team in 2024. My role is as the lieutenant of special services. For our department, I oversee all of our specialty teams, with the SWAT team being one of them, and the bomb team, the negotiation team, the K9 unit, all that stuff. I am now at the calls trying to fill that role. I'm no longer operational on the team, but I was on the team for quite a while and have a little bit of that knowledge to help the current tactical commander with those bigger problems that happen on scene.

That was a big portion for us. And then, exactly what we talked about: when the call starts growing beyond the isolated incident, you need to scale the command structure appropriately and also the command logistics and command location. We should have, at the local school, town office, or PD, created a centralized command post to really work the other problems going on there and not do it out of the central tactical operation center on scene. That is how we were operating.

Jon Becker: The problem with this thing is that it just kept exponentially growing, and it's very easy incrementally to just go, "It's one more thing," until you look back and go, "Wait, we had 22 things one at a time."

Greg Roy: I think anybody in the tactical world would say this: all these calls go, and you're thinking, "Hey, we're going to get that opportunity. Ten minutes from now, it's going to be over because we're going to do the thing." It just kept going and going and going. That was another thing. You've got to be planning for the two hours ahead, not the 10 minutes ahead, and working through some of that stuff in command and control.

Jon Becker: What would you do differently as far as resting the team or additional resources?

Greg Roy: I would have created, if I were to do it again and kind of how our SOPs are now, earlier on in the incident, a plan: "At this time, we're going to do a full cycle out." We still are going to utilize individual rest periods as needed at calls, but we've got to create that line of, "At 10 p.m., we're talking about 4:00 a.m., and we're going to do a swap out," so that we can be prepared for that. Who is the team that's going to do that? Are we calling up New Hampshire's team, Massachusetts' team, Portland, Maine's team, or one of the regional teams? Who is going to do that swap out for us? Then create a time so they can spin up, be fully briefed, and be ready to get in place when that time comes.

Jon Becker: Yeah. That is a recurring theme on this show. When these situations go long, they can go really long. It's trying to figure out at what point are we drawing a line, and I think you're right. If you're drawing the line prospectively, looking at it and saying, well, if by 3:00 in the morning we're going to be exhausted, that's when we'll make the call, that gives you a better opportunity. It also resists the incremental decision-making of, "Oh, we're almost to an entry."

Greg Roy: Yeah.

Jon Becker: We've debriefed a couple of cases where "we're almost there" went on for six, seven, eight hours, and you have team members becoming medical casualties, right? For the, "Oh, we're almost there."

Greg Roy: Conditions play a role too, right? It's March in Maine, so it's cold, snowy, and wet. All of that depletes your body faster. That has to be something that the commander is keeping in mind.

Jon Becker: Okay, so that's the command and control standpoint. Let's talk about the explosive devices here because one of the things that's really novel here is that it's unusual to find explosive devices. It's really unusual to find viable ones. It's even more unusual to find viable ones that are properly rigged to go and the guy has a plan. As you look back at that, what was the aftermath of that and the debriefs with the TBTs? What would you do differently there, or what would you warn teams about?

Greg Roy: We were utilizing some super qualified bomb technicians from New Hampshire. When they talk about this call, they use the slogan, "We're building the plane in flight," because we train with them, and their SWAT guys are at our basic school, but we don't train with our bomb guys all the time. Now they're integrated into our entry team stack. It's not ideal, right? Now we've taken the concept that they spearheaded in New England, and we have that program in Maine as well. Our relationship with our bomb team has gotten closer. We've now sent them through our basic and advanced SWAT schools, sent them through the tactical bomb technician program, and are starting to spin them up on that. We have the in-house capability for that now. Should this happen again, we'll be a little bit more prepared.

Jon Becker: Sure. What else from an entry team standpoint?

Greg Roy: We talked a lot about that decision because I was out a couple of months ago giving this debrief at the CATO conference, like you talked about, and I got a lot of questions after like, "Hey, what would you guys have done if he were to start shooting from inside?" My answer was probably nothing different. The reason for that is, if there's a gunshot from within, whether it's a suspect committing suicide, killing the hostage, shooting at us, or a show of force, one of those normal decisions, and we make entry and trigger an explosion, what good are we doing? If we can do that safely, and we talk about the police, right? That's what we sign up for. We're going to do the thing. But a hostage rescue entry is also very dangerous for the hostage if you're not prepared to be preemptive in that situation. In this case, you've got numerous explosives wired to a single initiating source. It's a level of complexity we're just not used to dealing with every day.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I think it's actually a really interesting question because you look at it: okay, then you hear the hostage screaming, "He's killing me. He's slitting my throat with a knife." Make it as explicit as you possibly can. If you trigger the devices, everybody's going to die anyway. One of the things that made me want to sit down with you on this case was this question of what would trigger a crisis entry in this case when TBTs are telling you, "We don't see a clean, safe path in." At what point do you go, "Well, let's just do it anyway"?

Greg Roy: The TBTs there were prepared to do their job. They were prepared to make entry with us and try to render safe the devices as much as they could. They were ready to do it. We talked to some of the national teams out there like, "Hey, what would you guys do in this situation? What's your opinion?" Their call back was like, "Hey, we would have been heavy on the snipers. That is the best way to end this call, as a sniper-initiated event." Which is essentially what we did.

We could have done a better job at that. After command and control and information, how we handled that sniper component could have been done differently next time too. Ideally, doubling up those individuals in locations, even if they can't both be on the gun. Doubling up that sniper observer role so they can at least talk about what they're seeing. "Hey, I'm seeing this. What do you think? What do you make of that?" Because, again, marksmanship is just one portion of being a sniper. Being able to make those decisions and compile that information is a huge piece.

