Episode 26 – Hostage Rescue In A Trailer Home – Hastings, MN – South Metro SWAT

Jon Becker: On July 2nd, 2020, patrol officers attempted to contact a suspect about moving an illegally parked automobile at the Three Rivers Mobile home park in Hastings, Minnesota. As officers spoke to the suspect's wife and two of his four children, the suspect locked and barricaded the door to his trailer with his other two children inside.

Over the course of the next 15 hours in sweltering Heat, the South Metro SWAT team, in conjunction with Washington County SWAT and Ramsey County SWAT, attempted to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the crisis as the suspect's mental state deteriorated.

Although they were able to obtain one of the two children, it started to become clear that a tactical intervention would be necessary. My guests today are Adam Tschida, Daniel Salmey, and Jeff Hanson from South Metro SWAT to discuss the case, their successful HRT intervention, and the lessons learned from a very challenging rescue.

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!

Guys, thanks for being here with me today!

Adam Tschida: Well, thanks for having us!

Jon Becker: So, Adam, why don't we start with you? Give me the context. Talk to me about the team first.

Adam Tschida: Sure. Okay. The three of us are part of the south metro SWAT team in Minnesota, and that is a multi jurisdictional team, kind of in the southern part of the twin Cities metro area. Our team provides tactical services for eleven different municipalities across two counties. There's roughly 1000 sq. miles in about 350,000 population in that area. The team has at any given time, around 50 tactical members. 15 of those are on the C and T side of the house, and then 35 of those team members are on the tactical side of the equation.

Jon Becker: For this operation what were each of the roles for the three guys here?

Adam Tschida: Sure. Yeah, I was the team commander for this operation and a pretty new team commander. I was promoted to that role, I think, like February or March of 2020, and this took place in July of 2020. And there was all kinds of stuff happening in February, March, April, May of 2020. I mean, it was a very busy time with COVID and civil unrest and that sort of stuff. So that was kind of my welcome to being a commander.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's baptism by fire, I think is the technical term.

Adam Tschida: Yeah, I think that's what it was. Yep. Exactly.

Jon Becker: Daniel, your role?

Daniel Salmey: So, during this operation, I was the one of the team leaders, the senior team leader on our team, and I was also the first team leader on scene.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Jeff Hanson: And I was an assistant commander overseeing the crisis negotiation team.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay, so why don't we start with, like, how the day sets up?Give me the background on the event.

Adam Tschida: Sure. The event that we're going to talk about, took place on July 2nd. The. It actually kind of got its start the day before on July 1st. And what ended up happening was park staff in a mobile home park in Hastings, Minnesota, located an abandoned vehicle that they wanted to address. And Hastings. Hastings is one of the cities that South Metro SWAT provides tactical service for. It's a small river town about 30 miles south and east of St. Paul. Population of maybe 20,000 people. Roughly 30 sworn officers work there.

And so on July 1st, the mobile home park staff went out to an abandoned lot and found kind of this junk vehicle and made contact with the owner. The owner of that vehicle would ultimately end up being our suspect on July 2nd. The next day, they told him, remove the vehicle. Get it out of here. If you don't move it, we'll move it for you. And then they left.

On the morning of July 2nd, the park staff again went out to that lot. The vehicle was still there, and they made contact with the suspect once again, and then informed him, you didn't move the vehicle. So we have a tow truck on the way. That made him very upset. He made a number of threats to park staff, including, like, hopping in that piece of junk vehicle, driving it off the cement blocks it was on, and then running them over. So park staff left the area.

Jon Becker: Ran the park staff over.

Adam Tschida: He threatened to run them over.

Jon Becker: Okay. Like, got it.

Adam Tschida: Get out of here. Don't take my vehicle. I'm gonna run you over with it if you try to do that sort of thing. And so they left. The park staff left the area, called 911, and ultimately, two Hastings police officers, a patrol sergeant, and a patrol officer responded out to deal with that.

Jon Becker: Got it. So what happens when patrol gets there?

Adam Tschida: Sure. Patrol received a little bit of background information from the park staff. Some of the key information was that they believed the suspect had an active court order preventing him from being at that residence and also preventing him from having any contact with his wife, who was a resident of that home. They made quick contact with the park staff.

When they arrived, the patrol officers made brief contact with the park staff when they arrived, and then approached the house and knocked on the door to deal with this disturbance and then also investigate the violation of this order for protection.

Jon Becker: And what was the response when they knocked on the door?

Adam Tschida: So they knocked on the door, and the protected party, the female, the wife of our suspect, came to the door. She answered the door. The first officer, it was a short, kind of maybe a three step up flight of stairs, and then a very small landing on the front door of this trailer house.

So the officer was kind of halfway up those stairs, and the female answered the door. The officer asked the female to come out of the door, and then there was a couple juveniles right by her. So that officer directed them to come out as well, which they all, all did. The female walked out. The two juveniles exited about.

At that time, that officer spotted another juvenile. It turned out to be about a four year old boy. And then he asked if the boy could come out. They talked to them in the front yard, figure out what was going on, that sort of thing. Well, as he was trying to have the boy come out, the suspect came into view and started to grab his son, grabbed a boy, pulled him back and pushed the door shut. The officers tried to force entry into that, into that front door, and the door slammed shut.

One of the officers observed what he thought was like a baseball bat or a pipe or something, also kind of dropped behind that door as they were trying to force it open, leading them to believe that this suspect just barricaded the door.

Jon Becker: Yeah, like literally barricade. I mean, we talk about barricades as a concept. This is like literally barricade, you know, barring the door.

Adam Tschida: Exactly. And immediately, like, shut the door, pipe is down and the door's not opening back up. And so there's a dialogue then kind of shouting back and forth between the officers and our suspect at that time. Very quickly after that door was slammed shut, the suspect started shouting out, you know, I got a gun. I'm gonna shoot you. Get out. You know, get back away from the house, that sort of thing.

And so one officer backed away from the front door and kind of moved to the north and west of the trailer and got behind a couple of cars. And then the sergeant moved kind of to the north and east of the trailer, where there's a garden shed and several trees. While he was doing that, while the sergeant was moving that direction, he instructed the wife, the female, the adult female, and the two children that actually made it out of the house to walk around a little bit further north to get behind.

There's another trailer there. I mean, they're kind of stacked in there, so they moved around to a position behind that trailer. So at that point, we had patrol officer to the north and east and the sergeant kind of, or to the northwest, and then the sergeant kind of to the northeast behind that garden shed.

Jon Becker: Why don't we, like, describe the trailer for me? I mean, it's, I'm picturing kind of as a single wide, double double wide, like, you know, on blocks. Give me a kind of image in my brain.

Adam Tschida: Yeah. So it. Your image in your brain is. Is about what it is. I mean, it is a kind of a normal looking trailer. Single wide trailer. Like I mentioned a minute ago, it's elevated. So about three flight, three stairs in a flight of stairs up to the front door. That would. The door that the officers originally made contact in was the. Considered the front of the trailer, and that would later be the one side of the house for our – For the tactical purposes of, you know, working through this.

The one side of the house faced north. Just off the one side of the house was this garden shed that would also kind of play in to the mission later as a kind of a jump off point and a piece of COVID for a couple of our teams. There were a couple of vehicles, two vehicles, I think, in the small little driveway, you know, normal windows around the trailer, a couple small ones where there's kitchen and bathroom and bedrooms, that sort of thing. Very noteworthy, though, is the master bedroom was to the far back of the house.

So if we were looking at the house at the one side of the bedroom is all the way to the left. So, like, the two side of the house. Is that checking out? Is that making sense in your head?

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Adam Tschida: Okay.

Jon Becker: Yeah, just for anybody that uses. I mean, there's. There are other ways to number, but it's. It's going clockwise around the house. One side being the front, two being, you know, if you're picturing a square, the left side, three being the back side, four being the right side.

Adam Tschida: Exactly.

Jon Becker: So he's basically, you know, the front door is roughly in the middle of the one side.

Adam Tschida: Closer. Closer to the – What would be, like the one four corner. So closer to the right side.

Jon Becker: So close to the right side.

Adam Tschida: Yep. And as I mentioned, like, the master bedroom, far back. So two. The two side of the house.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Solid two side.

Adam Tschida: Yep.

Jon Becker: Is it going from the one side to the three side on the two side?

Adam Tschida: The whole thing. So it's the full width yep.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Adam Tschida: On the back side of the house is. Is another entry door, a pull out, more of like a fire escape, sort of unused back door. That door is very close to the two three corner. So close to that bedroom. Immediately inside that door, if you hang a right, you're in the master bedroom.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Adam Tschida: Sort of deal.

Jon Becker: I feel like that might be foreshadowing.

