Episode 27 – Lessons From an Office Down and Traumatic Hostage Incident – Orlando, FL

Jon Becker: In June of 2018, two years after the Pulse nightclub attacks, Orlando police officers responded to a domestic violence call. As officers attempted to contact the suspect, he fired a shot through his door, striking officer Kevin Valencia with wounds that he would eventually succumb to.

The suspect then barricaded in his apartment with his four children as hostages. This event, which would last more than 24 hours, proved extremely difficult and required the resources of both the Orlando Police Department SWAT team and their partners from the Orange County Sheriff's SWAT team before finally reaching a tragic resolution.

My guests today are Captain Jonathan Bigelow from the Orlando Police Department and Sergeant Chris Eklund with the Orange County, Florida Sheriff's office to discuss the incident and share their lessons learned. This episode will be dedicated to the memory of Officer Kevin Valencia.

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 so much for being here! I appreciate you taking the time to do this!

Chris Eklund: Absolutely.

Jonathan Bigelow: Thank you for having us, really!

Jon Becker: Why don't we start with your personal backgrounds, Chris? Why don't you tell me about your history? How did you get here?

Chris Eklund: Well, actually, I'm kind of a thousand miles away from where I was growing up. I grew up in Massachusetts, graduated from college, and started realizing after a little short break that it was time to find something real to do with my life. Being from Massachusetts, I didn't really have any relatives who were in the law enforcement world.

My parents had moved to Florida a couple years prior right when I got out of college. So I decided to come down to Florida and started the arduous search of trying to find a place to work. It actually applied at the Orlando police Department, was summarily denied that position.

Jon Becker: We still love you.

Chris Eklund: Yes, thank you! And being from Massachusetts, I really didn't have a grasp on what being employed by a sheriff's office was, because in Massachusetts, it's a process server or work in the jail type of thing.

So I never really even looked at the sheriff's office, and I was actually approached by my neighbor, who was good friends with the sheriff of Orange county at the time. Asked if I had applied there. I hadn't, so I did. A short period after that going through the process and things like that. My neighbor brought over his wireless phone and said, here, talk to your boss. Next thing I know is getting offered a job at Orange county. That was 1999.

Jon Becker: Give me context on Orange county. Like, how many deputies? How big is the department?

Chris Eklund: Right about now, we're sitting about 1650, 1700 sworn, probably another 800, 5900 civilians. We cover about a population of about 1.4 million these days. It's a 1003 square mile type of an area. Basically surrounds the Disney area, the Disney corridor type areas like that on the north end. Part of it spans to the south in a different county. So we have all that to deal with, all kinds of tourism and things like that. A wide variety of people coming and going.

Jon Becker: Give me context from a team standpoint. Tell me a little bit about the team.

Chris Eklund: So the team is, we're a decentralized team. So to say that is to say that we have a part time contingent that's made up of 15 operators and some senior leadership. So two team leaders, two squads of operators, then a lieutenant and a captain.

And then we have about another 23, well, actually more like 26 part time operators who do another job besides just being on SWAT. And then we have six tactical medics that are assigned to us, that are deputies. They're not fire or anything. They're prior paramedics and things like that that make up the team.

Jon Becker: So full time, I mean, full team strength is 40 ish.

Chris Eklund: Yes.

Jon Becker: Got it. Jon, talk to me about you. Where'd you, where'd you grow up? Give me the brief history.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah, I was born in Michigan, just outside of the Detroit suburbs of Detroit, and moved down to South Florida in the early nineties. And my parents got a transfer there for work. And I attended Florida State University, went there, realized I was, I guess, when I started high school down in South Florida and became a part of the Explorers program down there, that I always knew that I wanted to be a cop.

So I went to ice. I went to college at FSU for criminology and came back, started working in Parkland, Florida, as we all know, that was put on the map, you know, several years ago with that whole incident. That was my alma mater, worked there for a couple years.

And then a buddy of mine from college said, hey, are you doing anything? I'm like, well, I'm working here. He's like, why don't you come up here and work? I said, okay. So I applied for the Orlando police Department, and I was hired. I started there and just after 911 in December of zero one. So I've been there ever since. And, you know, I'm very fortunate to have the career that I've had so far.

Jon Becker: Talk to me about the team.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah, the team is, man, I almost get teared up when I talk about the team because such good group of individuals. We're a part time team, 45 to anywhere to 45 to 48 operators. We got some techs in there, two ER docs that are phenomenal from our level one trauma center embedded in our team. Got a lot of resources. I served on the team for 13 years on the incident that I think we're talking about today is I rounded out my career as a deputy team commander, but just overall, pretty busy. Team Metro, or I guess you can say the city jurisdiction of Orlando is our department sizes at the time of 2018 was somewhere in the low eight hundred s, and now 2023, we're almost cresting in the mid 900.

