Episode 12 – Buddy Brown: York County South Carolina

Jon Becker: This episode of The Debrief will have a slightly different format. Today, we'll be conducting a critical incident review of an actual event. We'll discuss the timeline of the event as well as the aftermath, recovery, and the lessons learned.

Our goal in this discussion is not to criticize or second guess any actions taken by those responding to the event. Their actions are beyond reproach, their bravery is without question, and their sacrifices are real and need to be honored.

It is our hope that by discussing this event, we will learn from and hope to improve operator safety in the future. With regards to form, we'll be using the officers actual names because they're heroes and they need to be remembered. For obvious reasons, we will not be using the suspect's name.

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!

My guest today is James Buddy Brown. Buddy is a former United States Marine who is currently an investigator with the York County, South Carolina sheriff's office. In his 22 year career, Buddy has worked a variety of assignments, including property crimes, financial crimes, narcotics, and 18 years in SWAT.

On January 16th, 2018, York county experienced an incident that began with a domestic violence 911 call and by the time it was over, had resulted in the death of Detective Mike Doty, as well as the shooting of K9, Sergeant Randy Clinton, Sergeant Kyle Cummings, and Buddy. Buddy has graciously agreed to sit down with me and walk us through the events of that evening.

Buddy, thank you for joining me on The Debrief!

Buddy Brown: Thank you for having me, Jon!

Jon Becker: Why don't we start with kind of your personal history, you know, your career and kind of how you got to here.

Buddy Brown: Grew up in the South Carolina, went to school there, 1987, joined the Marine Corps, was in the United States Marine Corps from 1987 to 1995 here in California. Actually got out of there, worked construction for a couple years while I was getting into law enforcement. Started in law enforcement in 2000, worked there, started with a small city department, and then eventually moved to York county where I worked there, worked my way through patrol like you said before, work narcotics.

I've worked in investigations and spent 18 years on SWAT. I was in the department. I ran the department's response to active shooter program for about ten or twelve years was started with when we implemented a patrol rifle program. I worked through that. Where I did, we wrote the lesson plans and the training, and kind of implemented the, with a couple other guys. The patrol rifle program for our agency did a lot in training with SWAT training, teaching, being a firearms instructor, those kind of things. That's always been kind of my passion.

Jon Becker: So talk to me a little bit about your agency. Like, how big is it?

Buddy Brown: We work with it. It's the York County Sheriff's Office in South Carolina. We're directly south of Charlotte, so we have a lot of interaction with the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department. We're about 200 sworn, plus we have a jail where we do the jail. We're a full service sheriff's office. We do calls for service. We cover the unincorporated areas of the county, calls for service there. We do surf civil papers. We handle the jail.

We've got four districts throughout the county, kind of in a compstat style system. We run that. Each district is kind of different. You have two districts that are kind of rural and two districts that kind of are a little more urban with their proximity to Charlotte, North Carolina. So you really get a lot of variety in the ways you can police in York county.

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

Buddy Brown: At the time of this, they were about. There was. We had about 25 to 30 members. Right now we're up to about 40 members, counting our. We have truck drivers, we have medics, we have the snipers. We have our regular operators. We have an intelligence guy, an intelligence and safety guy.

The York County Sheriff's Office and the Rock Hill Police Department are the two large agencies within the county. Rock Hill police has their own SWAT team. The sheriff's office picks up the smaller agencies. If they want to put their people on the SWAT team, they can do that. We have a lot of multi jurisdictional teams in the county. Our forensics is multi jurisdictional, our drug enforcement unit is multi jurisdictional, and our SWAT team is multi jurisdictional.

Jon Becker: So how many agencies are there in that? In the configuration of the team?

Buddy Brown: We have guys from the Fort Mill Police Department, the York Police Department, the Clover police Department, and the TKK police Department. So there's four different agencies that are supplying guys to the team.

Jon Becker: Plus York county?

Buddy Brown: Plus York county.

Jon Becker: So a total of five agencies?

Buddy Brown: Yes, total of five agencies.

Jon Becker: So, buddy, set the stage for me. January 15th, 2018. What's the area like? What's the weather like? Kind of give me the environment.

Buddy Brown: Well, and that's the big thing about South Carolina, is we have four very distinct seasons. You know, every, every season has its difference. Very hot in the summer. It's very cold in the winter. Spring and fall, you know, you get the, you get the in between. January is the middle of our winter, and generally January and February are the really cold times. And it was especially cold on this evening. It was 18 degrees, I think, when we were out there. Our 911 center gets a domestic call from, from the instant location.

Male and female there both been drinking a lot. She's claiming that she's been assaulted by him. Come to find out, she had poured his liquor out in the sink. While the call is going on, you hear her. You can hear him assaulting her while they're on the phone and she's calling for. They're trying to get the deputies out there. He grabs an AK-47 and a Bag, kind of a Go Bag of supplies, and he heads out, you know, and it's very cold. It's like 18 degrees outside. And he takes off from the house.

Jon Becker: So is the – Give me an idea. Like this is rural South Carolina, right?

Buddy Brown: Like, very rural. Where we were at was a. Was a housing development, but it was probably on acre lots, acre to acre and a Half lots. So there's a lot of room between the houses. It's a Pretty Rural area. There's a lot of woods. There's a lot of places for somebody to hide or to take off on foot and be able to get gone.

Jon Becker: So where is the suspect at this point? He leaves the house.

Buddy Brown: He leaves the house. Where does he go? He's in the wood line. He actually was, we had discovered in investigating after that he was a guy that liked to walk. He was like a hiker and liked to get out and walk. And there were paths and like, we have a lot of ATV, four wheelers. People ride ATV's and four wheelers a lot. And there was a lot of four wheeler trails. And he had gone back and hit a horse four wheeler trail that was near the house and was on it.

Around 10, 20, the deputies arrived. They decided to call out our K9. When our K9 guy got there very. It was Sergeant Clinton. Sergeant Randy Clinton. He had about, at that time, he had over 30 years experience running dogs, you know, teaches K9 all over the state. One of the premier, you know, dog handlers in the state. He doesn't really like what's going on, so he calls for the state helicopter, which is like, an hour away. And it's not like our state helicopter is sitting down there, you know, spooling up, ready to go.

So it takes probably till about 11:00 or so. 11:00, 11:30 takes an hour or so for them to get the helicopter up there. And also around that same time, around 11:00, 11:30 on the 15th, the SWAT page went out for a couple of additional runners to go with the dog team. When we know that somebody's armed or poses a little bit more of a threat, we'll have our SWAT guys go and run with the K9 guys to give them a little bit extra cover with rifles and the equipment that we have available for SWAT.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Buddy Brown: So the helicopter was there when they started with the dog, and they wanted to just let him sweep the area before this, before they. They struck out with the dog.

Jon Becker: And how long is it before they make contact with the suspect?

Buddy Brown: At about 01:00, the K9 started the track. At about 01:10 is when the dog team got ambushed.They're on the track. They're coming up a trail, and they come up on the trail, and the suspect was hidden up behind some trees and just kind of opened up with them when they came around the corner and just started.

Jon Becker: They don't have night vision on at this point. [Crosstalk] – Okay, it's like, it's dark.

Buddy Brown: It's dark. They do run some lights. There's some lights and stuff that they run for the dog. And. And also, you know, that you kind of have to have. As dark as it is, there's not a lot. Wasn't a lot of moonlight that night. It wasn't like, a bright, you know? Cause there's sometimes where you can. Where you can operate at night, and then the moon will give you enough light to. Where you can kind of see what was going on. This wasn't one of those nights, okay? It was very dark.

Jon Becker: The suspect's basically lying in wait for this.

Buddy Brown: Yes. He was lying away for him, and. And. And they were behind the house down there off of Fair Lane, which was less than a quarter of a mile from the incident location from where the initial where the domestic happened at. They. One of the guys on the dog team returns fire, kind of suppresses him. He gets up and gets. The suspect gets up and gets gone. They drag Randy out of the woods. He's shot in the left leg. They put a tourniquet on him, drag him out of the woods.

Lieutenant Heath Clevenger was there. He was kind of the instant commander that was there. He figures out where Randy is. Drives his vehicle down there to him. It was a little bit difficult to find where he actually was in conjunction in the dark, trying not to put a lot of light out to figure out exactly which house he was at.

So they had a little bit of communication issues there. Getting that done. Finds the house. They load Randy in the car. He takes off with him in his – He had a Ford Explorer at the time. Load him in the explorer. He takes off with him. They try to make contact with the hospital. They had. They had a ambulance kind of on standby. When we do things like that, you know, we'll put medic on standby. And the ambulance was the opposite way from the way the hospital was. So Heath just took him.