Adam Tschida: That might be. We might be going. Yeah. So that's kind of the layout in kind of the middle of this trailer park. Small, little kind of private streets. We ended up setting up our command post later, just north of the trailer park in this cabinet shop or a woodworking building that had a big parking lot. And then also a little bit of foreshadowing, had a kind of a work area, office area that was air conditioned that we were able to rehab in later. That's kind of the lay of the land out there, so.

Jon Becker: Okay, so suspect bear, kids that are. You've got patrol officers have the wife, two kids. At this point, we know that there is at least a third kid who's, you know, roughly four years old, basically a toddler.

Adam Tschida: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Right. What intel does patrol get from the suspect at this point? You know about the suspect?

Adam Tschida: Yeah. So they very quickly determined that in addition to the four year old boy that's inside, there's a twelve year old girl inside, a daughter and son of this couple. Okay, so two kids out, two kids inside, along with the suspect. They also – While the sergeant was standing near that garden shed and the trees, the suspect was yelling out at them.

At one point, the suspect pulled back some curtains or drapes and pointed a handgun. Or what? The sergeant, it looked like he was pointing a handgun right out at him. The sergeant then moved from where he was back around to that next trailer to the north, where the female and the two other juveniles were. So he backed up a little bit further. When the sergeant walked around and reunited with the wife and the other kids, she had walked out of the home with her phone. She called the suspect and handed the phone to the sergeant.

There was an interaction back and forth between the sergeant and the suspect at that time. The suspect was upset about this court order. He wanted a new court date, and he advised the sergeant that he basically either wanted a new court date or he was going to start killing police officers. It is especially noteworthy during that phone conversation, the sergeant heard in the background what he believed to be the racking of a handgun, like a slide on a handgun after. And the suspect hung up the phone at that point pretty quickly after threatening to kill the police officers. The racking of the handgun sound.

Once the phone was hung up, the sergeant aired that information to the other patrol officers on scene, and the wife said, he doesn't have a gun. We don't have a gun in the house, and that sort of thing. And so that's kind of what we were working with.

Jon Becker: Any firearms registered at the house?

Adam Tschida: No. Nope. So. And that was the information we had. And I, and about at that time, the sergeant made the determination to call SWAT. We were paged out pretty much immediately following that phone conversation. The page went out, and then with that came a request for me to give that sergeant a call, and I was, I received about the same information that I just shared here. I mean, that's kind of what we were walking into.

Jon Becker: Got it. How long does it take you guys to get on scene and get set up?

Adam Tschida: It takes a while. I mean, we're coming from the, you know, four corners of different counties, and the, and the way that works, the way that looks is we check in on the air because we're, we're coming from all sorts of different places. And so we manage our check in procedures and roll call on the air and then also assignments for grabbing vehicles and pieces of equipment. So that's all done over the air.

Jon Becker: The team. Does the team have take home cars or you're in povs?

Adam Tschida: Very few of the team members have take home vehicles, and if they do, it's not because of their assignment on SWAT.

Jon Becker: It's because of some other assignment that.

Adam Tschida: Gets them a take home car investigations or narcs or something like that.

Jon Becker: Got it. So the guys are carrying a limited amount of personal gear in their, in their personal cars to arrive on scene, and that's why somebody needs to go get the team gear and the armor and get it all there.

Adam Tschida: Exactly. Exactly. And we, you know, we, we try to try to make that as efficient as possible, but that, it just takes time. And so typically, it's, at least in the first SWAT personnel on scene are there very quickly because they're working. You know, if they're SWAT folks are of work in patrol, they're, more often than not, they hear the calls, they're monitoring what's going on in neighboring jurisdictions, and they're heading that direction anyways.

But for the folks that are off when they're not working, it takes a while. I mean, it's an hour plus before we're on scene and fully operational in something like this. And in this case, it was absolutely that long before we were there.

Jon Becker: Okay, so as – So first SWAT personnel arrive on scene, I'm assuming start feeding information to the rest of the team or the radio as you guys are coming in. What else do you learn before the team is there and fully assembled?

Adam Tschida: Yeah. And I can kind of turn. Turn it over to Dan here. Dan was. I was a little bit further out than Dan. I lived the opposite direction. And as soon as we got the page of, I called Dan and gave him a heads up, and I knew he would beat me there. And so Dan was first on scene, made contact with patrol, and kind of took the reins until I got there. Dan, if you want to kind of fill in that part of it.

Daniel Salmey: Yeah, no problem. So this call comes out. I was at home on my day off, so I threw all my equipment. I actually had it at my house, which is unusual for me. I usually keep my stuff at my police department, which is a five minute drive from my house. So I had all my stuff. I also had part of our armored bearcat that I was working on that threw that all in my truck, started heading down there in my personal vehicle, pulled up, and I arrived at that woodworking place. That's where we were told to go. Stage is at that woodworking place.

So I pulled up there, and I grabbed a hold of. I think at the time, he was a commander. Got a hold of the commander with Hastings, kind of got the rundown, which is the same stuff that Adam just shared with us. Basically. We have a suspect. He's barricaded in a trailer home. There's two kids inside. He's talking like he has a weapon. He's making threats that he's going to start killing cops. So with that information, I started grabbing the first five or six operators that show up and seeing again most of them were people that were already on duty. I grabbed them. I grabbed one of our other team leaders that showed up just shortly after I did.

And I said, hey, take these five SWAT operators, start heading over the house. I need you to set up on the house, and I need you guys to be the crisis entry screen the immediate action team should something go bad here from us setting up and taking over to whatever. So that's what they did. They. They grabbed the gear. They put the gear on. I kind of. I filled them in on exactly what was going on, said, hey, it sounds like this guy has a gun, and he's making threats to kill cops. So find a good spot, get close to that door, be ready to get in there. If we need you to get in.

Jon Becker: There, does parole have a patrol? Obviously has a perimeter at this point. So you're going to move into the patrol's perimeter.

Daniel Salmey: Correct.

Jon Becker: With an immediate action team or a crisis entry team just in case he starts shooting the kids or does something else, correct?

Daniel Salmey: Yeah. So that's what they did. They moved up also shortly, early on in this whole response, two of our snipers had also showed up and seen, and they independently deployed, one of them to the northeast and one of them to the northwest, kind of in those patrol positions that were initially set up. They found good positions and got really good eyes on the windows on the one side. The rest of the perimeter was supplemented with patrol at that time just because we were waiting for other operators to get there.

Also, initially, our armored bearcat had arrived, but per command with the Hastings police department, they did not want that bearcat to be driven out to the property yet. So that kind of threw a wrench against what we normally do, how we normally operate. We have found that that armor, that piece of armor is usually a problem solver more than a problem maker.

Normally, our bread and butter is to take that thing and park it in the front lawn of a house and start making some commands. And usually we gain some compliance and things are over well before they start that didn't happen in this call. The. The piece of armor did not go out unseen right away.

Jon Becker: And that was a commander's decision, I'm assuming, like a patrol commander or.

Daniel Salmey: It was an incident commander. So how we operate will, an incident commander is usually somebody high up with the municipality that we're working in, and then someone like Adam, our team commander, he'll become a tactical commander, and he will work ideas off of the incident commander. It's the incident commander that basically makes all the choices about how tactical operations proceed. Given suggestions from our tactical command or from the boots on the ground like me, I'll say something to Adam. Adam will relate to incident command, and then, yes, just go ahead and do that, or, no, don't.

Jon Becker: So you'll come up with a brilliant idea, and Adam's job is to go sell it to somebody who doesn't understand what he's talking about.

Daniel Salmey: Adam is an excellent salesman.

Adam Tschida: Yes, that is. That is exactly how it goes.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I wish I could tell you that. You're in your unique. You're not. Okay. So you. You get there, you get a crisis entry team staged. Has the guy at this point threatened the kids at all?

Adam Tschida: No, no, he's only threatening to kill cops.

Jon Becker: I mean, the kids.

Adam Tschida: Yeah.

Jon Becker: The kids are at this point at best captives and at worst hostages.

Adam Tschida: Yep.

Jon Becker: But he's not yet, you know, made an actual threat against the kid, correct?

Adam Tschida: Yeah. Yeah. And that remains that way for. For some time. I mean, Jeff's negotiators spend a bunch of time, you know, talking back and forth, and it's hours before he actually specifically mentions the kids or harming the kids.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Jeff Hanson: But important to note that he did refuse to let. The requests were made for him to let the kids out and he refused that request.

Daniel Salmey: Yeah.

Jon Becker: So the kids are captives at this point. And, I mean, there's always the employee, you know, there's always that line between captive and hostage. And when it's a relative, it's a little harder. Like, if it's a third party, it's pretty easy to, to denote them as a hostage with your own kids. There's always that question of, is he just not letting the kids go or is he actually willing to harm the kids?

And obviously, there's an implicit threat always because the kids are being held, but it's always a line that's, that's good to, to look at. And obviously, in this case, at some point, that's going to shift, so.