I think the best thing that the sniper had going for him when he took the shot was that he was not a sniper for most of that call. He was on an entry team. He was assigned to an entry team. He was able to stand there and listen to everything going on. He's hearing all the radio traffic while not being distracted by looking through a scope. He's able to take all that information in and apply that to his decision eight hours later.

One of our big takeaways is that I would have assigned a team leader to the sniper mission of that call--someone who is not on the gun, someone who is not deployed out there, but who can facilitate swapping them out and information sharing. "Hey, the guy on the two side or the B side just saw this." Combined with what the sniper saw on the back of the house, put those two together. "This is what we're thinking this might be," and start working through that problem, which has its own complexity, while the overall incident is going on.

Jon Becker: That makes a lot of sense. Sitting behind the glass for that long a period of time, but the guy who actually ultimately fires the shot hasn't been on the glass that long, right?

Greg Roy: He's there for 15 minutes.

Jon Becker: What is he presented with?

Greg Roy: He's presented with an arm reaching towards the device and what he sees as the top of a head, just kind of the top of the skull of the head, which would match the physical description of the suspect. He's able to see a little bit more that indicates it. It's a combination of what he sees, what he's heard for the last 10 hours of the call, and the behavior, the behavior of manipulating an explosive device.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Greg Roy: That is more likely to be done by a suspect than a hostage, in combination with everything else. That's what he sees, and he directs his point of aim at what he thought was the most viable target at the time. We talked about that in retrospect, that all that was off in the body position because, again, it's not like shooting paper targets where it's 2D. Human beings are 3D. When the angle of the human is off, sometimes the bullet trajectory isn't exactly what we want it to be. One of the training things that we did after that is we actually got 3D shootable targets and used them in scenarios. Then we evaluate the bullet trajectory: this was your point of impact, this is where the path was, would this be an effective round? That went into our training after this.

Jon Becker: The round basically hits under the armpit and kind of traverses around the back.

Greg Roy: Yeah. The medical examiner determined that it certainly wouldn't be an immediately incapacitating shot. Could the person eventually have died? Maybe, but it was not the kind of situation we would hope for.

Jon Becker: They confirmed the suspect was self-inflicted.

Greg Roy: Yep. That's what the gunshot was out the front of the house. We thought he was alive shooting at us. What it was, actually, was the bullet when he shot himself went through his head and out the front of the house past our guys.

Jon Becker: Just one more layer.

Greg Roy: We didn't know that at the time.

Jon Becker: Of course not. I'm not doing the math on where the bullet came from. I will accept that you shot at me. The fact that you did it through your head, we're not going to infer that.

Greg Roy: Yes, we do put it that way.

Jon Becker: What else? From a team standpoint, if you're telling teams, "Think about these things," what else is there that you think the team needs to take from this incident?

Greg Roy: I think it's constant intel gathering. That was a big piece. Apart from command and control communication, constant intel gathering is huge to inform decision-making. It seems like this call was a very long call, and you're like, "Well, what the heck were you guys doing from 11:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.?" It was just constant intel gathering. We're searching his house. We're getting briefed on the results. Did we find any explosives at Walmart? We didn't. Did we find any explosives at the school? We didn't. What are the drones seeing from his car? Everything is a piece of information that's forming decision-making. That was pretty big.

Jon Becker: In the end, there is no other thing at the scene that you're doing. You have a hundred reasons to believe there are other things. He's openly threatening them, but everything that we know now is everything that it ultimately turns out to be.

Greg Roy: One hundred percent. That was a big takeaway. The assistant commander at the time, who's now the team commander, when he talks about this in the debrief, he was the team leader on the crisis entry team at the time. He talks about how, as they're hearing what the snipers are seeing and that frustration starts building, from a leadership standpoint, when you're in that TL position, it's really your job to gain control of that and be like, "Hey, we're not seeing what they're seeing. Let's work through our problem. Let's focus on our job," which is a very important job in this all. From a leadership standpoint, he talks about that, and I think that's a pretty good takeaway as well.

Jon Becker: Other than training with obviously integrated TBTs, did this change any other training protocols for you guys?

Greg Roy: Planning for the unknown. The other big thing that the team commander now is doing a really good job at is more frequent joint training with some of these other states for better full integration. Now that we have our own TBTs in-house, we're doing annual training with them. Should this incident happen, we're able to do that a little bit better.

From the technology component of this, we used technology that we were not super familiar with, and nobody was super familiar with it at the time. We could have done a better job briefing up, like, "Hey, how do we shut this off when we need to shut it off?"

Jon Becker: What happens if we turn this on?

Greg Roy: Yeah. Some pretty rudimentary questions we could have answered before because one of the issues is once we turned it on at the time, we didn't know how to shut it off. So, we had to use some pretty creative measures to get it back to be able to unplug it.

Jon Becker: Do we know if the technology would have been effective on the devices?

Greg Roy: Stuff like that is not 100%, right? It had the potential to be effective, I think is how I would say it. If the right conditions were present, location, no barriers, things like that, it certainly had the potential to be effective.

Jon Becker: So, better than nothing, but no guarantees, right?

Greg Roy: Exactly. I certainly wouldn't put my child there.

Jon Becker: Then flip the switch and see what happens.

Greg Roy: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Makes sense. Anything else you can think of?

Greg Roy: I don't think so. I think the big one for us was, when I went to all the command schools for this, there was no playbook for a call like this. It's about sticking to the fundamentals of decision-making and working through the problems as they come and doing the best you can with that.

Jon Becker: Yeah. This is a fantastic debrief. I really appreciate you doing this with me.

Greg Roy: My pleasure.