Jon Becker: Okay, so Heath. Heathen throws Randy in the car, takes him to the hospital.

Buddy Brown: Takes him to the hospital. So as Heath is getting Randy, they're getting Randy into the car. Heath gives a rifle to the guys, to Lieutenant Liggan that was there, gives him a rifle. Here's my rifle. Use this. And then Heath leaves to take Randy so that Mike has a rifle. He didn't initially have a rifle when he went out there.

Jon Becker: Okay? So now when they. When Heath evacuates Randy, what do the other guys do?

Buddy Brown: They left Cole. They had Cole Green, Mike Lorenzio, and Lieutenant Ligon, and they made the decision that they were going to leave Cole Green at the scene where Randy's shooting happened because they wanted somebody to be able to find the crime scene again, so they left him there. Lorenzo and Ligona continued on. By then, the sled helicopter had picked up the bad guy.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Buddy Brown: And had him walking down. While all this was going on, the bad guy started shooting at the sled helicopter. He shoots the helicopter, shoots the helicopter, turns around and starts walking away. And they have him on Flir. They're tracking him on Flir. And Ligand and Lorenzo are continuing to move in the same general direction that the suspect is.

Jon Becker: So now is the suspect walking back towards his house?

Buddy Brown: No, he's walking away.

Jon Becker: Walking away from his house.

Buddy Brown: He's found a power line, and he's trucking down that power line away from the house.

Jon Becker: Okay, so just, you know, I'm a city boy. So the power lines are running, like, through the middle of a forest. They'll cut a clear spot.

Buddy Brown: Yes, they'll cut a clear spot. It's called a right. They call it a right of way.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Buddy Brown: It's that they'll cut a clear spot so they can get in there and do maintenance on the poles.

Jon Becker: So I do remember something. They kind of lost the dog for a while, too, right?

Buddy Brown: They did. When the shooting happened, Randy let go of the dog, and the dog kind of took off, and when everything calmed down, she came back and the dog was fine. That was. It was kind of a – It was kind of a funny thing as all this stuff was going on. And the people were very concerned that the dog had gotten shot. They were very concerned that. About the K9, that our public information officer had to go on. On the news and say, the dog is fine. The dog didn't get shot and show a picture of her running around in the kennels, because people were. They were concerned that we had gotten injured, but they were also very concerned that the dog, if the dog had gotten shot.

Jon Becker: Yeah. That happens out here, too. You know, police officer gets shot, people like, oh, yeah, it's kind of sad. Dog gets shot.

Buddy Brown: Oh, yes.

Jon Becker: Community outrage.

Buddy Brown: Yes.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Buddy Brown: Now, there is a perimeter that is set up outside of what's going on. The deputies have, you know, set a perimeter up, but that. But Mike – Mike and Chris are following along with the helicopter, guiding them. And when. When all this stuff happens, when he goes to grab the randy, he jumps on the radio and says, have the rest of SWAT respond out code three, which is our, you know, licensed sirens, you know, get there. So I – When the initial call came out for K9 runners, I had called in and said, hey, I'm available if you need a K9 runner. And they were like, no, we're good right now, but stay dressed. Cause it was – Cause I got up and put on my thermal, you know, my cold weather gear. They said, stay dressed because we're probably gonna have to come out on this guy, you know, after a while.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: So we get the second. We get the second call, I jump in. I jump up, grab my gear, jump in the car, we drive out there. Now, the call that the page, when we would get SWAT pages, we would just get SWAT respond to this location, code three. Or sometimes it would be SWAT respond to this location, normal run. They'd give us an address. Respond here, code three or normal run. So they gave us. There was nothing in the page or anything that was going on that let us know that Randy had been shot. We had no idea it was just respond.

So we get out there to the scene. I'm about. I'm one of the – I live not a long way from there. I was one of the closer guys to there. So I was one of the first ones to get there. So we get there, it's pandemonium. It's helicopters flying. We got two of our guys that are still chasing. There's myself, Grady Gonzalez, and then a dog.

There was a dog guy named Chris Kinsey. We all kind of got there at the same time, and at the same time, our head SWAT medic, Chuck Haynes, was on scene also. So I'm throwing my gear on. Grady's throwing his gear on. Chris has got his stuff. And we decide that we are going to load up. And Grady had an unmarked explorer. We're going to load up in that explorer and let him drive us to where go find Ligon and Lorenzo and go support those guys.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Buddy Brown: To get. So we load up.

Jon Becker: So you're going to go fall in with them?

Buddy Brown: Yes, that's our plan is to go find them. And let's get some more guys to those guys.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: So we jump in the car. We get all geared up. We jump in the car. We go to the beginning, the entrance, kind of to the neighborhood. And I can't. People can't stop talking on the radio long enough for me to call Liggin and say, hey, I got three guys. We're coming to you. Where you at? So it's just….

Jon Becker: So you guys are all on one frequency.

Buddy Brown: One frequency at this point, so. And it was pretty crazy. So we're driving around, you know, in the dark, and Chris comes out and gets us, and we go. So we're going to our plan. You know, while this activation is happening, our truck drivers have been activated. So they're going to get our equipment, trucks, and our. We have an unarmored bearcat. Our plan was helicopter keeps the suspect in sight. He knows where he is. We get the armored vehicle there, we load up in it, we drive to where he is, and we do what we have to do. We take him into custody, or we.

Jon Becker: Do engage him from the armor.

Buddy Brown: From the armor, from inside, from the safety of that. So that plan went all to crap, but that was the plan, you know, you always have a plan till you get punched in the face.

Jon Becker: That's in the words of Mike Tyson, everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face.

Buddy Brown: So we're down there and we link up and we do this. Danger crossing on the power line. We do all that, you know, we're out there, you know, moving around, and helicopter comes across and says, hey, guys, we gotta leave. We're bingo fuel. We've stayed as long as we can stay were out of gas. So the bearcat hadn't made it there quite yet. So they get there about the time that the helicopter has to leave, the bearcat shows up.

Jon Becker: Well, and just, just for context, on bingo fuel for the helicopter, those guys stayed until they d*** near ran out of gas.

Buddy Brown: They did run out of gas.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Just stayed not there, but on the way back to the airport.

Buddy Brown: They were headed back to the airport and started to flame out and had to land the helicopter in a Walmart parking lot. [Video playing – voice quality low]

Jon Becker: There's bingo fuel, and then there's bingo.

Buddy Brown: Bingo. They were bingo. Bingo.

Jon Becker: Bingo. Bingo.

Buddy Brown: And we. And there is no doubt in my mind that they helped save lives out there by staying as long as they did and keeping an eye on him and letting us know so that we didn't walk into another ambush.

Jon Becker: Okay, so, buddy, the bearcat gets there.

Buddy Brown: Bearcat gets there. We load the guys. We load the guys up in the, in the back of the bearcat, the technology, we have our handheld Flirs. We have our night vision. We have spotlights on the Bearcat. All these things. We're going to use them to try to see if we can locate this guy. You kind of have to be careful with it where you take it off road because it's a big, heavy truck and it's easy to get stuck.

So we turn around where we're at, drive, drive past the, where the command post is, and then we're going to go back in on the power line and drive down to where the last siding was before the helicopter had to leave. And when we're driving down there, I jump up in the turret. We've got. Our bearcat has a turret, but it's not one of the, like, completely covering. It's just one piece of armor that sticks up, and it's not nearly as much cover as you think it is.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Buddy Brown: At all.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Buddy Brown: So we started driving down.

Jon Becker: When you don't know where the suspect is.

Buddy Brown: Yeah. And we started.

Jon Becker: 90 degrees is not enough.

Buddy Brown: And I'm thinking, I really don't know where this guy is. And I'm just sticking my head up here. So we kind of went down and buttoned everything up and used, you know, the windows and we have ports in the. In the bearcat, so, no, no joy. We were probably there for 30, 45 minutes, you know, looking kind of trying to figure out where he was at. While we were there, uh, we hear the Charlotte Mecklenburg sent their helicopter down to where we were. We hear them arrive on scene, but we can't talk to them.

And we discovered that our comms weren't compatible. We're all on the same 800 MHz system, but we didn't have their channels in our radio, so we could hear them talking a little, but we couldn't talk back to them and tell them what we needed. And to Charlotte, and much to Charlotte's credit, they sent an officer down with radios so that they could go to the command post and relay what was going on with their helicopter. While we were down there, we kind of decided that we were going to go to two channels because there was so much talk on. You know, they were running the perimeter, running everything off of one channel.