Adam Tschida: Exactly.

Jon Becker: Okay. So, Dan, you're, you're there. You got a crisis entry team stage. What's next?

Daniel Salmey:vSo shortly after they're already deployed out there, they find their spot. They actually set up on that shed on the north, east side of the one side, kind of the trailer home. So they're already out there. Adam gets unseen, takes over command. Tactical command tells me, start, grab, grab the next group of guys that are showing up and start forming a deliberate action entry plan. So that way we can switch you out with that team that's already out there. You guys are already practiced how you're going to get through there, through the door. You've done the footwork, you know what you're doing. So start working on that.

So I grabbed, it just so happened that the people that showed up next were all kind of more senior operators on our team. I grabbed them, kind of drew out a glass house floor plan that we got from the wife through CNT which the timing of that was perfect. We drew a glass house out on the pavement of this business and started working our reps of, you know, entry through the one side, entry through the three side. Barricaded or not barricaded or how we're going to get through the door, known unknown locations. We probably did 50 reps of entry before we actually went out on scene.

Jon Becker: Got it. And at this point, C and T has arrived, and you guys are working intel with the wife, and I'm assuming a complete intel package on everything you can find out on them.

Jeff Hanson: Yeah. And this one was a little bit unique, a given the timeframe. We were July 2nd, Thursday budding up to 4 July. My immediate concern was, we're not going to get enough people there that we need for CNT. Luckily, we got nine, and the call came out. The page came out at 11:41 a.m. and by 01:10, we were interviewing the wife and the daughter. So it really, timing wise, worked out great. And response wise, we lucked out.

Jon Becker: Got it. And just to kind of set context, it's Minnesota, but it's summertime in Minnesota, which I'm assuming is a balmy, ugly, hot and humid day. But what's our weather like?

Daniel Salmey: The heat index is at 96 degrees. It is super humid. Like, ungodly humid for scandinavian folks up north.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I live in California. Anything above 25% is reprehensible. So I can only imagine if you guys consider it humid. It's probably pretty ugly.

Daniel Salmey: Yeah. For July 2nd, 2020, the historical is, um. The air temperature is at 89 degrees. It's at 52% humidity, the dew points at 70, and the heat index is 96.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah, that's just super yucky, sticky, sweaty, hot, ugly.

Adam Tschida: And Dan. Dan alluded to it, but he. He said he was working on part of the bearcat, what he was doing for us. Dan is a pretty handy guy, and we have a hydraulic ram on the front of our bearcat. Well, he took that, the ram piece, and he welded small, little triangular teeth on the backside of it so that as we are pulling back out of a door or a window, we can catch the drapes or the door or whatever.

So, in this heat, before Dan received the page and headed to Hastings, he was working with a welder in his shop, kind of setting the tone for how hot and sweaty he's going to be for the rest of the day.

Jon Becker: Yeah, Dan's about to have an ugly day.

Adam Tschida: Yeah. Right.

Jon Becker: All right, so you take your. Your deliberate action team, draw glass house on the ground. You rehearse it 50 times. What is the next movement in the case?

Daniel Salmey: Yeah. So, once I felt confident that we ran through every possible scenario we could think of for making a deliberate entry, I went and told Adam that, hey, we're good to go. And, you know, he had so, hey, he had those conversations with incident command, but basically, we got green lighted to go out there and switch out with that. That team that was already staged out there almost immediately.

To do that, we initially had jumped into what we have. We call it our jump out van. It's just a white van with some side steps on it, open back area, so you can transport people to and from places pretty quickly. We jumped in that thing. We started heading out there. We arrived to, it would be the west. So off the four side of the trailer.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Daniel Salmey: We arrived on the west side of the trailer. We started walking up, and as I'm approaching this trailer with my team, I'm looking at it as the first time I've seen eyes on this trailer since I've been on scene, or at least in staging. And I'm like, there's just no way that we. That we don't have our armored vehicle up there. We can't get physically close enough where the seconds are going to matter. For me, I can't get close enough to get to the door and stand in a safe spot without wasting time to get to the door to get it open.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And anything in that area that you would normally regard as cover is really just concealment because they're all trailer homes and made of aluminum foil.

Daniel Salmey: Correct. So as I'm walking up with my team and I'm seeing this, I'm like, no, this thing's got to come up. So I tell Adam, I said, hey, I need the bear cat. Go, bear cat.

Jon Becker: Go sell the bearcat, adam.

Daniel Salmey: Go sell that.

Adam Tschida: Yep, exactly.

Daniel Salmey: And that, you know, and that's what Adam does. He goes and sells it. And sure enough, our, our bearcat comes pulling up from the west. We jump into it. And initially I pulled it up right off of the one four corner by where those two cars are parked. There's like, a little parking pad right there. I pulled it up right on the one one four corner. We weren't there for very long before I was like, this is not the right spot.

I told Adam, I said, we're going to have to move this thing. I need to get it right off the door on the one side. We're going to pull it right up to the door. That those couple stairs leading up into the house. On the one side, there was a railing that went towards the foreside of those stairs. We would had to have gone around the railing. It would have taken more time again, I'm trying to get closer, not farther away. I'm trying to eliminate those seconds. I need to get into that house if I have to.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Daniel Salmey: So I tell Adam, hey, we're moving, we're going to move it. We're going to nose it up perpendicular on the one side. We're going to put the ram 3ft from the door. Okay. As we're doing that maneuver, thankfully, we have an explosive breaching capability in our team. But at the time of this call, we only had one certified breacher left on our team just through attrition, through people leaving and stuff.

So thankfully, we had. Adam had made some phone calls initially and asked for one of our partner or assistance agencies, Washington County SWAT. We asked for a couple of their explosive breachers to come to scene so that we had people for placing and firing the in explosive breach.

So as we're moving the Bearcat to the one side, we take two of their explosive breachers and we add them to our team. We end up getting the Bearcat on the one side again, like 3ft, the Rams, like 3ft off the door. And that's basically where that piece of armor sat through the duration of this entire call with my team while we were out there.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. So is the guy talking to C and T at this point?

Jeff Hanson: He is, yep. Interestingly, this guy wanted to talk to us often and for a long time. And on top of that, we had his wife and daughter, as I said, before being debriefed. So we had a ton of really good information and we had direct contact with him.

Jon Becker: What's he saying?

Jeff Hanson: You know, he's making demands for that court date in which we tried to reach out and get. Get him one. And then it was, you know, just pleading his case with us, telling us he did nothing wrong, that we were there harassing him. He wanted us to go away, so on and so forth, and then started making some demands that, well, backing up. The weather is so hot, the tactical side cut power right away, which he didn't have air conditioner, and he's now in a tin trailer at 96 degrees.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think when we were kids, we called that an easy bake oven.

Adam Tschida: Right.

Jeff Hanson: So it started to heat up quickly and motivated him to make some demands for us to turn it back on. He used the fact that his cell phone was dying to turn it back on, turn the power back on, and tactical side ended up delivering a cell phone to him instead of turning the power on, which he didn't. Take kindly and threw that out the window.

Jon Becker: I mean, to be fair, he had a pretty good negotiation tactic, and you guys really didn't play along very nice by trying to deliver a cellphone.

Jeff Hanson: Right, right.

Jon Becker: That was a creative argument, at least.

Jeff Hanson: Yes. But, yeah, he was talking to us, and he talked to us consistently for almost 13 hours.

Jon Becker: Is he lucid? Like, I mean, does he sound crazy? Is he, you know?

Jeff Hanson: Yeah, I would say at that time he was, but extremely upset. So not rational. But.

Jon Becker: But he doesn't think he's Jesus or Adolf Hitler.

Jeff Hanson: No. Nope.

Jon Becker: Yep. Got it.

Daniel Salmey: And while he's talking to CNT on the phone, he's also coming to the windows on the one side, screaming at us out on the front lawn to multiple times. And, you know, I'm airing information that he's yelling at us. And, you know, Adam's getting this intel from both me on the radio, hey. Saying this and this and this. And then he's also getting it from CNT at the same time. So, like, the communications kind of bouncing back and forth to Adam, who's relaying it up to instant command.

Jon Becker: But you can't see him when he's screaming at you.

Daniel Salmey: Oh, no. He comes to the window. We can see him several times.

Jon Becker: Oh, okay. That's convenient. All right, so then we're baking away in the easy bake oven. You guys are standing outside in terrible weather, and guys, I'm assuming, are starting to get a little hot and sticky and uncomfy.

Daniel Salmey: Yeah. To make matters worse, our piece of armor, the air conditioner, decided to not work anymore on top of everything else.

Jon Becker: So we're having competitive easy bake ovens. Yeah. And yours is painted black.

Daniel Salmey: Yes.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Okay, great.