So we've grown some, some size and we're covering some, you know, 300,000 people over 114 sq. miles. And we got a lot of territory that we're covering. But I'd like to tell people the easiest thing to say when you talk about Orlando, because everybody knows Orlando for Disney and Universal and stuff like that, but our peanut butter is in Orange County's chocolate.

Jon Becker: I don't know whether that was a good description or a little too graphic.

Chris Eklund: I wouldn't have said it.

Jonathan Bigelow: Take it out.

Jon Becker: Oh, no, it's going to stay. Okay. So let's start with the incident. Give me date. Give me context. How does this thing kick off?

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah, so this is a crappy scenario. I'd like to, I guess, start by saying on June 11th, 2018, that, you know, cops are cops, and they do everything with the best of intentions to get the job done and to resolve problems and save people's lives. But on this case, in this scenario, we ended up losing somebody and one of our few that have been lost to crime and to evil. I guess what you can say.

But in the early, in the late, I guess, late night of that evening on June 11th, as we responded to a domestic call, the officers met with the victim, a female victim, saying that her husband had beat her and, you know, was threatening her, and she vacated the apartment where they were staying at the time. And it's just right outside. It's in our southwest area of town, and it's near universal studios, just to give some operational direction of where we were in the city.

So we were sitting there. They responded to this call, and they realized that they had felony charges. And one big thing that she had said was, I'm going to fear for my four children. And the officers that responded were like, well, why? You know, okay, so he deprived you of your phone, which gave us our felony, and you. He beat you, which is a domestic violence thing in the state of Florida and probably anywhere in the United States.

Okay, what else? You know, he might have guns. He's on probation for 45 years for arson and. Okay, okay. You know, he had all these little red flags. Well, where does he – Where would he keep a gun? Oh, he keeps it. Keep it in a car, in a closet or. These are the things. And she gave some of the circumstances, but she kept hitting home about how she was in fear for her, for her children.

So the officers, you know, they sought some assistance, and I guess it was a slower night in Orlando that night. So they all rallied up and tried to go make good, make contact with the individual, the suspect, if you will. We're not going to name them, but they were provided some keys, they did some homework, realized that there was no gun in the car. Apartment was dark.

Now to lay out the apartment kind of sucks because it was a, I say a standard apartment complex building where you have two different rows of stairwells on a large structure that was three levels high. And the room, their apartment was on the middle level on the second story, and it was deeper off at the parking lot. So they're at the door and they tried to make contact with the individual to take him into custody, and that's when things went south.

Jon Becker: Got it. So initial call is just a DV call that kind of gradually getting more and more red flags as you go on. Apartment building. This is the second floor of a three story apartment building. Two stairs coming up. Kind of describe for me, try to paint a picture of what the layout of the apartment building is. It's a long, straight hallway that all the apartments come off of. Or is it more like townhouses?

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah, it was a rectangular building as a whole. So on either side, if you just say north and south, you have stairwells that will traverse up all the way on either side, east and west of the actual building, that would bring occupants to those respective build of their apartments.

So then on each floor you have four doors on each hallway. So bottom floor you have two on the left, two on the right. Go down a little bit. Two on the left, two on the right. And those are the respective room. You know, the doorways to these apartments, and they're probably about anywhere from two to three bedroom apartments.

Jon Becker: Okay, makes sense. Go ahead.

Jonathan Bigelow: So it was just the distance from the, I guess the challenge is from the parking lot, where, you know, easiest line of travel would be from point a to point b, would be park up, walk up, traverse those stairs, get to the second floor, pass a doorway to one occupant, somebody's apartment, and then go to the target apartment, which was, in this case, on the right, on the backside of the apartment was sort of like a steep incline of grass and, you know, almost like a gully. What would you call that? I don't even know.

Chris Eklund: It's like a retention area and separates two different apartment complexes.

Jonathan Bigelow: So there's no easy way to just say, park up here and go here. There's no easy way. Whether you go up one stairwell or not, you're getting to the same.

Jon Becker: Yeah. You're ending up in the funnel no matter what you do. And there's no easy external access.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah. The only difference is, if I go up from the parking lot side, I'm not. I'm not exposing myself to the windows on the side of the target location. So the target location only looked out in one direction, which in this case was. We'll call it the east because it was sort of southeast, but it's the east.

Jon Becker: Got it. It's the patrol officers. Get there, they make contact. What happens?

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah, so make contact with the victim, get the story, get the keys. They have keys in hand to go inside and try to make contact with the suspect. And they brought troops with them. Knock on the door several times to no avail. Nothing's happening. It's dark, but the car is there. So they don't think that suspect left with the four kids, but they say, hey, you know, let's do a due diligence. They try to insert the key in the. Into the key lock and turn the key, and there's some resistance there.

And in this case, I think officer Valencia, even we hear him on body camera saying to one of our. His partners, and, yeah, yeah, I think somebody's holding the lock.

Jon Becker: All right.