So at that point, they put. I think they put Steven Ramsey in charge of the perimeter and move them to a different channel and then put us on our own channel, you know, for SWAT team, SWAT team to command, and then command had another channel to perimeter.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: So we were the perimeter still could hear what we were doing, but it wasn't everybody trying to talk on the same, same channel at the same time, which was a problem. And one of the things, and we'll get to this a little bit later, and one of the things that kind of gets me is when we, when we were in the, in the bearcat, I noticed that not everybody had all the gear that they were supposed to have on because we were, you know, this thing had, had developed from a dog call now into the SWAT call.

So you had guys that kind of had armor setups for running a dog call and not armor setups for going after a guy with an AK-47. They still had some soft armor, didn't have helmets, didn't have the stuff that they should have on in there. And thought about it, and while we were sitting in there, that, hey, you know, this guy or that guy needs to have their different armor on.

But at the point that we were at as a team at that time, I didn't want to say anything to them because I didn't want to turn into a thing where they got yelled at by somebody else. So I just kind of let that go, and I wasn't. Not one of my best moments. I feel like, personally, I feel like I should have said, I should have said something to about that. That goes on. Lieutenant Clevenger takes Randy to the hospital. Sheriff, more K9 guys. They get Randy's wife. They get them all down to the hospital. Heath goes to the sheriff and says, hey, you guys seem to cause, you know, if you're the guy that brings the guy in, you stay with him, you know, until you're relieved.

Jon Becker: Yep.

Buddy Brown: He goes to the sheriff and says, hey, you know, there's plenty of people here to take care of Randy. I need to get back out to where SWAT is. And the sheriff's like, yeah, I need you back out there. So while this is going on, and, you know, this is South Carolina. And Heath had given his rifle to Mike Ligan, to his duty rifle to him. He asked the sheriff if he could grab another rifle that he had with a similar setup and use it and if it would be okay for him to use that. And the sheriff said, the sheriff okayed that.

So he called his wife on the way back to the call and said, hey, grab my rifle with the red dot on it and meet me at this location. And his wife brought the rifle to him, and he grabbed it and took off. So as we were coming, we had kind of used up everything that we could on the power line initially, where we were there with the. With the bearcat, and we pulled out and pulled back to the command post.

We're back at the command post. Lieutenant Ligand and Lieutenant Clevenger go out and they're talking with the Sheriff and the command up there to kind of figure out what our next steps are going to be. And while they're doing that, the sled helicopter. We had gotten a fuel truck to the sled helicopter, gotten him fueled up, got. He came back in. He's circulating the area of the last sighting, and he comes across the radio and tells us that there's a boat behind the house off of Perham Road. We call them John boats. Like a little flat bottom. Like a. What are the Cajuns call them? Pirro. Like a Pirro or a flat bottom.

Yeah, a little flat bottom John boat that you would generally row, you know? And he says, they've got this John boat out the back of the house, and it's got a heat signature near it. Now, it's, as we talked about before, it's a 20 degrees outside. It's freezing cold. As far as we know, this guy hasn't, like, taken a coat or taken any kind of cold weather gear. With him. So we're thinking he's pretty cold.

So it would be, you know, well within the realm of possibilities that he's out there hidden under this. Under this boat. So at that time, we decide that we're going to load up in the bearcat, and we're going to go to this house on Perham Road. It's 1475, and we're gonna go there and do go there, deploy, and see if we can find this boat, challenge this guy, see what we're gonna do with that.

So we load up in the bearcat, we drive over there, and it's not very far from where the command post was or from where this whole thing started. And earlier in the evening, the resident at 1475 had called in and said that a motion light had gone off in the back of his house. We didn't have that information at the time, but in it was information that was out there in the ether, you know, but I don't remember us getting that particular information.

Hey, guys, in the bearcat going there, a security light went off an hour ago at that house. The guy called in about it. I think it made it to command, but it didn't make it all the way down that that had gone on, or it may have, and we didn't hear it or, you know, it was. There was a lot of chaos going. The dispatch comes across the radio and says, there's some lady at an address, like a mile from where we are that says that she thinks she saw somebody walking in her backyard with night vision.

Now, I don't know if she had night vision and saw somebody walking in her backyard, which I don't think was the case, or she thought she saw somebody wearing night vision walking around in her backyard, which there were none of our guys were over there, so. And I didn't like it at the time, but the sled helicopter leaves to go investigate that as we're driving down the driveway to where we're going to check out this boat that's turned over.

Jon Becker: So do you have no air cover at that point?

Buddy Brown: We did, but it was the Charlotte that we couldn't communicate with, and we didn't know it. We didn't know that they were up there. So our guy leaves, our helicopter leaves to go do that, and we pull up to the house, and like we said, it's 20 degrees, it's dark. It's 03:30 in the morning. I've had a couple hours sleep. I laid down at like 09:00 and was back up at, you know, I laid it down at like 10:00 and I was back up at 01:00. You know, I'd worked the whole day, slept for a couple hours and now I'm back out on this.

Now it's 03:30 in the morning. I thought that this was a brick house when, until I went back out to it and it's actually a log, it's a big log cabin house. And just the way your mind, you know, processes things, we pull up in the bearcat and we get a plan in there. It was kind of funny in the way that things change because as you see, as you have pictures of the houses, it's a nice house with a manicured, with a nice yard.

And we didn't want to drive the bearcat too far into their yard. Just, you know, the way your thinking changed. We don't want to drive the bearcat too far in their yard and rut their yard up and have them calling the sheriff and being mad at us.

Jon Becker: Yeah, if you didn't find the suspect.

Buddy Brown: Yeah, you didn't find a suspect. Now we've tore our yard up, we've done all this stuff, or we've run over their sepi tank. We a lot sepi tanks and stuff out there. So we didn't drive the bearcat that far into the, we drove pretty far in the yard but not as far as we could have.

So we drive in there and we make a plan. And initially myself, Mike Doty and Kyle Cummins were gonna go left. We were gonna get out of Bearcat, we were gonna go left. Heath grady, Mike and Judd were gonna get out of Bearkat and they were gonna go right.

Jon Becker: So you guys gonna split the house.

Buddy Brown: And that was the plan.

Jon Becker: Cause you're in front basically in the front yard. We're in the front yard of the house.

Buddy Brown: We believe that the boat is gonna be back directly behind the house. So our plan is to take one team around the right side of the house, take one team around the left side of the house and then link up and be on each side of where this boat is.

You know, in a perfect world, we call out to the guy, he throws his hands up, he comes out, everything's cool. You know, we take him into custody. But we really believed based on the intelligence that we had from the boat, from the helicopter that he was going to be out there in that boat. That's, you know, we had, we probably believed that a little too much, honestly, in hindsight.

So just a quick second on, on that kid that was, there was two other people that were in the bearcat. When all this was going on, there was a guy named Charlie Three. And Charlie's a guy that. He's on SWAT now and has been on SWAT a couple years, but he had. He was driving trucks at the time, and that call was his first time driving the bearcat.

Mike Doty had told Mike Chanel, when the Bearcat got there, jump in the front seat and be there in case we need, you know, in case we need a medic. So Mike Chanel's in the front pasture. Charlie's driving the truck. First Callie, first SWAT Collie had ever been on. First time driving the truck is this. We were initially, like I said, we were supposed to go left. Mike was always a kind of a go get em kind of guy.

Jon Becker: Mike Doty.

Buddy Brown: Mike Doty, yes. And Mike jumps out of the truck and goes right. I yell at Mike a little bit to get him back to where I was so we could work out. Work together. I was on night vision, so I was on point with night vision in my rifle. Mike was about a double arm's length off of me at about 09:00, and then Kyle was at about 06:00, trailing behind. And when we got out of the truck. In South Carolina, sometimes you have where people will build little platforms off their houses, like, little wooden patio kind of thing.

Jon Becker: Yeah, like a deck.

Buddy Brown: Like a deck. But it's only, like, this far off the ground.

Jon Becker: Yep.

Buddy Brown: It's not something that somebody could get out of. I'm sorry. Get under. So when I come out of the truck and I see this on night vision at 03:00 in the morning, it looks like just a little platform. So we start making our way around the edge of the house. Now it is January. All the leaves are off the trees, and there's a wood line, and then there's the house, and there's a path, kind of a yard kind of in between the two.

Well, I thought about jumping us into the wood line, but with the leaves on the ground, I felt like we would sound like a herd of elephants coming through there. So we kind of shaded our way over towards the wood line, but stayed in the yard area.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: Because I didn't, I would have liked to have the cover. And we still believed that our contact was going to be from in front of us where we were out looking that way.

Jon Becker: Into the John boat.