Daniel Salmey: Painted black and roasting. So it isn't too long before concerns are. Are being raised. At my level, at the team leader level with my team watching these guys just stop sweating.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Daniel Salmey: Starting to cramp. I mean, we're drinking so much water. There's a mountain of water bottles piling up next to the bearcat. But nobody's sweating anymore. People are starting to get headaches.

Jon Becker: Yeah, we're working our way towards dehydration rapidly or heat stroke.

Daniel Salmey: Yeah, it's. It's getting. It's getting bad. It's getting so bad. To the point that I had taken one of our most senior, our team leader medic. We have four medics that are attached to our team from our area ambulance service. Full time with our team or not. Our team's not full time, but full time. Attached to our team. And the most senior guy, the team leader at the time, was with me. And I remember distinctly looking at him and telling him like, this is, this is a problem. Right?

As I'm looking at these guys, specifically looking at one of our operators who's probably the largest, most muscular guy in our team, just completely just, he's going down fast. Like, you can just see it happening in his eyes and his body and his mannerisms. He's not sweating, he has a headache, he's slumping over. You know, it's, it's a problem. I remember looking at him saying, this is a problem. Right. Just confirming in my head because I'm thinking it and he's like, this is going to be a bad problem.

Jon Becker: So what time of day is that?

Daniel Salmey: This is probably. I think I start talking to Adam about this probably 02:33 o'clock. I mean, this is.

Jon Becker: Yeah, we're not, we're getting to peak heat.

Daniel Salmey: Yes. And we're not. We weren't out there very long, but it did not, it did not take very long. You know, for these, this heat to set in. It didn't take long at all. So I'm telling him, hey, we need to get switched out. I'm thinking in my head that this needs to happen sooner.

There's, you know, not to foresight on some lessons learned, but, you know, this is something that we probably didn't do the greatest job on. I know I didn't do the greatest job on kind of managing this heat with my team. I walked away with this. Very lucky that I didn't lose somebody.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Adam Tschida: Yeah. And Dan is, I mean, he's hard on himself. We're all hard on ourselves. Looking back at it, you know, he said he didn't do a good job, didn't relay the information. The information was getting to me. I just was too much stuff going on. I needed more help in the command post and wasn't smart enough to ask for it.

And so the request for another team was delayed longer than it should have been. And he's right. I was just looking at some notes here. It was getting into mid afternoon and finally I made that call for a second team, our Washington County SWAT team, which neighbors us to the east. But the point is, it was, we were behind. We were behind on the heat. And once you're behind, we just never got back. You can't. Even if you rehab the guys that have been out there, you don't bounce fully back to. I mean, it takes a day or two to bounce back from that kind of heat exposure.

And so, finally, I think the phone call for that mutual aid request was right around 04:00 in the afternoon. And that also, I mean, everybody listening to this knows you don't just make that call and poof, you have a team. It takes them a while.

Jon Becker: You start to clock on their 1 hour response.

Adam Tschida: Exactly. And that's what it was. And so that was, it was kind of status quo for that portion of this operation. The south metro SWAT folks were out there suffering in the heat, pretty consistently engaging back and forth, talking with the suspect, CNT ongoing, but really kind of on a merry go round. Like, we're not making progress. We're nothing getting anywhere. And we kind of held that position until.

And you mentioned it before, until something did change where the suspect finally mentioned the kids in a way that caught our attention. And Jeff was the one fielding this information and heard that come in, so I can let him kind of allude to that. We held kind of this position until that happened, and then we had to have some tough conversations on what we wanted to do.

Jon Becker: Jeff, what. At what point, you know, Adam referenced this, but what did the suspect say that that moved his status, in your mind, to more dangerous to his kids?

Jeff Hanson: Well, he actually stopped talking to us on the phone for a little bit, at which point we sent a negotiator up in the bearcat and tried to do some verbal communication with him over the loudspeaker, which enticed him to reestablish phone contact with us. But what really turned, what caught our attention is he had threatened to shoot the gas meter and blow up the trailer house if we wouldn't leave. And then he was making mention, or this is the first time he mentioned his kids as being hostages.

Jon Becker: Okay, so he's threatened to kill everybody, and he's now mentioning the kids as hostages. And he's now positioned himself as a hostage to, like, squarely moved into the hostage taker willing to kill the kid's box.

Jeff Hanson: Correct. And what amped it up even more is that he then put us on a five minute timer.

Jon Becker: Oh, boy! So he basically says, you have five minutes to what? Leave. Release everybody that's in prison in Pakistan. What does he want you to do? Cause they all have, you know.

Jeff Hanson: We had five minutes to leave, or I believe it was turn the power on.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Adam Tschida: So that did change things. And I don't remember if we turned the power back on at that time. Or not. We turned it back on and off throughout the afternoon. Each time we cnT would work out a deal for something in return, we turn the power back on. And he did not follow through with whatever his end of the demand was.

But when Jeff came to me with this information, this shift where, and you phrased it perfectly, Jon, we very squarely moved from barricade, maybe just keeping the kids in there into hostage land. Right? We stepped across that line with these comments clearly. And that was a very significant shift in our thinking. And we immediately relayed that to incident command.

And I clearly remember Jeff and I talking with the Hastings police chief saying just that we are now this has changed and we have a decision to make. And the decision was whether or not to command initiate a rescue or not. Basically, yeah.

Jon Becker: Do you go deliberate action or do you continue to stand by with an immediate action team stage? How many operators do you have at this point that are there?

Adam Tschida: Low twenties, probably.

Jon Becker: So we got a five man, four or five man. Immediate response or immediate action team?

Daniel Salmey: Yeah. So my team I had, it was myself and six operators, but one was a driver of the Bearcat and then a medic. So seven. Seven operators and medic. And then that immediate action team that had been on the shed that I deployed out when I got on scene, they had gone around the house, around the trailers. And they're set up on that three side door now on the backside. So they never left off scene. They just move their position. So they are also baking in the heat in the back.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. They're. You're in the bearcat convection oven and they're in the outdoor oven.

Daniel Salmey: Correct.

Jon Becker: Got it. So you have two, basically have two five or six man elements now that are staged on the one side and three side. So if you want to go deliberate action, you have the ability to do that. If you need to go immediate action, you have the ability to do that, correct?

Adam Tschida: Yeah, yeah. And so, so we have that conversation with incident command. And the result, the feeling at that time was that we were still our best chance of getting the kids out safely, we still believed was through negotiation we had. And hearing this, you know, he put us on a timer. He put us, he said he's going to blow up the gas line outside the house. That seems like those facts make this a pretty black and white decision.

And the thing is, we are in a big fat bucket of gray. I mean, these aren't black and white decisions. And so we went back and forth and trusted people, trusted advisors, kind of issuing or giving their opinions. That's the decision we ended up at. So we did not initiate a deliberate rescue and continued working through negotiations.

Jon Becker: I think it's easy, like in these situations, retrospectively, you can go, oh, well, you have that information. Why do you take deliberate action? And I think that anybody that's been involved in these situations understands there's so much nuance in communication in physical circumstance that is conveying and CNT and all the operators. And just like it is that totality of the circumstances that goes, no, it's 49% gray, not 51% gray.

Adam Tschida: Yeah.

Jeff Hanson: I vividly remember thinking as we're working through this with the Hastings police chief, that, no, this guy's gonna keep talking just based on his demeanor, how he was responding to our negotiators and things.

Jon Becker: Like that, and what happens next.

Adam Tschida: Sure. So the five minute. That five minute time limit comes and goes. That time elapses, and it. We continue on. We continue on with kind of what we had been doing for the afternoon. But about at that time, Washington county is starting to finally get on scene. And so we are briefing them. They are running through deliberate action reps.

By that time, one of the Washington county assistant commanders, we had. We had taken over part of that cabinet shop, part of the air conditioned area. And rather than working out in the hot parking lot, one of the assistant commanders with Washington county had actually taped out a floor plan in there. So they were working up there.

And then we started kind of that wholesale line change where we were going to pull south Metro SWAT off the line, rehab them, and Washington county would take over. And that happened. I mean, that went smoothly. But Dan can speak to a little bit of what that looked like back at the command post, because I say it went smoothly.

It went as smoothly as this big crap sandwich of a bunch of super hot heat, heat, illness, suffering, SWAT team members peeling gear off and trying to hydrate and rehab can go. And Dan does a great job explaining kind of what that looked like. I was in the command post for a lot of it, but he was front and center for kind of what that switch out looked like.

Daniel Salmey: Yeah. So Washington county was all ready to go. They showed up out there to relieve us. You know, one of the first positions that we wanted to switch out was the driver, the bearcat. Now, I talked about my team members, you know, complaining about not sweating. And when I say complaining, they're just informing. Informing me that they're not sweating anymore. They're informing me that they're having headaches. And they're cramped up. They're not complaining to me, Evan.