Jonathan Bigelow: So they try again. And they, there was a command decision made to boot the door, you know, kick the door in. So he reached around or turned around, I should say not reached around, but turned around to almost like mule kick the door to reverse and looking over his right shoulder. And when he – Mule kicks the door, that's when I – He was trying to kick it one time, and then the shot rang through the door and caught Kevin over in his face, and bullet wrapped around his head and someone dropped him.

Jon Becker: Suspect fired one round.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah, suspect fired one round. Right. Blindly through the door and ever ceased.

Jon Becker: To amaze me, man. Trained cops will fire 20 rounds, not hit anybody. Suspect fires one round through a closed door and ten range. Yeah, it's terrible. So, okay, so he goes down.

Jonathan Bigelow: So he goes down. And the assisting officers, one of our team guys at the time had. Had brought his patrol rifle with him. So it's like, okay, you know, not for enough, but you knew what, you suspected something that where you're bringing your patrol rifle with them. And we, you know, we don't have a policy where we have to ask for authorization to. To bring our long guns with us on certain calls.

So hats off to him for saying, hey, I might need additional weapon firepower. But, yeah, he had his rifle with him, sees Kevin go down, and he immediately returns fire into the. Into the closed door, into the. Into the apartment to the target location. I think he fired about five rounds. So he and his thinking. I talked to him after the fact, and Manny says he's like, yeah, I just, you know, he shot. I was like, I'm going to end this right now and get cover for him because we want to rescue Kevin and get him out of the case, but we can't do that if we're under fire.

So it was pretty instantaneous, his reaction. He goes back and says that it's probably the worst decision that he ever made. And I'm not here to talk about, you know, I guess the decision that he made or did not make, but he was fearful that those rounds could have impacted somebody else. Unintended as, but it serves the purpose. And they at least were able to extract Kevin out of the, you know, further down the hallway towards the landing of the stairwell, the top of the stairwell where they brought him down into the. Near the parking lot where they assisted in medical aid, and I extracted them to the hospital. So that's where we stood.

Jon Becker: So at what point does it is at that point they make a decision to push the red button, get you guys there and.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah, I don't, you know, the watch commander at the time, after all that, after the, probably the radio chatter happened, and shortly after that, it was, we're sounding the alarm and the team's coming. So we got that. We got the page shortly after. Right about 01:30. We were paged out in the morning, that following morning. So I guess it would be June 12th, right? June 12th, yep. Which is not a good day, as you like to say, yeah, mid June is not a good day. Two years prior, we were just dealing with pulse, but something about June in Orlando.

Chris Eklund: Hot on my side.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah, it's warm. It's warm. It's definitely warm. We got the page for the call out and said, officer down. That, honestly had been the first time that I had received a page saying that an officer was involved in something where we had one hurt and injured and shot. Officer down. I come across, and I was like, man, this is gonna stink.

Chris Eklund: Go badden.

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

Jonathan Bigelow: From the time the page out, we have always said, hey, we're going to have a 45 minutes response time, but time that page out. And the time that we were pretty much deployed after our meeting and team brief and had some assets in place was probably over that. Probably an hour, hour and 15. We were right about that, or about that time, but we're just shy at that.

Jon Becker: Patrol. Officers are holding down, basically holding a perimeter.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah, we didn't. The patrol didn't vacate. They held, and they, you know, they continued their commands, and we took over from there.

Jon Becker: So is the suspect engaging patrol at all? Is he responding? Is he negotiating ?

Jonathan Bigelow: Radio silence from him? One shot. Nothing. No movement. Nothing.

Jon Becker: And no sign of the kids?

Jonathan Bigelow: No, none. None. So, obviously, mom is in our custody around the corner. She hears some shots and she's concerned, but after that, nothing, you know, trying to call, no response.

Jon Becker: So what is the next milestone as we're moving through the project or through the problem? What's the next step that that happens?

Jonathan Bigelow: So the problem when we get there. How about that? When the problem when we get there is, okay, what do we have? These are our charges. What's the structure? What's the target location look like? What communication do we have with him, if any, which was none. What are we – We know we – Or we suspect we have four kids inside that are possibly being held by this. We know we have an officer down that he's willing to shoot through the door to not go to jail. But we were like, all right, is he holding them hostage or what's their status?

So we immediately said, okay, well, let's treat it as a hostage situation, because we had no other reason to believe it wasn't. And we started deploying assets into an emergency hostage rescue team, and then we developed a deliberate hostage rescue team. We started doing the perimeter as far as relieving patrol and looking at the status of the occupants, surrounding the target location, evacuating them, and then in the midst of that, we came across an apartment on the next stairwell to the north, again, mirroring image of the target location that we were at.

And they said, yeah, you can use our apartment. We said, can you leave it unlocked? And said, yeah, use it all day. You know, we'll be over here, basically. So we just had our deliberate hostage rescue team just running, repping rep after rep after rep of saying, make entry and figure out a plan they were developing or hostage rescue plan as they went, and just rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsal after rehearsal.