Buddy Brown: Into the John boat.

Jon Becker: Which is in the woods.

Buddy Brown: Which is in the woods out by the pond.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: Which we still – Which the way we were moving would still be out, like 12:00 like, out in front of us.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: So as we start moving around the house, I'm on night vision. We're moving the ground. I notice that the ground is starting to drop off. So as the ground is dropping off, I'm on my rifle. I come off my rifle and take my hand and point it out and say, hey, you guys check under that deck.

And as soon as I point my hand and say, you guys check under that deck, the suspect starts shooting at us, and Mike gets shot immediately. I get shot in the hip, in the handguard of my rifle. The round went through the top of my handguard. It should have taken the gas tube out of it, but it didn't. And I took a round to my helmet.

I kind of roll myself kind of over into the woods, and I return fire. I've seen people say, oh, I got shot. And I never knew it. When I got shot, I knew exactly what had happened. It felt like somebody had taken a sledgehammer and hit me in the hip. It was like, oh, I know what that is. And this is, you know, and it was that – There was a, you know, you see movies and stuff where you see people get shot. They cut flips, and they do all this crazy stuff. I just kind of got hit and turned and kind of stood there and stood there for what seemed like a really long time.

And then was like, I really. And it probably was, you know, split second, but it was like, I really need to be somewhere else other than. Than right here. And we had always trained when we did simonitions or when we did force on force training, that you never quit. You never do. Oh, I'm hit. I'm dead. I stop. You know, it was always, you continue to fight. You push on.

So I rolled over into the woods. I don't remember this, but Kyle said that I lit him up with my flashlight where the. Where the bad guy was. I light up. I see where he is. I remember. And I talk about this when I teach concealed weapons, when we talk about knowing your target and what's behind it, I remember seeing the block wall. That's the bottom of the house, like the foundation of the house behind where he was shooting at us from or where he was at.

And I remember thinking, okay, I've got a backstop in there. And I started shooting, and Kyle started shooting in on the suspect at that time.

Jon Becker: And on this deck, there's a hot tub.

Buddy Brown: Yeah, he's, like, around. Well, we found that later on. He was kind of hidden down in back behind the hot tub.

Jon Becker: Got it. So he's got at a minimum concealment. He's got a good actually probably cover.

Buddy Brown: And there was a bunch of four by four poles that were littered in between the whole area. So he's got actually, he's in a good position. And we kind of had to fight our way. We had to fight our way through, you know, the ambush with it. Kyle. I start returning fire with my rifle. Kyle starts returning fire with his rifle. His rifle jams. And he did a fantastic. He transitioned to his handgun and continued to fire with his handgun. And then in the ensuing gunfight, Kyle was struck and went down. So Kyle. I'm down in the woods, and Kyle's down in the woods.

So while all this is going on, the other. The team that Heath is leading goes around the left side of the house. So as they're about halfway down the left side of the house, because the house was l shaped. So we had gone to this corner. They were still back over here in this corner.

Jon Becker: So they've got a longer way around than you guys did. So even though you separate at the same time.

Buddy Brown: Yes.

Jon Becker: They're now behind you.

Buddy Brown: Correct.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: And one of the things that me and Heath have talked about is, we should have set up a point. We should have talked a little bit more before we deployed, and we should have gotten together and said, hey, I'm going to go to this point. You go to this point. And then we get together on the radio, this hindsight 2020, that, let's find some points, get there, and then establish communication, and know where we were at. Cause we didn't do that. And while they're coming around the back of the house, the gunfight is going on, and they're seeing. They still believe that the suspect's supposed to be back here where this boat is.

We didn't have any lasers. We didn't have any cans. We didn't have anything like that. That differentiated us from, you know, and from who was who. So they held up. So they didn't realize. It took them a while to realize that the bad guy was under the deck, and we. I was in the woods, and Kyle was in the woods.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: So they come around. One of their guys from the other team ends up engaging back towards the deck in there. In the midst of that fight, he saw some muzzle flash, and he engaged that muzzle flash into the. Into there. I'm in the, I've rolled myself into the woods. I'm engaging him back in. Under there. The shooting stops. I feel like he stopped shooting at us. I don't know if I've eliminated him, but I feel like he stopped shooting at us. And out of my peripheral vision, I see, like, if somebody's running and their weapon light is on their gun and the dot bouncy light, and I see the bouncy light, and I see legs coming, and I'm laying down there, and I'm proned out, you know, and everything, so.

And then they end up moving up and finding Mike doty, finding that one of our guys is down in the. In the yard, that there was a guy down in the yard, and Grady Gonzalez runs up and is like, just lay down. You know, we're good. So I just kind of put my head down, and I remember. I know now that it was Mike, but I remember in that moment seeing what I thought was a pile of clothes or just, like, a pile, something laying there, and couldn't comprehend what that was, so I just kind of laid down there.

There's a point during the gunfight that Heath gets on the radio and wants me to tell him where we're at. Buddy, tell us where you're at. We want to know where you're at. Cause he sees the gunfight going on. I have no recollection of that, ever. Of that conversation happening.

Jon Becker: You've been shot at that point?

Buddy Brown: Yes, I'd been shot at that point. And I was on, you know, I was on a Delta four helmet with headphone, you know, earphones, everything, you know? And there's, you know, it was that auditory. We talk about auditory exclusion, tunnel vision and stuff like that. That was completely auditory excluded. I have.

Jon Becker: Well, to be fair, you'd been shot in the head with an AK-47, and a ballistic helmet had stopped it. That it's not really designed to stop.

Buddy Brown: So I guess if I knew you.

Jon Becker: Had a raging concussion, I would guess, at that point.

Buddy Brown: Yeah, probably so, yeah. So those guys came around from the other side. Heath was coming from the other side, shines a light under the deck, sees the guy under the deck. By now he's gone into surrender. Okay. He's behind his rifle. He's gone into surrender. We found out I was testifying in a trial not too long ago, and there was a sled. Our state law enforcement division has a firearms. Their firearms division worked this case, and they let me know that. And I always thought this, but I didn't know it.

The AK that he had, we shot it so much that it wouldn't fire. They had to stick a screwdriver through the. Through the trigger to get it to fire when they test fired it for the investigation. So it was inoperable after we had shot, after the gunfight between me and Kyle and him had. His gun was inoperable.

Jon Becker: So he surrenders cause he's run out of guns.

Buddy Brown: He surrenders cause his gun's dead. His gun's gone down. It was tough. It was hard. I mean, it was hard. And it's something that, you know, a lot of us struggled with the fact that, you know, he took Mike's life and he lived, but, you know, everything happens for a reason, and it happens the way that it's supposed to happen.

And they made the absolute best decision that could be made. And they go ahead and decide that they're going to bring the medics in. They call for medics, and one of the guys gets on the radio and is just. He's upset. This is probably, you know, probably one of the most horrible things he's ever seen. And he's so loud on the radio that you can't understand what he's saying, and you can't. You can't. We know that something bad has happened. They know that something bad's happened, but you can't figure out what had happened.

[Video playing – Low voice quality]

So they. He gets on the radio. Hey, you know, we need medics back here. We got guys down. We need asap. I've got the suspected gunpoint. And we were. When I was in the hospital. And I'm gonna get back to the – But this is kind of important for this part. When I didn't see heath for, like, it was like a good, solid day, you know. Cause he had to do his debrief and he had to. And I was in surgery. He comes to the room and we talk about, you know, what we could have done different.

And I told him, I said, I hope that if the roles were reversed and I had to be on your side of and I was on your side and you were on my side, that I would have done as good a job as you did. Cause he really did a great job over there and kinda took a chaotic situation and kinda calmed everything down. So we had our bearcat and the Rock Hill city police departments, SWAT team, they have an mrap.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Buddy Brown: They had their mrap out there, and their guys drove the mrap to where we were. And actually, Rock Hills team guys were the first. They were the closest. That was a group a team. They were the closest to get to where we were. So they got there with our medics and started working on. Started working on us.

Somebody came across the radio, and it may have been heath, and said, let's get our guys out. I've got him. I've got suspect. If he does anything, it'll be the last thing he does. Let's get our guys out. That decision, their plan was they had enough guns on him that if he did something stupid, they were just going to shoot him, and then they would haul us out.

So the guy, Chris Rowe, comes over to me. He's one of the rock hill police department guys. And they roll me over and they start doing a – They're evaluating to see where my wounds are, and they go to take my vest off. Well, the vest that the city has is different than the vest that we have. So they pull my side panels and try to flip it over. They take my helmet off, they pull the side panels, and they try to flip the front of my vest up over my head and hit me right in the face with it, with a plate and everything in magazines and s***, and hit me right in the face with it. I'm like, ow!