Jon Becker: Yeah, they're just. They're just making you aware of their readiness and how it's beginning to decline.

Daniel Salmey: So they're telling me all this. My driver that I had up there had told me, you know, I'm. I have a headache, and I can't feel my legs. He had told me that probably a half an hour prior to this whole changeover happened. And I told him, I said, hey, I just need you to hang in for 30 more minutes. We'll get you out of there. 30 minutes, man. That's all I need.

But when it came time to pull him out of that driver's seat, we had to go in the Bearcat and physically pull him out of the driver's seat. He could not feel his legs anymore. He could not move his legs anymore. It took us, you know, three operators to get him out of the seat. Two of the Washington county fresh guys went in there to help do this, thankfully, partly because one of them was going to jump in the seat.

So that way, we weren't without an ability to break in that front door if we needed to. And then our medic was right there, the one I referenced earlier. But that that situation was bad. We had to carry him into the vehicle to get him back to staging. He could not walk. I got the rest of my guys switched out, put him in the car. We got back to staging, and thankfully, and I got a credit Hastings fire for probably taking most of the lead on this, they had gone through some pretty significant. I mean, I wasn't expecting to have so much support when I got back, because this not usually what happens in these things.

You know, we're not usually to this bad of a degree, but somebody somewhere, thank God, recognized it and set up a pretty decent rehab center with, you know, we had a bunch of medic rigs there. There was a greyhound bus with air conditioning running there. There was food, there was water, there was Gatorade. There was all this stuff there waiting for us. We just needed to get there.

So we got back to the staging area. We walked into this main kind of office, air conditioned area, this woodworking business. And the thing that stands out most to me is how significant it was that I'm watching my guys go in, I'm following them in. I'm the last one in, last one in the vehicle, first one out, last one in the. In the office to make sure everyone's getting in there and getting checked out.

But I remember there being a bunch of firefighters there and they were helping my operators pull their gear off because they couldn't physically lift their arms above their head anymore. And then they were shuffling him into this room and there was a medic there, like a. A medic that was just kind of doing an assessment, a quick assessment, and it was like, you need to go here or you need to go there. Here was you're getting an IV and you're going to sit here and we're going to push some fluids into you. We're going to give you some water. In the second year, you're going to start eating the other ones. You're going to go here and I'm going to monitor your heart rate and stuff for a little bit. And then you're going to go in the greyhound bus. And, you know, I'm just looking back on my notes here, but I think we had a whole box of IVs, which is about twelve operators got a full IV. Like a big iv.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Daniel Salmey: Three were transported to the hospital because of heat exhaustion. And then the rest of us that didn't get an iv ended up just getting monitored for a while. And then we got put into that greyhound bus where we got some food and stuff. So not the most pleasant scene to see, for sure, but super thankful that, you know, whoever set that up, that means that, hands down, I think, mitigated some severe risk to the team.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Which, I mean, that very easily could have been one of your guys dying from heat exhaustion or heat stroke. So. Okay, so you guys are sitting in the wood shop, sitting in the greyhound bus, sitting in the hospital, rehabbing, drinking Gatorade, getting iv's. And the sheriff's department.

Adam Tschida: Washington County SWAT, arrived on scene and conducted that switch out. And their team is very similar to our team. It's a countywide team, multi jurisdictional. The team members are made up of city police officers and then also sheriff's deputies from that neighboring jurisdiction. So that switch has happened. Dan's group is rehabbing and this is where we CNT has been, as Jeff has explained, kind of throughout this has been on the phone, text messaging, even up at the Bearcat, face to face with the suspect throughout the afternoon. He now starts making, he's made all kinds of demands. Right?

Jon Becker: They always do. One of my favorite SWAT commanders, Kevin Cyr from RCMP, when I interviewed him, said, we get on scene and they always want us to release prisoners in Russia and do these things. I, you know, his, my response is always like, I can get pizza.

Adam Tschida: Right. Yeah, exactly.

Jon Becker: So Jeff is trying to negotiate a pizza, probably, right?

Adam Tschida: Yeah.

Jeff Hanson: Well, this turns out to be a cat.

Adam Tschida: Yeah, this is, yeah, this is. Speaking of just crazy demands, this was a good one. So, so the suspect is he kind of as, as this thing shakes out, he is. Becomes very, very concerned for the welfare of this cat in the trailer. Far more concerned about this cat than his two children. And so he works out a deal to lower his daughter, the twelve year old girl, out of one of the windows of the trailer where she'd be holding this cat. His daughter would then walk over to the garden shed and secure the cat in the garden shed.

And then I be allowed to return to the trailer. He would raise her back up, bring her back into the trailer and then we would move on, move on with our lives here. We would continue what we were doing because he was worried when officers came into the trailer that we would somehow hurt or kill his cat. And so that arrangement was made. Jeff's negotiator said, yep, that sounds good. Let's do that.

Well, in the meantime, we're relaying that information to Washington County SWAT that's up in position to see this whole thing shake out. And that's what happens. So he opens up the, the window, he lowers this girl down, she's holding the cat. And two Washington county operators were in position by that garden shed, kind of by those trees, and they see her start moving that direction. Those two operators broke from cover ran right between the garden shed and the trailer house and scooped her up and get her out of there.

And when we talk about this and we presented this different times, I call special attention to those two guys. And this is kind of the way I explain it. You know, we, in our world, in our society, we throw around the word hero, like all the time. You just see in the example I use, you know, you have some, some lady pull over the side of the road and like move the turtle, a snapping turtle from the middle of the road to the ditch. And the local newspaper does a write up on this hero.

Jon Becker: That hero.

Adam Tschida: Yeah, right. Never mind that she, you know, almost caused a 15 car pile up because she pulled over in a dumb spot or something like that. But that, but she's called a hero. These two guys, the two, the two gentlemen from Washington county, like they did some hero stuff there.

Jon Becker: Yeah, for sure.

Adam Tschida: This guy threatened to kill police officers. He pointed out, you know, handgun. They heard a racking of a slide on the phone and they ran right past him. They broke cover from where they were scooped up this little girl and ran right past the suspect and got her out of there to safety.

Jon Becker: How did he lower her down? Does he have her on a rope or how does he physically do it?

Adam Tschida: That is a good question, to be honest with you. I don't know. And in the videos that I've seen, I don't know that that was captured.

Jon Becker: So they don't have to cut her off of something or they just s***** her up and run.

Adam Tschida: Yeah. She was kind of in, out in space. So in no man's land between the trailer and where that shed was, I'm thinking he just kind of with his arms, lowered her out of that window.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Adam Tschida: But to be honest, I'm not exactly sure.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And was dumb enough to think that you guys were going to give her back, which is awesome. And Jeff, that was a great job, lying to him like that and saying, sure, we'll send her back.

Adam Tschida: Yeah. Well, that. That created a pretty unique opportunity. So he was under the impression she was coming back and then she didn't, and so he lost his mind. The suspect, he was pretty mad at us for not keeping up our end of the bargain. And like I just said, that created a unique opportunity for Jeff, and I'll turn it over to him because he can kind of explain the tap dance in ballet.

Jeff Hanson: Yeah. And maybe it's important to add just a little bit of context on how we got to a cat. What would generally happen is he would, the suspect would dip down and say, okay, you guys are going to kill me today. You are going to come in here and kill me today. I'm going to kill as many as you. And that would be, you know, a low point in our negotiations. That's what caused him concern about the cat, that when we come in, that we're going to hurt the cat.

So just to add some context on how we got to this cat negotiation that took an awful long time to make it happen. Once we did, the negotiator on the phone that did all the work did not know that tactical was going to snap, s***** up the girl, and shame on me for not telling him that. But it created a really good, I guess, for lack of a better term, a time to transition out teams. We generally, in the negotiation world, don't ever transfer, switch out a negotiator.

Once you get a negotiator, you're stuck with them. And that's just the way it is. This had gone on for so long, and I was just getting the feeling that the negotiator was getting sick of dealing with this guy's ups and downs.

Jon Becker: Yeah, he's getting frustrated himself, right?

Jeff Hanson: Yeah. And so now the suspect is just raging, at which point, I thought it would be a really good idea to switch out negotiators. Cause he didn't care who he was talking to. He just wanted to yell at somebody.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jeff Hanson: Thankfully, Washington county negotiators were there, and that was their introduction to this suspect. Him screaming at them on the phone.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Adam Tschida: And so this is about just to kind of reset our timeline here. This rescue where we grabbed the girl was about. At 10:00 p.m. so about 2200 hours, she's out of the equation. So now we have the suspect and the four year old boy, Jeff, has conducted that swap between Washington county and South metro.