I remember initially staying there with them. I was the deputy team commander, I guess the forward team commander at the time, just saying, okay, you guys, team leader, you got it. Start working scenarios. Start working rescue at the front of the front bedroom. Based on the fact that we had a mirror image of the apartment that we are going to, we could say, okay, if the hostages are located here, but the suspect is deeper and we've accomplished the mission of hostage rescue, not what are we going to do? How does that work?

If we make entry and we get two officers down, what's how we pushing forward to the next, you know, to accomplish the mission to save the additional hostages, you know, so you just keep running scenario after scenario after scenario in a compressed time of, I need you to be ready in 30 minutes. So it's like, imagine having a whole hostage rescue training day of one specific location about small structure, small target location, and saying, I need you to run every scenario possible right now with failed breach. With failed breach and officer down.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it sucks. Yeah. No, but I mean, it's, you know, given. Given the choice of having an opportunity to rehearse it repetitively or going in blind, rehearse wins every day.

Jonathan Bigelow: 100%. Well, then you also have, okay, take a breather, switch places with the emergency hostage rescue team, who is just sitting there blind, who have been provided, like, a map of the general apartment layout saying, in case something happens, be ready to go. Well, what are we walking into? Hey, go take a rep, go walk through, and then we're going to swap back and do more rot. So you just have this constant on and off of teams switching to do and plan and rehearse.

Jon Becker: It's a great strategy, though, is, you know, set up a QRF and be ready if something kicks off unintentionally. But in the meantime, go plan the deliberate, and once the deliberate is planned, put them into the QRF role, take the QRF guys, get them delivered. Now you've got two teams that can relieve each other that you're giving yourself some options in the future. You're maneuvering in time. You're buying a future option of having two teams that are prepared for the problem. So what's next? What happens?

Jonathan Bigelow: So after, I mean, after they kept rehearsing and rehearsing, rehearsing and we're trying to establish some sort of communication with the suspect, one thing that we looked at was, all right, what, what are some other avenues of approach? The problem with this structure, and, I mean, it's just a crappy layout, and it's really not uncommon. It's probably super common across any jurisdiction, is you got one point of entry, one point of exit. It's the front door.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jonathan Bigelow: Okay. The intel that we had was, I think neighbors provided this, was they believed that they heard furniture moving. So we were like, okay, so now we're dealing with entry a as pretty much the only point of entry on a second story structure as barricaded. Well, that hinders your, you know, deliberate or emergency officer rescue.

Okay, so if it's barricaded, it's already, the door is already locked. Are we going to go up there and manual breach it? Well, let's do explosive. Let's try to do a dynamic explosive breach. Well, at the time, the Orlando police Department didn't have its own explosive breach program for our SWAT team, so we relied on Orange County's explosive ordinance disposal unit.

So we called them right away. We also looked at the structure, and we said, okay, well, there's windows to the east side of the structure. There's several of them, but we could exploit those by going through those. What about ladders? Well, that takes time. Well, how do you break and rake them? Okay, that takes time.

So there was just a lot of different options. We were like, oh, let's get the seminal county sheriff's offices, which is the county just north of us. They have a regional asset with a moor system or ramping system that would reach up, and they were quick to respond. They came out and we're like, we looked at terrain and was like, that's just not conducive to actually hold the vehicle. That would allow us to run up a ramp, brake and rake, and make entry through a big a** window. I guess if you could say.

Chris Eklund: Yeah, yeah. I think just for context, that Mars ramp system sits on top of a passenger van, if you will. So it's a road vehicle with however much weight on top, sitting now on the sloped wet retention area. That just wasn't feasible.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's not going to happen right, it's going to slide down. It's going to flip over. It's not something you can use as a platform to make an entry.

Jonathan Bigelow: It's creating a bigger problem than the problem that you already have. We said, okay, well, what other assets do we have in the area? And we've always had. Well, since my experience has always been a great working relationship with the Orange County Sheriff's office, specifically with their SWAT team, you know, I mean, Chris and I are known each other. We probably competed each other as soon as I came on, which he's been on longer than I have.

So we knew that they had this regional asset, or this asset, at least to their agency, which is a rook, which is…. How would you describe that?

Chris Eklund: It's an up arbor and bobcat with a lot of great attachments.

Jonathan Bigelow: Which we've trained on it before, and they brought it out once. Once they had, and they did their training, they're like, hey, you might need this one day. We'll bring it out to your site and train on it all day. And then sure enough, and we're like, man, this is great. And it offers an ability to raise a platform that can deliver four to five operators, you know, up to a second story level.

So it was, it was perfect. And they were like, man, we'll bring it out and we'll drive that thing out wherever we need to go. And it was going to work. And we used it actually to break and rake the large window, which ended up being, hey, that's our backup plan for entry. We're going to deliver these five, come down, suck up another five, raise the thing, the platform again, and deliver another five as they. As they do work.

Jon Becker: Got it. That's giving you now a secondary entry point to either put two teams in or, you know, if it is barricaded in a different direction.