So they pull it off my head and they start working on me. And they decide they're going to pick me up and move me out of the hot zone that we're in and take me over where the Bearcat is. Well, I'm 260 pounds of dead weight with a concussion, with a leg wound that isn't being a lot of help for anything. And they pick me up and they dropped me and they dragged me a couple feet and they dropped me.

And we have a guy on our team, Carlos Kohlbroth. And Carlos is a big, strong guy. Power Lifts. Just a strong dude. And he's got, like, a unique voice. And I know I've been working with Carlos for 15 years. And he come up behind me and he grabbed me under my arms and was like, I got you, buddy. And he drug me by himself almost all the way back to the bearcat. And after that, he told me, he says, I really need to work on my legs. But he – We did. They put a tourniquet on me. They tourniqueted my leg. And that was pretty unpleasant because it worked. I mean, they.

Jon Becker: So you're shot high up in the hip?

Buddy Brown: Yes. I'm shot high up in the leg. No bone, no bones. Just flesh. Just…

Jon Becker: And femoral vein.

Buddy Brown: Femoral vein, yes. Totally.

Jon Becker: You're bleeding out.

Buddy Brown: I'm bleeding internally, yeah. I'm not bleed. I'm not. What's the fancy? I'm not exaggerating, waiting. I'm bleeding internally. So, Kyle, on the other hand, they went to Kyle first. Kyle was the first one that they got to. He was hitting the femoral artery, and he was bleeding out.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: And they couldn't get a tourniquet on him. And luckily, Chuck Haynes came in, stuck his finger in the wound, and got it, stopped bleeding, and packed it and put a tourniquet on it and got him his bleeding under control. But it was very touch and go for Kyle. And I firmly believe that if we hadn't had the medics with the experience that we had on scene, we'd lost Kyle out there, too. It would have been bad. And they had already gone in and got Mike and put him in an ambulance, and they had taken him out to the. Taking him to the LZ.

Jon Becker: Cause Mike is hit in the head.

Buddy Brown: He's hitting the head. Yeah. And I didn't know, you know, Mike was gone. Mike. In that time where I laid my head down and passed out for just a second, they had picked up Mike and got him out of there. He was. He was long gone before they ever started working on me. They did CPR on Mike and brought him back on the scene. They got him breathing at the scene. So, which was a big thing, because Mike was an organ donor, and getting him. Getting him breathing at the scene allowed him to be able to later on to them to donate his organs, which was important to him, which was a good thing.

So we get there. They're working on me. Chris Rowe comes in and puts a tourniquet on. My leg is already swelling. My stomach is swelling and turning black and blue as they're cutting my clothes, and they're cutting my clothes off, and it's 20 degrees outside, and they're dropping me on the ground, and, you know, it's just.

Jon Becker: And you got a concussion.

Buddy Brown: And I got a concussion.

Jon Becker: And they hit you in the face with a vest.

Buddy Brown: And they hit me in the face with a vest. So, you know, it's not the greatest day I've ever had in the world. They brought a pickup truck in that one of the investigators had and backed it in, and they loaded Kyle into the. Into the truck. Put him in first. They carried Kyle's. I say, like a normal. He's like a 170 pound normal sized guy. So they kind of just picked him up and threw him in the back of the truck.

At this point, I was tired of being dropped, so I was like, hey, how about y'all help me get on my feet, and maybe I can just kind of hop? And I had guys on each arm, and I kind of hopped my way over. And the guy driving, the investigator that was driving the truck is a very good friend of mine, and he told me that he remembered seeing me hopping and said, oh, buddy's not hurt that bad. He's walking. He's all right.

So they kind of hopped me over to the truck, and when they got me over there, I kind of sat down on the tailgate and rolled myself over. And I was sick. I was real nauseous. And I remember seeing Kyle, and Kyle was as white as your shirt because he lost so much blood. And I remember thinking, man, Kyle doesn't look good.

But, I mean, I wrote. I kind of rolled on him, and he grunted at me. So, you know, he was. You know, but he really lost a lot of blood. So then they take us to. They've established an LZ. They take us in the truck and drive us to an LZ quarter mile away, where they're going to land helicopters. So I'm laying there, and I'm in the back of the truck. Now, while all this is going on, I'm gonna break from that and go to them, getting the suspect out from under the – So the suspect is under the – He's under the deck. They hold him until we get out of there.

One thing that we ran into that we talk a little about in the debrief, and you can kind of see in some of the videos, is when they got on the radio and said, we need help down here. Everybody that was on that crime scene collapsed onto where we were, and there were guns pointed in the. Everywhere. If somebody would have shot, it could have turned into a horrific, you know, scene down there. But nobody. Nobody did. And they kind of kept everything under control. So they. They don't want him to have to crawl out over this rifle because they don't know that the rifle is. Doesn't work.

Jon Becker: Yeah. You don't want him to get his gun?

Buddy Brown: We don't want him to get his gun again. We don't want to have to shoot him because he inadvertently crawled over his gun, and we thought he was trying to kill us and shoot him. So they, Raquel, SWAT had a little. A very short statured guy that was out there, and he asked him, he said, can you go? And I'm gonna. I've got him. Will you crawl under there, reach out and grab that rifle and pull it out and bring it out?

So they did that, and he crawled on there and got the rifle out. He was wearing, like, the old. And you might be familiar, like, the old 782 gear that the Marine Corps used to use. He had. That was the pack he had on was like, that old 782 gear. And they made him take the pack off because they were concerned that maybe he had it booby trapped or because so much crazy stuff had happened.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Buddy Brown: So they made him take the pack off, and then they got him. They got him to crawl out and got him enough to where they could get their hands on him. And they drug him out. And he had another pistol in his back pocket. He had a revolver in his back pocket also. So they get him. They get him, you know, under. In custody.

Jon Becker: And he's hit, too, right?

Buddy Brown: Oh, yeah, yeah. He's hit a good bit. His arm and leg are all shot up. And I believe that he – When we start. When me and Kyle started engaging him, I think he hid behind his. I think he stuck his rifle in front of him because the rifle had a bunch of hits on it, and it had a bunch of blood on it, like, where it hit his hands, where he was holding the gun. You know, if you ever do. If you ever do a lot of sims, you see guys that always get hit in hands. So they get him out. There was our state law enforcement agencies, the sled state law enforcement division. One of their investigators was there to work Randy's shooting when this shooting. He was on scene when our shooting happened.

Jon Becker: Oh, boy!

Buddy Brown: So he goes down there and he's like, okay, I need everybody from the county out of here. Cause the city guys were still there. The city guys took charge of the suspect, got it. So that the county guys didn't. It was a little, you know. Yeah, it was a little bit of separation. When we would have training, we would always tell the guys to find work, don't be standing around.

So after all this has happened and they've stripped all this gear off of us, the team guys start going and picking everybody's gear up and putting it in piles in the front of the house. So they catch them.

Jon Becker: And they're like, I'm gonna guess the investigator goes crazy.

Buddy Brown: When he sees that. Yeah, he wasn't very happy about that, but he. So. But the guys were, like, almost, like, in shock. I wasn't there. But from the way it's been described to me, they were just wanting to get busy doing something. So, that being said, we didn't know whose gear was who, who's – For a while, we didn't know my rifle was shot. We didn't know there was a lot of stuff that we didn't know. So in that deal, I ended up being shot in the upper left leg. The handguard, when I took where my rifle was shot, where I took my hand off to point under the deck was where my rifle was shot.

Jon Becker: So it would have hit your hand if you had.

Buddy Brown: It would have hit my hand if I hadn't moved it. And it went across the round, went into the handguard and went across the top of the barrel, and it should have knocked the gas system out of it.

Jon Becker: Didn't hit the gas.

Buddy Brown: Didn't hit the gas. The gun still functioned perfectly. It's crazy. And the round that was in my helmet. So you had a couple of really.

Jon Becker: Good little bits of luck there.

Buddy Brown: Yes. Yes. It was very unlucky day overall.

Jon Becker: Bad day overall, two moments of really good luck. Helmet stops the bullet at shot.

Buddy Brown: Yes. Hand doesn't get blown off, destroyed, and hand doesn't get blown off because it's still sitting up there on the gun. And, you know, to quote the mountain, I am big and hard to kill. So.

Jon Becker: Apparently so.

Buddy Brown: Apparently so.

Jon Becker: You've proven that.