So Washington county is now primary in negotiations. And I'm also starting to make arrangements for a third team to come. South Metro SWAT, the folks that were rehabbed and ready to deploy back out. We're starting to work some of that to give the Washington county operators a chance to come back, get their gear off, get into some air conditioning, and that sort of thing. But we also, like, there wasn't necessarily an end in sight on this thing yet.

And so I made a request for a third team to head our direction, and that was the. The Ramsey County SWAT team. And so they border our service area to the north. Again, very similar makeup, multi jurisdictional team. Ramsey county is the county that the St. Paul police Department or the city of St. Paul is in, and then the kind of first ring suburbs around St. Paul.

So they're en route, and it is around, I don't know, 1130 ish, maybe around midnight. By the time they get on scene, I brief them up, and they start working a deliberate rescue plan, and then we. And then we start really talking about conducting a deliberate rescue on this matter.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Because how long have we been going now?

Jeff Hanson: At that time, I would say nine or 10 hours, 9 hours. Active, ongoing negotiations for over 9 hours.

Jon Becker: Okay. And then is his mental state beginning to deteriorate, or is it staying pretty.

Jeff Hanson: Consistent when tactical snatched up his daughter? I don't feel like we ever got him back to a baseline.

Jon Becker: Got it. Yeah. Still absolutely the right decision, because you just reduced your problem by. I mean, if you count the cat, you've reduced your problems by two thirds. If you don't count the cat, then you've reduced your problem by half.

Jeff Hanson: I don't think we counted the cat.

Adam Tschida: But maybe we should have.

Jon Becker: I wouldn't have. Yeah. I personally would have threatened the cat, offered to trade the cat for the kid, you know?

Adam Tschida: So that's where we are. Washington. A mix and match of Washington county and south metro are downrange on the trailer. Ramsey county has arrived on scene, and Jeff and I and the Washington county commander, along with the Ramsey county commander, sit down with incident command.

And this is what we go through. We've been out here. We just alluded to it hours and hours and hours, and kind of lay out the points for making the decision to conduct a deliberate rescue. And these were those points initially when he first referred to the. The kids as hostages and put us on that timeline we talked about. And we felt that our biggest chance for success was still through negotiation.

Well, we have been through countless more hours, countless more negotiations, more deals, more working with this man, and he has not followed through with anything. That opinion had shifted from believing that we could still negotiate. That boy out to feeling like we are just not going to get there through negotiations. So that was one factor.

The second factor that played into this decision was that shortly after he lost his mind and became very upset with us for scooping up that girl, he kind of disappeared. And so we had had very consistent contact with the suspect over the phone, at the window and that sort of thing throughout the whole duration of this event.

In addition, we would, on a pretty regular basis, see the hostages. We'd see the girl in the window, or Jeff's negotiators would hear them in the background on the phone. And so shortly after the girl was rescued, we no longer saw the boy.

Jon Becker: Oh, boy!

Adam Tschida: So it was. And that time was growing to, like a couple hours since we had last been able to verify the welfare of the boy. So he's not talking. We haven't. We don't know his status. We know the suspect was very mad, and we haven't seen the boy, really since. And then the third factor and the final factor that that played into this was that we were ready. We were ready to conduct a deliberate rescue. Ramsey county was briefed up. They repped out the deliberate rescue plan. South metro SWAT, their component of the rescue, they were good to go.

And then Washington County's parts and pieces of it were also ready, but we were not going to stay ready for long. South Metro SWAT was getting to the end of their operational period. We were going to have to stand down and just be done. We were taxed. Washington county got there a couple hours after us, but they were out online through some of the hottest hours of the day, and they weren't far behind us.

And so we were ready to go then, but we weren't going to maintain that status for real long, and we were going to need to call in more resources, which, like I mentioned before, it's not as simple as hitting the button and having them stand in front of you.

Jon Becker: Yeah, for sure.

Adam Tschida: It's ours.

Jon Becker: Well, and there's, and there's a brief up curve where everybody's got to figure out what's going on and, you know, and then you got to swap people out. So, Dan, at this point, like, in your brain, you got three teams involved now, right. You know, and yours is a multi jurisdictional team. So, I mean, you know, we're talking five, six agencies. How do you see the actual tactical execution of a deliberate plan going with, like, like, who is doing what?

Daniel Salmey: Yeah, so I had talked to Adam when this came to fruition where we were, where we are talking about actually hitting the button and doing this. So it was, it was, this was the plan. The plan was, I was back in the Bearcat with my team on the one side. Ramsey county was their part of the deliberate action that they were working on was getting into that three side door. That was their portion of the deliberate action.

So they were ready to do that. So they were going to go on the three side. We were going to go on the one side, and then they were going to take the bedroom in the back, and we were going to take everything up front.

Jon Becker: Now, when you say front and back, by do you mean that you're taking the master bedroom or they're taking the master bedroom? You're taking the rest of the trailer?

Daniel Salmey: So they were going to take the master bedroom, that one that's on the two side that goes from the one side to the three side.

Jon Becker: Yep.

Daniel Salmey: As far away from the one side door as possible. They were going to eat up that whole thing because that was a very likely place that our hostage would be.

Jon Becker: Sure.

Daniel Salmey: We were going to take basically everything else in the trailer.

Jon Becker: Yep.

Daniel Salmey: The front of the trailer, towards the foreside, the middle of the trailer, which was a living area and a kitchen. That was going to be our space to own when this went down. On top of all those things, we had a couple other things built in with this deliberate action plan. We had two brake and rake teams on two different windows.

One of them was on the window on the two side going into the bedroom. One of them was on a window, another window, but on the one side into the bedroom. So you get two different looks at that bedroom.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So you're basically, you know, if you think of it as it's the bedroom is affected. You know, it's like the end of the. It's the one two corner and the two three corner. You're breaking windows on the one side and the two side, which is basically two thirds of the exposures.

Daniel Salmey: Correct.

Jon Becker: And entering from the three side.

Daniel Salmey: Yes.

Jon Becker: And making entry.

Daniel Salmey: Correct.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Daniel Salmey: On top of all that, we had planned to deploy a couple of flash springs on the outside of the residence, one on the one side by my team, another one on the four side by another team, and another bearcat that arrived on scene from another agency.

And then the final piece of this whole thing was through CNT, through their work. And I'll let Jeff kind of speak to this once I mention it, but we were going to try to ruse him to the foreside of the trailer to try and separate him from the kidney.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Daniel Salmey: Jeff, if you want to fill in. Kind of what that looked like.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jeff Hanson: We had. Throughout the day, he had made requests to speak to a particular female. I can't remember the exact relationship. I think it was a friend of his. Obviously, we weren't going to bring her on site, so we put a female negotiator in the bearcat on the loudspeaker, because we couldn't reestablish phone contact with him, and we believed he was in the back of the trailer.

So prior to them making entry, the bearcat pulled up and this female pretended to be that person he was requesting to talk to, trying to draw him to the. The front of the trailer, though the. Would it be a foresight?

Daniel Salmey: Yep.

Adam Tschida: Right.

Jon Becker: Got it. All right, so. And what's the. What's the team on the four side? What?

Daniel Salmey: So that team is – It's – They're in a bearcat.

Jon Becker: What agency is it? Sorry.

Daniel Salmey: That was South Metro.

Jon Becker: Oh, because that was also. So that's. That's you guys and then one side. You guys.

Daniel Salmey: Yeah, correct.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay.

Daniel Salmey: The two ladder teams were mostly Washington County SWAT operators. And then the Ramsey county team that had just shown up was the three side entry. Deliberate entry.

Jon Becker: At these three, I mean, do you guys train together pretty regularly?

Adam Tschida: Not regularly, but we have. And our relationship with Washington county is. That's a closer relationship than us and Ramsey periodically, yes. We train together. Our team in Washington county have run a joint basic SWAT together for many years. And they are our closest team. It's not a monthly training that we're working together, but it's a time or two a year where we're at least seeing faces, shaking hands, doing some reps and stuff.

Jon Becker: Yeah. But when they show up, you're not walking up and saying, hi, my name's Adam.

Adam Tschida: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. Just that the huge importance of those, you know, those relationships. Right? But even with us training together, this is still, you have parts and pieces of three different teams coming at this thing.

And I think, and one of the things worth noting here, too, is that, you know, on a hostage rescue, in a perfect hostage rescue, which sounds just silly to say because there's nothing perfect about them, you have your immediate action team, your crisis entry team on site ready to go, and then you have all your elements of the deliberate rescue plan, those operators repping that out together, and then they switch.

And so everybody that is ready to conduct that deliberate rescue has just done it. They communicated it. They briefed it. They kind of hashed out the little nuances of it, and then they move into position and then they're ready to conduct that rescue.

Jon Becker: And did you guys run reps with these teams? Did you have a chance to do that?