Jonathan Bigelow: As the primary team would be working, to say, hey, I need you to. Whatever you encounter as far as barricaded door furniture, you know, you need to be moving men and move that stuff out the way.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jonathan Bigelow: And make do, make entry, get more resources, get in there.

Jon Becker: Got it. And just from a mutual aid context, I think you kind of touched on it, but this was not the first time that you had met Chris and this was not the first time that these two teams had seen each other.

Chris Eklund: No, no. We had trained. We trained together quite a bit as two teams coming together. I think we both probably practiced somewhat different methodologies and used different tactics from, we don't work to integrate with each other, but we can certainly get on the same job and assume different roles at the same time if we had to.

Jon Becker: Yeah, well, and I think it's kind of a recurring theme on the podcast is that it's very rare that two teams are willing to integrate just because they're not constantly training together. And there are subtle differences in tactics and movement and everything else, but the value of you trusting their operators and them trusting your operators and leadership to where you could divide a problem, even if you're willing to put the other team on a perimeter around you, is in a situation like this where it's going to go on for a while and it's going to get worse. It's invaluable.

Chris Eklund: Yeah, I agree with that.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah, 100%. And I always say this, I'm fortunate enough to at least go around and talk to numerous operators on planning and critical incident management, stuff like that. It's who you're able to call when you need to call. Do you know those people don't pick up the phone and be like, hey, we had a problem with each other.

Our relationship was shaky last week, but now I need you. It's like, yeah, they're going to come help but stop, bury the hatchet and move forward. Have those relationships fostered and growing and I don't know, I don't know how else to say it other than neighbor.

Jon Becker: It's trust. Right. In the end, it's trust. I'm going to guess that the explosive breaching component, this was probably you calling Chris or some two other guys in the team. Hey, man, I need explosive breaching. We're in route.

Chris Eklund: Yeah, that's usually how it works. Up through the years I came on the team in 2002, I've gotten to know so many of their operators just from when I was a part time guy, you know, in regular work and doing those kind of things and form great relationships. So it just bleeds over into the team as to what's going to happen after that.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it sets the culture.

Chris Eklund: Yeah.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah. So we had their explosive ordnance unit with us. They make charges they made. So we said, okay, we're going to end up wanting to explosive breach this door and we might end up wanting to have a secondary explosive entry on a wall of an adjoining wall of the apartment that we occupied to the other side of the target apartment. And we said, we also want to use a huge charge to create a portal that people that operators can walk through. Right?

Jon Becker: So if that's going from the adjoining apartment into this, the subject apartment.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah. So if target, if entry a is barricaded. And the breach would go. I have no doubt the breach. And the breach ended up going, the breach works on the door, but we encounter resistance from stuff blocking our way simultaneously. I want another entry point into that, through the adjoining wall of the apartment next to it, which we occupied, while also inserting somebody else on the opposite wall, which creates almost like that, that blue on blue, if you will. Blue on green.

However you want to talk about that, you know, friendly fire aspect of, hey, we could insert ourselves by doing that into a crossfire situation. And we started to realize that it was fine so long as we managed our, our fields of fire, you know, and identifying, if you – If this happens this way, you are not responsible for this half moving in.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. You just used allocating fields of fire because you're. You're basically allocating a field of fire to eliminate the potential blue on blue.

Jonathan Bigelow: And if you hear something over here, don't pop your head around the corner to engage because they're engaging.

Jon Becker: Yeah, got it.

Jonathan Bigelow: So it was a pretty, I call it a ballet, but it was a pretty intricate plan. And I never had. And this will come into later with, with Chris's thing is, I never had the ordinance people, they built the charge, they put it on the door and I said, okay, good, thanks. Is it working? Yeah, it'll work. I said, all right, now take it off the door. And they're why I said, that's our only point at, we're calling to this person to come to us. And if he opens the door, is it going to cause him to go, well, I don't want to go out to that.

Well, what's going on here? And then rabbit back in and say, nope, that was our last opportunity at our first chance to end the scenario. So I never had that. So it was an intricate part about, okay, we're going to execute this hostage. First, you go, go, go. You put the charge on, back out. Go. More diversionary tactics, break and rake of windows, sounds all sorts of nonsense. It was a intricate plan to say, okay and all. And they were just sitting there on standby.

But I'll hit on one point that you talked about with the relationships is the cool part about Orange County Sheriff's office and their, their SWAT command staff is we had early on in the morning when we called for our city bus service to come down and act as a rehab because in June in Florida, in Orlando, central Florida, it's probably already starting off at 85 degrees in the morning at 05:00. And I'll get up to 103 quick.

So we said, hey, we're going to need rehab for our resources that are on site, meaning cooling station, so that we could cycle operators through just to have a chance to sit down and take a breather and get some AC is there. Two of their commanders came by and they, they sat with us for hours and they didn't say, hey, we should. You should consider this. What about this? They were just there. What do you need? What do you need? Always. What do you need? What do you mean we do?