Buddy Brown: But. So they take me over to me, and Kyle and. And Mike are over at the – They take us to the landing zone. Well, I'm in the back of the truck. I'm super sick. I can't, you know, I can't figure out why I have to lay on my side. If I lay on my side, it doesn't hurt as much. So. And I remember thinking they had me in a truck, and one of the guys was, like, on top of me just because it was so cold, and they had cut my clothes and everything.

So eventually, and I say eventually, but it was in a very short amount of time, an ambulance shows up, and they load me in the ambulance and load me onto a stretcher and put me in the ambulance, and there's a – There's a medic over here, and he's trying to get an IV going at me, and he's working on getting an IV, and they're gonna give me some fentanyl. And that fentanyl was. That's some pretty good stuff.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it works.

Buddy Brown: And it was literally when they. When they pushed it, it was like, okay, you know, I just. I'll just drive myself to the hospital. I'll be all right.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I'm fine.

Buddy Brown: Yeah, I'm fine.

Jon Becker: So I may be dying.

Buddy Brown: But I kind of don't care. Yeah, I kind of don't care right now. Everything's good. So when. Right before I got hurt, I was working as a patrol sergeant, what we call a road sergeant. And I was in charge of a shift. And anytime that we had a death in the county, even if Nana went to see Jesus, you know, you had to go out and just make sure that there wasn't anything, you know, any problem with it. And we dealt with the – Not the – You know, the coroner is an elected official, but they have assistant coroners that are the ones that come to the death scenes, and, you know, unless a high profile or something.

So one of the assistant coroners is a guy named Butch. Lindsay and me and Butch were on the same rotation together, so most of the death scenes that I went to, Butch would come out, and we had a rapport, and we worked together a lot. And for years, we did this. Well, in all those years of us working together, I never knew that Butch was a paramedic. So I'm in there, and I'm laying in the. I'm laying in a stretcher, and I'm all shot to h***. And they're putting a fentanyl IV in me. And Butch leans over to me and says, hey, Buddy, how are you doing?

Jon Becker: Oh, no.

Buddy Brown: And I'm like, f*** you, Butch. Get out of here. I don't even want to see you.

Jon Becker: Not today.

Buddy Brown: And I did tell him that. I told him, not today, Butch. Not today. And we still, you know, we still laugh about that. He came to the hospital and saw me, and we laughed. And even when I see him now, we still laugh about, you know. Cause who's the person you don't want to see when you have the truck?

Jon Becker: That's the last guy you.

Buddy Brown: Yeah, that is definitely the last guy you. But that was the thing with me was there was really not much they could do for me at that point. There was nothing, you know, other than make sure that my tourniquet was good and push some pain medicine. They loaded me in a helicopter. There was some discussion about whether they could get me in because my leg was so swollen. You know, I'm big anyway. And my leg was so swollen that it was hard for me to get hard for me to move around. And they managed to wedge me into the helicopter, and they flew me to CMC Maine in Charlotte, andI learned something about the helicopters that I didn't know. They don't know.

The helicopter crews don't know who they're flying. They don't know if you're the good guy, the bad guy, whatever. Because when they got me to the hospital, the guy rolls me out of the helicopter, and he says, what's going on? He said, I said, I got shot. How'd you get shot? I'm a police officer. We were in a gunfight with a domestic violence. Oh, okay. Well, let's get you to the ER. I was like, okay. And it's a thing. And in, in learning about it, they don't tell them what they've got because they don't want them to, like, overstress the aircraft or do…,

Jon Becker: Or take their time.

Buddy Brown: Or take their time getting there. Exactly.

Jon Becker: So get lost.

Buddy Brown: Yeah. So they fly them to Alabama. They flew me and Mike to CMC, and they drove Randy. Once they stabilized him, they put him in an ambulance and took him to Carolinas medical center, which is level one trauma center in Charlotte, which is where you want to be. Charlotte Mecklenburg was fantastic through this whole thing. They shut down the whole interstate.

Jon Becker: Oh, wow!

Buddy Brown: Blocked all the exits, blocked everything. Drove them straight into. Drove. You know, they never even slowed down going to the hospital.

Jon Becker: Were you even aware at that point that Randy had been shot?

Buddy Brown: Yes.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Buddy Brown: Yeah, I knew then. Somebody told us when we got there that the guy had shot Randy. So my sense of time is a little. It's a little wonky at that point. And I get to the ER.

Jon Becker: Cause you've been hitting the head.

Buddy Brown: Cause I've been hitting the head.

Jon Becker: And you're on fentanyl.

Buddy Brown: And I was on fentanyl. So I go and I get to the ER, and there's already people from the sheriff's office there, and there's people there, and I'm like, I just flew here in a helicopter. How in the world? But I didn't know they had brought Randy up already. And there was already. Our people were, were in there, and they shut the ER down. Kind of a couple of the things. And you talk about how this affects your family and your. My girlfriend is a dispatcher, and she was. She was, you know, she was off. She wasn't working when.

Jon Becker: This was not as bad then.

Buddy Brown: And. But her friends, all of her friends were. And all of her friends were listening on the radio. To me, being in a gunfight. And they said my name on the radio. So they wanted to call her and say, hey, you know, buddy's been shot. You need to get to the hospital. But they got told, no, you've got to let the sheriff's office go and tell her that buddy's been shot.

Jon Becker: Go and get her.

Buddy Brown: Go and get her. So they drive. And this is kind of funny because she normally, when we would have a SWAT call, I would have my phone with me somewhere in the truck somewhere. And if we're sitting around waiting for something to happen or we got a guy in a house and we're. They're negotiating with him, you know, I'm texting her, hey, this is still going on.

Everything's, you know, everything's all right. You know, we're good. Or this is Bs, or, you know. But when the. When all this happened and she got to knock on the door, she realized that I hadn't texted her. And she told me that she thought in her mind, please don't be the coroner. Yeah, please don't be the coroner coming to tell me that he's, you know, that he's dead.

And it wasn't. It was our patrol captain was there because I still worked in patrol at that time, and he told her that he would take her to the hospital, but her sister lives nearby, so she went with her sister. So when later on, when she got up there and just to kind of talk about mindset and the guy, that's the patrol academy. She's known him for 15 years. Knows him. First name basis, knows the guy. I said, baby, who came to the. Who came to the house? Some patrol dad. Some guy in uniform. Some guy in uniform in a patrol car. She had no idea who came. And I was kind of mad. I'm like, did they just send joblow deputy down there to get you? Or, you know, what did they. And it was actually the captain had come to see her, and a funny.

So I didn't have my phone when I got to hospital, and I was trying to call. I couldn't remember my mother's number, but I remembered my dad's. And Veronica had already called my dad and told him that I had been hurt. And he was up. He lives in Alabama, and he was up getting dressed, and I remembered his phone number, and somebody gave me a phone, and I gave him the number, and they dialed it, and his wife answered the phone, and I thought I had the wrong number. And I was like, oh, I think I've got the wrong number.

And Diane said, Buddy, is that you? And I'm like, yeah. She's like, let me get your dad for you. So I talked to my dad from the ER when he was leaving to come up, to go up there where he had gotten up and was taking a shower and getting in the truck to come up. Cause he's like 6 hours away. But he said that being able to talk to me before that was a big, you know, was a big deal.

Jon Becker: Settled him down.

Buddy Brown: Settled him down. So we're all in the ER, and one of the things that we didn't realize the suspect came in the ER, also, and they had to coordinate keeping him separate from doing all this stuff. So they rolled me in. They had to do some scans on me, and my leg was so swollen up, it was hard to get in the scanning machine.

And one of the nurses was there, and I was not very pleasant. And she said, just cuss all you need to, you know. I know it hurts. We got to do this. And we got past that. And the funny thing that I talk about is when this thing was going on, when I was out there laying on the ground, when I was getting a tourniquet put on, when I was getting put in a truck, I don't ever remember being scared, like I was going to die. I never had that. Oh, my God. You know, I never panicked. I never, you know, and probably some of it with my brain was all scrambled up, too. Probably wasn't helping.

But I never had that feeling, that really scared feeling. And when they got me to the hospital, they were rolling me down the hallway to go to those scans, and I saw myself in a window as I was going by, and I was like, ooh, yeah, I don't look so good. And that was the first time that I got a little bit like, oh, this is, this is really serious. Uh oh, this is really bad. Because the fentanyl was starting to wear off then, and they couldn't give me anything else because they were rolled, because they literally took me from there and rolled me right into surgery.

And we were lucky because I had, Doctor Nguyen was one of the top vascular surgeons in the southeast, was there, was coming to work all fresh, coming to work nice, and walked right in and started working on saving my – It saved my leg. They put twelve units of blood through my leg to get the flow back going in it, and got it fixed. And the, they put so much fluid through me to get me, my blood flow going again that I swole up and they couldn't get the wound closed. So I had to have five more, five total surgeries on my leg to get it done.