Adam Tschida: That was never going to happen here. I mean, that just the way the number of personnel we had on scene and just the breakdown of this, this situation, there was not going to be that wholesale change out. And so to get everybody to conduct this deliberate rescue on the same sheet of music was. It was no small task.

Jon Becker: No. That's crazy when you basically, I mean, I think that the best thing you could do at that point is to bifurcate the problem. Right? We're going in here in this direction. You're going here in that direction and try to deconflict fields of fire as much as you possibly can. But, yeah, this is ambitious.

Adam Tschida: Yeah. And I think we. It went, the entry went well, and I think a big part of that was just a testament to the professionalism and the ability of the guys and gals out there doing it. But I think on the front end, what we ended up doing was when the plan was in place, I ended up calling each, each leader of each component of this that was out at the trailer and going through the whole plan with them and then their specific piece.

Once those phone calls were done, I got on the air and briefed it through the whole thing again, rehashing the plan in its entirety, the overview and then each component, what their assignment was going to do, what their assignment was going to be. And then finally I did a roll call for each leader of each component and had them brief it back on the air.

Jon Becker: Oh, that's fantastic!

Adam Tschida: So, so what that did and that. I think that's why it worked.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Common operating picture for everybody.

Adam Tschida: Exactly. Because they heard it once from me on the phone, they heard it once on the air, and then everybody heard it again when the. The Tl's or the – Those leaders of those respective groups briefed it back.

Jon Becker: Out of curiosity, in the brief back, was there any point that somebody said something that was not correct?

Adam Tschida: I don't think so.

Daniel Salmey: Yeah, I don't. I don't think there was. There was, I think, one time where one very small correction was made, but it was. It was so minute that I just recall you correcting one person and It wasn't something that, even if it wasn't caught, it wouldn't have wrecked.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I'm going to the one corner. No, you're going. I'm going to the one side. No, you're going to the four side. It was like, you know, small dog puppy.

Adam Tschida: Right.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Adam Tschida: So once that was done, it was. The directive was, like Jeff just said, to initiate this. We were hoping to draw the suspect to that. To the four side window furthest away from where we believe that young boy was probably in. In the back bedroom, the two side bedroom. We wanted that separation. Well, he never came.

And so I, we realized, well, that this just doesn't seem like this is going to happen. He's just not going to come to that window. And so I turned command and control over to the team leader for the Ramsey county team. They were our primary entry team. They were going into that three side door immediately hooking a right and getting into that bedroom.

And so that team leader took over command and control and ultimately initiated that rescue. Ramsey county came in the three side door simultaneous to Dan's team coming into the one side, and then those port teams in through the windows.

Jon Becker: Mechanical breach, explosive breach.

Daniel Salmey: Everything was mechanical. The windows, the doors, everything was mechanical. My door on the one side, we use the Bearcat ram because that was the door, if you recall where we saw.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it was barred.

Daniel Salmey: It was barred.

Jon Becker: Okay, so you smash it with the Bearcat ram.

Daniel Salmey: Correct.

Jon Becker: To affect your entry, which certainly. Probably shakes the trailer impressively.

Daniel Salmey: And while this is all going down, there's a flashback that goes off on the one side from my team and then one from the four side.

Jon Becker: Again, this is a pretty overwhelming experience.

Adam Tschida: Yeah. And we talked about an explosive breach on that three side door and talked at length with it, about it with Ramsey county commander and then the team leader that's going to be running that team. And they were very comfortable and very confident on. We had some intel on that door and what it looked like and materials, and it was an outward pull door. And they had worked. They had repped those doors out in training, trailer park doors that pull out, and they were very confident in setting a pick, setting a hoolie, popping that door and getting in, and it. And they got through the door fast. I've watched the body cam footage of that portion of this many times, and it. It was efficient. I mean, it worked well. So, yeah, to answer your question, mechanical all the way around.

Jon Becker: Okay. So they push the big red button and what happens?

Adam Tschida: Yeah. So everybody moves in, kind of as it was laid out in the plan. Ramsey county makes entry in the three side, gets in and locates both suspect and juvenile, the four year old boy in that bedroom, they're both on the bed. A number of the Ramsey county operators address the suspect, get hands on him right away, and then the others, you know, they grab the boy, get separation, and kind of exfil him out that three side doors, carry him out, and get him out of there.

While that is happening, Dan's element is clearing the front side of the house, kind of working from the fore, the four side back down towards Ramsey county, and the residence is cleared. The suspect wasn't real compliant. I mean, he kind of fought a little bit with the tactical folks in there, but they ended up taking him into custody and then. And then carrying him out as well.

Jon Becker: What's interesting about this as a hostage rescue, is so often the hostage rescue ends with the guy being shot. This is one of the few that I can remember in recent times where you have a no kidding HRT with it, with a tactical intervention that just ends in a fistfight. And the guy going to custody, that's. I mean, it's a testament to the discipline of the operators to not go in and kill him, right? Yeah, it would have been very easy to go in and kill him. Did he, in fact, have a weapon in the trailer?

Adam Tschida: The detectives later did a search warrant, and they found it was a toy pistol. A toy gun. So he…

Jon Becker: So he would have been killed for a toy gun?

Adam Tschida: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Jon Becker: That's really, I mean, that is. That is impressive all the way around. Nobody, you know, no conflicting fields of fire. Nobody fires a shot that they don't have to suspect goes. So often the narrative with SWAT teams is, oh, you know, they're so violent and they just go in and they just want to go in and kill people and rough things up. And like, this is a perfect example of where, you know, that that isn't the case.

Adam Tschida: Right. Yeah. Yep.

Jon Becker: So let's talk. You know, obviously, this is, this is a huge success. You, you guys s***** victory out of the jaws of, you know, heat induced defeat. Let's talk through lessons learned. What do you, what are the things that, you know, you take away from this and go, we could have done this better?

Adam Tschida: Yeah, I, I think. I think that's, it's twofold. And when we talk about this incident with other folks in the tactical community, the emphasis on having relationships with people that do what you do. And so, and so in our world, that means other SWAT teams. Right. That have similar capabilities, similar philosophies and just are willing to come and help when, when an incident is, is too big for your team to handle.

And the fact of the matter is, like, there is going to be that incident, right. No matter how big your team is, you're going to run into something that's just too big for your team to handle on its own. Like I said, at the onset of this, our team is roughly 50 operators large. You know, Washington county is very similar in size, and Ramsey is, too. I mean, that's a lot of personnel. And this was, and this taxed us almost to the limit. And so to have that relationship established ahead of time is a huge takeaway from this.

And I think it is also worth noting, one of the words I use there is relationship. That doesn't mean that you simply have a team identified, that you're going to have your dispatcher look up a phone number for their commander and I and give them a call when you need help. It means that you know them. It means that you're not doing the introduction that you alluded to John at the command bus when they're, they're out there, you know. Hey, I'm Adam, you know, d*** glad to meet you. Now let's try to work this thing.

Jon Becker: Nice to meet you. Let's go do a multi port integrated hostage rescue. Four year old.

Adam Tschida: Yeah. It means that you have, you have their number in your cell phone. It means you know a little bit about them and their team that you have trained together. You have talked through some philosophy stuff. You sat at a conference, your state association or NTOA, and had a beer with them into the evening and discussed shop. You know, it's having that relationship.

So I think that's a huge takeaway from this. I think the other big takeaway is that having that relationship is fine. You need it. It's very important. But you also have to be smart enough to know when to make that call and ask for help. You know, we got behind on this one. We were lucky that it worked out the way it did.

You know, Dan did such a good job of explaining what type of condition his guys were in when they came offline. They were having firefighters pull their gear off. A few minutes before those firefighters pulled their gear off, they were standing in front of a trailer where it was very likely they were going to have to make the biggest, quickest decision in their life. Very literally, life and death situ. A life and death decision.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah, 100%.

Adam Tschida: And they. And they were so fatigued and so hot. And that was a miss. That was a fail, a huge fail on my part. I was hearing the information and I wasn't requesting help soon enough. And I think one of the things that Jon, you and I talked about this call last week, and one of the, one of the phrases you used I think is so worthwhile mentioning here, it's the idea of, like, now we got it. That idea of, nah, nah, we got it. We just have to. In law enforcement and specifically SWAT, like, that's just gotta get out of our vernacular.

We are so ready as a profession to offer help. You know, on patrol, you'll be, you know, listening to another precinct or a neighboring agency and they have a big call come out and you start floating that way because you're just waiting to be asked or you just want to go. We're so good at offering help and giving help, and we are so bad at asking for it or accepting it. The nah, we got it. That almost cost us dearly in this incident. It didn't. Like I said, we got away with it. But that philosophy for people listening to this, and I know, and the people listening to this have all said that.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting because you talk to tactical guys, right? And everybody, I mean, we're. Look, we're all alpha males. We all want to solve our own problems. None of us want to take help. And yet every tactical operator is a contingency planner. Right? They think constantly about, okay, what if this happens? And what if this happens? And how do we do that?