And we said, hey, this is our plan. This is what we're thinking. Boom, boom, boom. And we laid it out like, what do you think? And they're like, man, I don't have anything for you. That sounds like an excellent plan. That's probably what we would do. And we were like, okay, cool. But they're, I guess I tell that story because they were there from inception of sort of like quasi planning.

Jon Becker: Yeah, well, just having the value of an objective opinion from a different team who looks at it differently is. I mean, it takes certainly humility on the part of your team to be willing to look at another team and say, hey, what do you see here? But it just speaks to the relationship between the two teams that you're not. You know, sometimes surrounding sheriff's office in city can have an adversarial relationship or it's them.

It's, I think one of the key stories here is that this relationship was so good that they're with you as you're planning and you're looking to them to kind of just murder your ideas. What are we doing wrong? What are we missing? And I think it also speaks a lot to the culture of the Orange county sheriff's department to be willing with their commanders on site and just go, just tell us what you need. We're here to help. That's fantastic.

Jonathan Bigelow: I think in our area in central Florida, we're definitely lucky for that.

Jon Becker: Okay, so you got a bus coming, which, I mean, there's another interesting lesson learned there. From the beginning, you guys identified heat and fatigue as a potential. And bus is a pretty novel way to keep your team cool because it holds a lot of people, has really good air conditioning, and there are a lot of them driving around. Was that a pre existing relationship that you guys had made with the transit company to be like, hey, can we borrow a bus?

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah. I mean, the, what's called links. Links is the county bus service. Those administrators, those security personnel that work with that, that are just top notch, they've always been, hey, what can we do? You know, prior to this incident? How can we help you? You know, we want you to learn our buses, how to turn them on, how to drive them, how to open the doors if something happens on this bus, you know, so they're just.

Again, so we've trained on those buses. We know a lot of contacts at that government entity, and they were just. They've always been willing to help step up. So for us to call and say, hey, we just need you to bring a bus with a driver down here, and it's just going to sit, and if it sits too long and gas runs out, we need you to bring another bus. And they're like, yeah, okay, whatever.

Jon Becker: That's awesome! Okay, so what's our next step here? Team stage? You've got a plan. Breaching plan. Assistance from Orange county for breaching. What happens next?

Jonathan Bigelow: Nothing. It sucks to say it, but, I mean, attempts to negotiate, attempts to contact. I can't tell you how many times that we delivered. Throw phones to the front door, near the front door. We ended up deploying listening devices that turned out, we suspect, to be just inadequate and inept and outdated. That didn't work.

Jon Becker: It's a recurring theme. Don't feel bad about that one.

Jonathan Bigelow: No. So to no avail. Just nothing. Nothing happening. So we were trying to get eyes and ears in the inside. So then we reached out. Well, how do we get eyes and ears into the inside of this apartment? So we said, well, we don't have the technology, but this other multi jurisdictional that Orange County, Orlando and several other agencies contribute members to, which is like a narcotics task force, I guess, in the area, they have technical capabilities where they have, like, pinhole cameras, listening devices and people.

So we said, all right, so we have a charge on the wall, the joining wall, the adjoining wall. Let's put pinhole cameras through the wall and try to see, get eyes into the interior. And we called those people out and they're willing to come. They brought their equipment and their people to do it because we were like, oh, we're not training this. We don't know how to do it. What you need? So you guys, we'll provide you cover into the apartment that we own. Oh, by the way, you go over there and drill a hole in the wall and insert a pinhole camera. Don't mind the fact that.

Jon Becker: Don't make too much noise.

Jonathan Bigelow: Don't mind.

Jon Becker: Yeah, don't make too much. I'm the last guy that came and knocked on the door. But, yeah, good luck.

Jonathan Bigelow: Just forget about all that. Do what you need to do. Hats off to them. They did a phenomenal job under the…

Jon Becker: That's a really ballsy. That is a really ballsy tech. That is like, yep, no, I got this. I can drill really quietly, so.

Jonathan Bigelow: And they did it. After several attempts, they were able to get it through and for anybody to think about. Well, I just need you to drill through some drywall and I. And insert a pinhole camera into somebody else's wall. Oh, yeah. That seems like a probably 5, 10 minutes task. I think it's better half of an hour.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah!

Jonathan Bigelow: And I'm like, I'm trying to. So the poor decision that I made was, I'm going to mask your. Your movements, if you will, your. The sound that you might generate, sawing or drilling or whatever. I'm going to mask your movements by exterior sounds from my APC in the sound of, you know, just wailing the siren.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jonathan Bigelow: And it was just a bad decision. I was like, we don't. We can't hear because now, yeah, they're. They're covered, but I can't hear if that action reaction counteraction happens, you know?