Jon Becker: Put it all back together.

Buddy Brown: Put it all back together. And they were, from what I understand, they were very close to going ahead and taking it off at one point, and they got it to work. So I owe my leg to Dr. Nguyen. He did a great job. So. And all the guys came in and we talked to guys about planning for something like that, because it's never going to go the way that you think it's going to go. Like, my thought process would have been in that when I'm shot, Heath is going to go get Veronica and tell her. Well, he can't go get Veronica and tell her because he's right there with me.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Buddy Brown: You know, so the way that you think that plans are going to work or sometimes are not the way they're going to go. And then, um, that was, you know, you talk about time. Um, we start out on the 15th. We go, we. Randy gets shot on the morning of the 16th. I get shot further on in the morning of the 16th. We go to the hospital. It's still the 16th all through the day on into the next night. And then Mike passes late on the 17th. So there was like, two days there.

It doesn't seem like it, but it was a longer time because I remember when we were doing, when I was in the room. Cause people came, and that's one thing Veronica really did. People would come and they would want to visit, you know, and I was coming out of major surgery, and I felt like if people were coming to visit, I needed to sit up and. And talk to them.

And I was passing out while people were there. And she finally. And she's five foot one, and she finally marched out, and there was a. They had posted CMPD officers outside of all of our rooms, and she went out and told the CMPD officer, if it's not a member of his family, nobody else comes in. Yeah, he's got to get some rest.

And he said, yes, ma'am, and went out there and didn't let anybody else in. CMPD was great. They had a guy at our room the whole time that we were there, and we just. I finally got some rest and just the, you know, people showing up, people coming. You know, it was a. It was a crazy, just a crazy scene for a while there. But I spent ten days in the hospital, got to leave to go to Mike's funeral. I had to walk. I had to walk her or get up on a walker.

There was something I had to do that I had to do that for them to let me. And I still had all the tubes and pipes and all that stuff. They just taped it all to my legs and my body, and I put a BDU blouse on and sat down in a – They put me in a wheelchair and put a. I thought I was going to wear pants, but my leg was so swollen up, I could never have gotten pants on. And they just threw a blanket over my legs and took me to one of the local ambulance companies brought an ambulance that they could load me up in and took me to the funeral. And then I had to come straight back. They doped me up, gave me a lot of stuff so that I could hang in there for the funeral. And then as soon as the funeral was over, I had to go back to hospital.

Jon Becker: And then how long after that were you in the hospital?

Buddy Brown: Four or five more days.

Jon Becker: And how long, what was the recovery like? How long did it take you to recover from this?

Buddy Brown: Two years, probably a good two years to get back as good as I was going to get. Because I started with a home healthcare nurse would come in and do, just because I would get up in the morning with a walker and just make it to go make coffee. And it would take me, you know, just getting up and going to the bathroom was initially was, you know, just would wear me out and, like, I would start getting up in the morning and making my way and being able to make a cup of coffee was, like, my first thing. And then I had a home health care nurse that kind of worked with me, got me.

And that's kind of where we figured out about the concussion stuff, because she was helping me. I was doing some kind of stretching or something on the floor, and she went to help me up, and I got real dizzy and fell down. And she's like, what's wrong with you? And I'm like, well, when I get up too fast, I get dizzy. And she laid me on the bed and took my head, and you have, like, little pebbles in your ears that have to do with your equilibrium. The way she took my head and racked it back and forth a couple times, and it kind of resets that stuff.

And we had to do that several times, but it took several of that to get to where my head kind of cleared up. And I saw a neurologist, you know, and you had the physical portion of it and you had the psychological portion of it.

Jon Becker: Absolutely.

Buddy Brown: That you had to, you know, that you had to deal with. And that's the, you know, if I can say anything to guys is don't be afraid to. To get the help that you need, you know, because I couldn't imagine dealing with this, dealing with a situation like this without getting the help that I had needed. You know, and for the whole department, you know, everybody, you know, everybody that was involved was offered, and a vast majority of them used the help that was available to them. You know, it's a big deal.

Jon Becker: So, Buddy, talk to me about kind of the personal lessons learned from this event.

Buddy Brown: I went through a long time of kind of telling myself that this was my fault, that what had happened was my fault. You know, I would go through this. I had this cycle that I went through where I would get up in the morning, and my girlfriend used to always make me get up in the morning, take a shower and get my day going. I would get up and I would get in the shower. My leg hurt going in the shower, and my leg hurt because Mike got shot and Mike was dead, and it was my fault. And that's how I would start my day.

And it took a long time for that not to be, you know, and just to learn that, you know, things. Things happen the way that they're going to happen. We did everything that we could, you know, to kind of make that, you know, not have that outcome. But, you know, sometimes you can, you can still have a decent plan and things can go, can go sideways out there that night. And after this thing was over, us depending on each other and depending on, you know, if somebody needs something or if somebody need, you know, if we needed somebody needs some help and they wouldn't get it, kind of helping them do the things that they needed to do.

So it was, there was a lot of we – There was one of the things that one of the guys said in the, in the brief, and, you know, and you've got, you know, 30, you know, type a SWAT guys, you know, and you said you've never told so many grown men that you love them in your life, you know, as the way that, you know, the way that we all kind of came together after this thing and still, you know, to this day is a, you know, is a bond of going through some, some pretty horrible stuff, but, you know, working our way through it.

Jon Becker: Well, one of the things you and I have talked about, you know, before that, I think is worth talking about is staying in the fight.

Buddy Brown: Yeah. We definitely, in our training, even when we did simulations, training. Even when we did that kind of thing, we knew that we always trained that even if you get hit with a sim, even if, you know, you got hit with a sim, you continue to fight, you continue to go on. And when I was hit and I knew I was hit, I knew that if I didn't do something about it, I was, this was, you know, I was going to continue to get hit. And I took the mindset that I needed to, you know, get off that X and return fire and stay in the fight and get things done, and we managed to do that.

Jon Becker: Talk to me about lessons learned for the team.

Buddy Brown: We learned a good bit of instant command lessons, kind of span of control type stuff. We went through a long time of, it was kind of a first come, first serve thing. If you were the first one to get to the call, you were the first one to go in, regardless of, of your level of experience or what you had.

And when we were still kind of working under that, those assumptions when this call came out and there were, there were better equipped, better trained guys that we could have used in the Bearcat versus the guys, some of the guys, maybe some of the people that were in there, maybe if we were hindsight 2020, and I don't know that it's gonna, you know, it would have changed any of the outcome of it.

We would have had maybe some different people in there, some guys that weren't, like, one of the guys was a sniper and had a, you know, he didn't have, he had an ar, but his primary mission was a sniper, but he just happened to be the first one of the first ones to get there.

And he jumped in the Bearcat because he, you know, because we're all type a's and we all want to go. But since then, – since this, in that endeavor, we have been much more selective about who is going to go and picking the best people that are performing the best. And we always, we try to run our training like you're auditioning every time you come to training.

So if you're, you know, if you have a couple of off trainings, you might not be that first guy to go to get in the truck to go when we have a call. And if you're one of the up and coming guys and you're having really good, then maybe you move up to that point and you're the guy that goes. But not just, okay, you're the first one to get here, get in the truck and go.

We're a little more selective about that. And we have gear. We now have a guy that does that ensures that everybody's wearing the proper gear that they should have on, because when we were preparing for this operation, not everybody had plates in, not everybody had their helmets on, not everybody had all the gear that they should have. And now that is very much.

If you're gonna go, you have, you know, you have your gear on. We do a thing now where before we go on, before the team goes on a mission, they empty their pockets, because that way, if you have to put a. If you have to put a tourniquet on them up high, they don't have their wallet or a knife or keys or something in their way of putting a tourniquet on your legs, because everybody out there that got shot got a tourniquet except for Mike. I got a tourniquet. Randy got a tourniquet, Kyle got a tourniquet. And if I'd have had a set of keys or something in my pocket when they put this tourniquet on way up here, it could have been in the way of it. So now we. When you go, when you're deploying, you don't have anything in your pockets.

Jon Becker: That's a really interesting one. What about comms? You said you had a lot of struggle with comms.

Buddy Brown: Just the too many people on one channel. Just too many people trying to talk on one channel and not having that control of where, you know, these guys are going to go to this channel, and these guys are going to go to this channel, and just where you're standing there, you're standing there with your hand on the mic, you know, trying to talk, and you're waiting for somebody to stop talking. But. And it wasn't that anybody was, like, hogging the radio or talking, you know, overly talking. There was just so much activity that it was.