And yet somehow, when it comes to asking and receiving help, we have this giant block that prohibits us, you know, and it's – And this block is not just in this situation. It's, oh, we're in a shooting and I'm emotionally traumatized and I need to talk to somebody. No, no, no. I got it.

And it's just, I think if you were to say, what is the Achilles heel of SWat teams? I got it. Is the Achilles heel of SWAT teams and of operators that so often leads to catastrophe and so often leads to guys committing suicide and guys, you know, refusing to take help. And I think it's a really valid point. I really do think it's a personality defect that every alpha male has.

Adam Tschida: Right.

Jon Becker: That they're just not, you know, so, I mean, one of the things I love when we first talked about this, and part of the reason I wanted to do this debrief with you guys is you own this from the first 37, I had known you for 30 seconds and you're like, no, I really screwed this up. And it's so often now with debriefs, they've become hero stories. And this is certainly a heroic story, but that's not where the gain in listening to a debrief comes from. Right? It's the lessons. So asking for help, obviously. Big one. What else?

Adam Tschida: Those were the big ones for me. I think Dan and I have talked about some, like, missed opportunity parts and pieces throughout the afternoon. He can, he can hit on that. And those are valid and certainly worth worth mentioning.

Jon Becker: What did you miss down?

Daniel Salmey: So one of the, I had mentioned before that he constantly was coming to the window while he was talking to CNT would come in the window and start shouting at us and then go back inside. And he come in the window and starts shouting at us, go back inside.

One of the tactical options that I was considering at the bearcat when I'm sitting there was, man, when he comes to the window, do we just lasso him or grab him and hold onto him and then hit the button and go and just hold him?

Jon Becker: Hold on. Physically grab him?

Daniel Salmey: Just physically grab him. Hold him. It would certainly be at a very high risk to our operators to do something like that. But the goal here is to save the four year old boy and the twelve year old.

Jon Becker: Well, and I mean, obviously, if he's coming to the window, there's also the Sierra option, right? Yes. Which in this case, is challenging, yes, because we don't know for sure he has a gun and he's not imminently threatening. And, you know, like, I live in California, that would be murder in California, in Texas, that would be considered a viable text, you know, viable option. But, you know, Minnesota's kind of between the two. Right? Like, I think it's, it certainly had to be going through your brain. But, I mean, what do you do? Right?

Daniel Salmey: Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, more, more things on my level is when that, that five minute countdown happened my team was still at the bearcat. Granted, we were in rough shape. You know, I, we were in very bad shape. But I thought to myself, do I go with a five minute? I mean, they told, they told us in the air, he just gave a five minute warning that he's going to blow us all up.

And I was, do I, do I initiate it here on the ground, not even asking permission? Because I certainly could do that. Sure, I could do that, but I didn't because I wasn't, you know, obviously information's golden, right? You, you don't have all the information. With that one sentence, he gave a five minute warning. You don't have all the information. It's not like a gunshot that went off, so I didn't go.

Jon Becker: Do you think that the fatigue played any part in that decision? Like, do you think that, because obviously, you know, five minute comes and goes and, and there's been a lot of discussion, and there's always a lot of discussion about ultimatums because, you know, it's – Is the guy a promise keeper? Right? Is he somebody, I mean, this guy is not a promise keeper. He has not done anything that he said he was going to do. He's nothing. You know, he's lied the whole time. Right?

So he's not a promise keeper, but yet he's made a timeline. And it's like if, if at five, you know, at 459, you hear, you know, a shot. Well, yeah. So that's got to be weighing on you. And do you think that the fatigue and, and the situation helped drive that decision? Or was it just we do not have enough information to initiate?

Daniel Salmey: No, I think the fatigue, for sure. Washington definitely in my mind when I made the decision not to do that, because, I mean, I was looking at my, my guys and this whole now we got it stuff, you know, I was asking them and constantly asking them because I was getting so concerned for their welfare, you know, hey, man, you good.

Adam Tschida: Yeah.

Daniel Salmey: Yeah, I'm good. You know, and one of the things I learned from the situation is you can't go up to a SWAT operator and that's been in the heat for 4 and a half, 5 hours near heat exhaustion, and ask them if they're good because they're going to say yes. And they're going to lie to your.

Jon Becker: Face because it just goes back to what we were just talking about. Right. Like, no, I got it. I got it. And when he passes out, he will still be saying, I got correct. Yeah. And I think that is one of the challenges of leadership is frequently as a leader, you're having to make very difficult decisions and you're having to impose your will. Right? Because none of the guys want to pull off. They all want to save the kid. And they've been working this problem and they want to see it through to resolution. But I think that is one of the challenges, especially the tactical commander, of being the one that goes, no, you're leaving. And it's difficult. It's a difficult decision.

Adam Tschida: Right. Yeah.

Jon Becker: And it's a recurring theme in debriefs. I will tell you, in all the events that we've done, all the debriefs that I've been to, it is a recurring theme of the tactical commander having to just go, you're leaving, and then deal with the consequences downstream.

Adam Tschida: Right.

Jon Becker: Anything else you can think of, Dan?

Daniel Salmey: Yeah. Just a word of the wise. If you are going to decide to weld a bunch of stuff on your bearcat ram before a 96 degree heat index SWAT call, it's probably a bad idea.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think that's certainly proven that. Jeff, from your perspective, from a C and T perspective, what are the four lessons learned?

Jeff Hanson: You know, I think for me there's – There was probably three takeaways. One is the communication piece. We're. We're laser focused on being effective communicators from CMT to tactical. But that's got to work both ways in order for it to be a complete success. Leaving. Leaving the team in the dark on what our intentions were. Again, we got away with it, but I should have informed them a little bit better than what I did.

Jon Becker: You mean when you say keeping the team in the arc, you mean the CNT team, correct. Yeah. So the girl being snatched up, the CNT team did not know they were not prepared for.

Jeff Hanson: Correct.

Jon Becker: Which maybe undermines their credibility with the suspect and creates a little drama.

Jeff Hanson: At the very least, it allows them just a couple of minutes to make up a rebuttal instead of being as shocked as, I mean, the primary negotiator was, it was, it was comical in hindsight because he was as shocked as the suspect was.

Another takeaway is for us not to have the attitude that we're not going to change out teams, we're not going to change out a primary negotiator. You get what you get. You can't request a new one. And that's something we should have been training on. On how are we going to. Ways to introduce another negotiator, ways to incorporate another team. It's just something we hadn't done before.

And then third is it's so rare that we get an act of ongoing negotiation with a suspect who wants to negotiate and just how much manpower on the CNT side of things that can absorb. I mean, we had nine people there and they were chewed up real quick with primary negotiators, secondary negotiator, two people to interview, other family members showing up. So that really emphasized that for me is that when we're in an act of an ongoing negotiation, nine negotiators isn't too much.

And it's funny because when you talk about it, people are like, holy cow, nine negotiators. What did you do with everyone?

Jon Becker: Yeah. You know, as I'm going through this, like there, there really, I mean, other than maybe a bathroom, there is nothing smaller than a single wide trailer home for a hostage. You know, this for an HRT, this is as small as an HRT gets next to like a garden shed or a bathroom.

Adam Tschida: Right.

Jon Becker: And as you're listing this through, we got, what, three or four. Three. Three SWAT teams involved.

Adam Tschida: Three. Three teams.

Jon Becker: Three teams involved. Nine negotiators hit, you know, firefighters galore. I mean, it's like 100 people.

Adam Tschida: Yeah. And it wasn't too many.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It wasn't enough.

Adam Tschida: Right? Yeah, yeah, we needed them.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's really interesting because you think like, one guy in a trailer, how much personnel and teams tend to think like, oh, yeah, no, we're good. We can do a hostage rescue. And it's like, I mean, here you've got close to 100 people to rescue one hostage from one guy in a single wide trailer.

Adam Tschida: Right.

Jon Becker: That gives you an, admittedly heat conditions and other things that drove it. But just the utter complexity of even, you know, a quote unquote simple hostage rescue as though that were a thing. I think that's a really valid point, is that you've really got to think about your personnel and you've got to raise the flag early.

Adam Tschida: Yeah. Yep. Exactly. Because people are ready to help. We all are. I mean, if the shoes on the other foot, you know, you know, you'd go and help your neighboring team. You just want to be asked, like, we're ready. Ask us. We'll be on the way. Like I said a few minutes ago, you just got to be smart enough to recognize when to ask, because the help will come. It will come. It'll come like crazy. If you have those relationships established, you just, you have to ask.

Jon Becker: I think that's a really good place for us to stop. Guys, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it, and it was really enlightening.=!

Adam Tschida: Yeah. Thanks for having us!

Jon Becker: Thank you!