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jonathan Bigelow: If he hears something and it causes gunshots, I'm not gonna be able to hear it now. I can't affect a deliberate hostage rescue based on his actions. So it was a, I don't know. I don't know. A good cover sound, other than you need to be really quiet when you do that and perfect it prior to actually executing it and see how much sound you're making and to know what you can get away with come time. But we didn't. We didn't have that, so I was just masking sound. And anytime we would do movements, whether it was the throw phone delivery, whether it was the song through the wall is just wailing the siren. It was probably the worst decision I ever made.

Jon Becker: Got it. What would you do now?

Jonathan Bigelow: I would train on putting an element in some room, in some training environment and saying, all I want you to do is listen for sounds cutting through this wall. And when you hear something, say, I hear you. I hear you. And then, hey, guys, on the other side of the wall, guys, cut through this wall. If you hear, I hear you. I hear you. You need to go back and rethink how you're going to do it.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jonathan Bigelow: And just train it over and over and over again, because that's going to be your job when I need you. So hey, you on the one side, you're the suspect. You on the other side, you're the good guy. Do your job.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Get your stealth on.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yep.

Jon Becker: Yeah, got it. So about what time are we at – Give me, kind of, you know, approximate timeline here?

Jonathan Bigelow: 01:30, 02:30, deployment 02:00 to 03:00, 02:30 to 03:00, deployment. We inserted those texts around noon. Keep in mind that we swapped out the cell, the throw phone, the old throw phone technology, three times. Our third time ever.

Jon Becker: From the suspect.

Jonathan Bigelow: Nothing.

Jon Becker: He doesn't. He doesn't make a noise, he doesn't pick anything up. He doesn't answer the phone. He is just self indisciplined.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah, there were some comments about making some posts or trying to contact the media somewhere early on, but that hadn't gone away. It was just nothing. Nothing. So when you talk about.

Jon Becker: And nothing from the kids, no sounds? No childhood sounds? No.

Chris Eklund: I think there was some – At one point after we had gotten there, there was some information that the one thing that they did hear was the suspect say, hey, don't go in there. That came over a listening device or something like that. But that was the only, to my knowledge, the only communication they got at all inside the apartment.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah. So you're talking about four young kids, you know, early, like, I don't ages.

Chris Eklund: One to twelve.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah, twelve is the max. So getting up early in the morning, you know, wanting to eat, wanting to play, wanting to watch Barney or, you know, whatever, on TV. Yeah, 1, 6, 10 and 12 year olds, you know, these kids are not going to be silent. And we even commented on that. It was like, okay, I have a six year old, I have a two year old. They're not quiet.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jonathan Bigelow: You know, but we don't hear anything, so no one hears that.

Jon Becker: Making you think, maybe he's killed the kids already.

Jonathan Bigelow: There was a lot of talk about that. There was a lot of talk about they're probably already dead. But we didn't want to believe that.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's difficult because you want to rescue the kids and you want to believe they're alive and that's the whole reason that you're there. And there's nothing to indicate that that happened, except that they're extremely quiet, which certainly points in that direction. I can see where it's conflicting.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah. So it's 100% conflicting in that she's adamant they're there, we're there to affect a hostage rescue, which we said, hey, this is why we exist, right, to save these kids. And also we're there to say, you just shot our guy. You're going to jail.

Jon Becker: You're going to jail.

Jonathan Bigelow: You're coming with us. One way or another, you're coming with us. Which brings up a, you know, this thing. But in essence, we're at, you know, we just go on and on and on.

Jon Becker: Yeah, so you guys, at this point, it's noon. You've been on scene for 10, 11 hours through the middle of the night.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Guys rehearsing. Guys are getting tired.

Jonathan Bigelow: Several times the rain came. Rain came and went. Food came and went. Water came and went. You know, as a team, as a. As a deputy team commander, you walk up to your team leaders and you go, hey, I need you to really focus on. On your guys, making sure that they're operationally sound. Yeah, I need them here.

All right. I know Kevin's, you know, been involved in something. We don't know his status. Focus on the mission at hand. This is the mission. We need to save these four kids. Okay. What are we doing, boss? What are we doing, boss? Hey, I know time seems like it's standing still and they're working. They're working in the command post to come up with what we can do. We can only plan, and when the command comes down to, say, execute, we need to be able to go.

So we just need to focus on what we need to do here, which is plan to be prepared. But then you just, as time goes on, you just see life just draining from them. No, we got this. We got this. Hey. And I individually walked around and said, are you good? I mean, operator after operator after operator, are you good? Look me in the eye. I need you. No bs. You tell me. No, sir. I'm good. I'm good.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's an interesting, as a leader, it's an interesting quandary, right? Because, like, the guys have been there a long time. They're invested in it. They're doing everything they can to be alert and attentive. And the longer you wait there, the less likely it is to pop off, but the more likely it is to pop off.

So it's like, I need you guys be really attentive. Even though you've been here for 12 hours and at any second, this guy may come running out the door, guns blazing. You have to be ready. We may say go on the QRF, you know, but about noon, you're starting to kind of do the math.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah. So now about noon, we do. But then also we insert the camera. We get the camera inserted. Finally, we get the inserted camera. Going after, I think, the second attempt. And that's not a knock on them, but we get eyes in. You see, it's dark. We see a ceiling fan spinning. It's totally dark. No movement whatsoever.