We discovered where it became overloaded. We discovered where things. Where we needed to branch off and make it and make another channel. And we have kind of guidelines set up now where, okay, if we have this incident, we have an incident and it becomes, you know, this becomes this big, then we'll. We'll get another channel and we'll move some of the people onto that channel so that we can still utilize the radios without it being so clogged up.

There was never really an established command post. There was where the commanders were, but there was never like, okay, I'm at here and here, and this is the command post, and this is where everybody needs to come and. And get jobs, you know? So that was like I talked about earlier. We, we kind of fall down on that. Compared to the firemen, we don't do the command and control and the instant command stuff. And we lost track of some of our people.

There was a couple guys that stayed out a little longer than they should have on different scenes, and, you know, and it was the. We had some. We had a weather, not a. We had a weather casualty. We had a guy that got some frostbite because he got left out. You know, he was out too long. He wasn't going to say anything, you know, but he was stuck out in the cold, and he didn't get relieved when he should have and ended up getting frostbite. Nothing, you know, he recovered from it. He didn't, you know, he didn't lose anything, but just things we learned about that.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, it's so – so do. And you now, I'm assuming, have communications.

Buddy Brown: With Charlotte Mecklenburg that has been. That has been repaired. We've worked with them. We now have communications with their, where we have a channel that we can actually talk to their people and we can talk to their helicopter. That problem. But it still took a little while for that problem to get fixed. Even after something like this. When we talked about resources and all, having Randy calling the sled helicopter in the very beginning probably saved lives that, you know, nothing, you know, it's not beginning being able to keep an eye on where the suspect was.

The Rock Hill PD SWAT team, I guess the way I understand it, when Heath was coming back from the hospital, when he had dropped Randy off and was coming back from the hospital, one of the Rock Hill SWAT lieutenants called him and said, hey, do you guys need help? And he was like, yep, we'll take all you can get. And they sent a whole. They sent a whole element in their armored vehicle, and they came out and helped us out there. So that was a big part. You know, they were a big help.

And that kind of, you know, anytime you have multiple agencies, you know, you get a little. You can get a little. Or we do things this way and you guys do things this way. But us having this incident, you know, kind of galvanized us into one, you know, good unit that we work well. We work really well with those guys.

Our communication could have been a little bit better. Like we talked about earlier, me and Heath should have established communication at the corners of the bill of the house instead of just kind of, we were just planning on just kind of driving back to where the boat was and going from there. And some of the consequences of that lack of communication between the two of us is that we ended up in a blue and blue situation to where one of the officers involved sustained a non lethal injury as a result of that.

And I feel like that better communication between the teams, maybe we could have alleviated that problem. Problem. When we talked, we talked a little bit also in the. We talked a little bit about equipment. We laugh and joke about it, but when they were trying to move me off the X, they dropped me several times. So we ended up getting a portable litter system that goes on to the molly of your vest.

So that way, if you had somebody down like that, you could throw it out, throw the person on it, pick the litter up and take them out, because you don't realize how hard it is to move somebody until you're actually doing it. And when you don't want to be doing it is, you know, after a gunfight with a. With a, you know, suspect still downrange.

So we could have had a little bit better night vision and lasers. That's something that we're working on. We're getting. We're getting a little bit better equipment on that. That might have helped a little bit. Since this incident happened, we got two UAVs that we can use that's our own with Flir and the cameras and the whole. Just about all the capabilities of a helicopter, but it's in a. It's in a drone configuration that we've used a lot since then. Just, you know, I've sat down with some pretty. I've sat down with some pretty senior guys and gone over this thing, some pretty senior tactical guys.

And a lot of times I give them the, hey, if you had this situation, you know, how would you have. How would you have tackled it? And to a man, they've kind of said, well, it's really not fair if they have a lot more resources to use, you know, maybe a K9, maybe we do a, you know, a drone with a fliry or things that we didn't have available. So that's that. You know, we've been talking about this thing with, with different people from across the country. We've gotten a lot of good. A lot of good feedback.

And, you know, we – One of the big things also, that we were concerned that the guy was going to get in a house we were concerned he was going to get in somebody's house and take them hostage. And then we were going to have this hostage standoff thing. So that's why we were kind of pushing him. Cause they were like, well, didn't you kind of push, you know, couldn't you have waited till. Well, no. Cause then he gets in somebody's house, and now we've really gotta.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Cause until you identify where he is, which you identify by him ambushing you.

Buddy Brown: Yes.

Jon Becker: He's at large. He's already shot a police officer.

Buddy Brown: Yes.

Jon Becker: And he's looking for a place to hide.

Buddy Brown: Yes. So that was kind of why we were pushing that. This other equipment. One of the equipment things is, when the K9 track was going on, none of those guys took rifles with them, so they only had handguns, even though they knew that the suspect had a rifle. They all took handguns, which they fired back at him when he ambushed Randy and kind of drove him off with the handgun. But, you know, if you're, you know, the one plus one, if he's got a rifle, we're gonna bring two rifles. You know, let's – Those are things we need to think about that.

Talking a little bit about medical care, putting a tourniquet on Randy. Randy, I think, was the first time that we put a tourniquet on such a severe wound was, I think, was that night. Yeah. We had. I don't know that we had ever used a tourniquet on anything, and we had them because the. The tourniquets that they used for all of us that night were manufactured in our hometown. They were an American rescue, and they were manufactured in Rock Hill, where we live.

I actually, me and Randy went and toured their plant where they make them at and met with kind of like they do with the saves. Yeah, we went to the plant and talked and thanked them and all because they weave them, weave them, put them everything, do everything together right there in rock Hill.

So the decision to load Randy up and take him to the hospital immediately probably helped out, you know, instead of, you know, we're. Okay. We're going to drive him here and wait for an ambulance. No, we're not. We're going to. We're. We're taking him to the hospital and getting him there. Um, placing the SWAT medics, you know, having the SWAT medic so close probably helped us, you know, helped Kyle's survivability, definitely, you know, helped with the way that we got. You know, those guys. Those guys definitely earned their. Earned their keep that night, you know? Cause I. I still firmly believe we'd lost Kyle if we didn't have. If Chuck hadn't been able to get his bleeding stopped. It's crazy, crazy, crazy.

Jon Becker: So, Buddy, in the aftermath of this, how did the team deal with the psychological fallout and the, you know, the. The emotional damage and everything that followed?

Buddy Brown: Well, we were pretty lucky. We have an organization called Sleep that does post critical incident debriefs, kind of where they get. They have peer support. It's a peer support group. They have guys that have been involved in critical incidents, and they come and get everybody together and allow them to talk about it. We went to a post critical incident retreat. Most of the guys have been to it. It's a week long thing, and it kind of talks about. You talk about your incident. You work with other people that have been involved in similar type incidents and kind of help you understand.

And a lot of it is understanding the stresses and understanding the way that your body reacts to all these things and learning that it's normal. I went through a state of, like, hypervigilance where I couldn't really sleep. Anytime I heard a noise, anytime I heard anything, you know, I was up, moving around, went through a lot of that, did. Had a lot of psychological, you know, had a lot of stuff I had to, you know, I had to deal with, had to get some counseling, had to work with a. I worked with a neuropsychologist for a while.

And that was offered to everybody, and most everybody took advantage of it. Most everybody. That was a key player in this thing. And the thing that sometimes I have to remember is, once I got to where I could drive again. I go out to get breakfast one morning, and the patrol chef is at this restaurant having breakfast, and I go and I go over and sit down and eat breakfast with them because I knew them. They were the guys, and they were asking me how I was doing. I didn't even realize, but they were out there that night, and some of their guys helped drag me out of the woods.

You know, this thing was so, you know, we had a thing that we talked about, and I've said it before, is that, you know, me and Kyle and Randy, and we lost Mike, and we were all injured, but, like, everybody was hurt by this thing. Everybody in the agency was had – It had some kind of, you know, because there was so much, you know, Mike's funeral was that you're familiar with who Delta was, the race car driver Dale Earnhardt.

Mike's funeral was at the same church where they did Dale Earnhardt's funeral. And it was completely packed and you couldn't even get in the doors in there and the community out. I mean, we got a lot of support from the community. It was, it was just, you know, I had, and it's kind of carried over, you know, it's carried over into the relationship that we have with the community and just, if anything, just trying to get guys to get the help they need, not be afraid to get the help they need, not be afraid to go through. And if they're having a problem with something, identify it and move forward.

Jon Becker: I think that's a fantastic place for us to stop. Buddy, I really appreciate you joining me, and thanks for coming and sharing this information with us!

Buddy Brown: Anytime!