And, okay, so now we know sort of some of the layout of the land. There was a door closed to the master bedroom, which will come into play later with Chris's thing. And it just said, all right, not this is. We don't see moving. No one's moving. And this, that's not right. So 5 hours later, it's, all right, well, you know what? Let's try to get some more eyes inside this place.

So we develop a plan based on sort of that, that entry plan with that rook. We said, okay, well, if you're going to give us the go to insert cameras in camera balls, we're going to insert some camera balls in this. We're going to say we're going to take out that big window that we want to use and exploit as a method of entry in case all h*** breaks loose and we're not able to make entry a or half b, I guess what you can call it. And we're going to take out that double pane two window with the rook and that element.

So they go up there, they say, okay, take it out and insert the camera. So they do, they go up there and they break out that big a** window up there on that, that one side, and they insert the camera balls, and they insert two. And they land right next to each other. Go figure.

Jon Becker: Of course.

Jonathan Bigelow: And one sees the wall, which is awesome. It sees nothing. And then. But one does point down the hallway, which shows it's dark. It's all the doors are closed. So again, nothing moving. But that's around the 05:00 hour. And at this point, it's like, okay, again, we could use. We use that as a, I'm doing something to spark a reaction. Gains us intelligence, gains us that point of entry. We're prepared, but no, no reaction. No suspect reaction. No, hey, get out of here. Hey, you know, no shots fired, thank goodness. But nothing.

Jon Becker: No drones at this point. No ground robot, no secondary tech.

Chris Eklund: There were some drones flying on the outside. I think that was all nuts. Inside of SWAT type drones, that was more agency level type command post, gathering information.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Jonathan Bigelow: So about, man, right after that, after we gained that entry, or I guess access to that window and then inserted those camera balls is shortly after that, we said, listen, we're done. Our people are taxed. We can't stand in here. Anymore, do nothing. Not that we're doing nothing. We work to work, but we were. That's where we're at.

Jon Becker: Yeah. At that point, you guys have been there for.

Jonathan Bigelow: It was 16 hours.

Jon Becker: 16 hours. Yeah, 15 hours.

Jonathan Bigelow: 15, 16 hours. So we said, hey, you know what we need? We need to make the call.

Jon Becker: So you reach out to. Well, Chris's team is already there, basically.

Jonathan Bigelow: So, yeah, they're there.

Jon Becker: So the leadership is there. Right?

Jonathan Bigelow: The leadership's there. I think the team's there. They made the call. And the problem is, okay, guys, you know, we delivered the message of, hey, we did what we could. We're here. We were prepared. We were ready. In your eyes, you may think that we did nothing, but we were ready. But we're transitioning now.

So once they got that message, they thought, oh, they're going to come right in and, you know, five minutes, I'll be out of here. Little did we know, like, almost an hour later, our actually, team is actually moving because the transition just takes that long. It's kind of messed up. Not messed up in that it shouldn't take that long. It just.

Jon Becker: It just takes that long. Yeah, yeah. It's just, you know, going out, replacing position by position, and handing it off and briefing what they see and everything else is a lengthy process. Seems like it should take five minutes and takes an hour.

Chris Eklund: Yeah.

Jonathan Bigelow: So when Chris showed up, I was like, hey, buddy, good to see you. But, yeah, I'll be back. Enjoy.

Chris Eklund: Yeah, so this was interesting for me. I had actually gotten a call that this was occurring literally right as I was walking out of the gym. My commanders called me and said, hey, this is going on over here. So I drove over, probably parked about a mile away, probably between, like, universal studios and where the target location was, just in a parking lot.

You know, for me, I think one of the worst times to be on a call out in Florida is when you're going from nighttime into the morning. You know, that dark today, and then the heat comes with the humidity.

And so I'm thinking that it's going to be a relatively early kind of transition. And I sat in my truck until about 06:00 at night when they finally paged us up. One of the things about it is that the – My team knew what was going on. So kind of instead of guys just off doing random things and getting a surprise call, they sort of knew it was coming. Just nobody knew when.

Jon Becker: Yes. But guys. Guys are not, you know, they're not going to the gym. They're not going for a two hour drive. They're, they're staying close and being ready.

Chris Eklund: Yeah, yeah. So we got the page out and of course by that time it took me about two minutes to go from where I was to the scene. I got to the command post, jumped out of my truck. My lieutenant was there who I've worked with for. I came up on the team with the guy. So, you know, very good relationship. Basically he hands me a floor plan that's provided by the complex. He says here you go. It's flipped, so opposite direction. And he says how many people do you need? I looked at it real quick and said ten. He said okay, there's really no exigency right now, but this is kind of what were going to do.

And I hadn't had the information about the apartment yet, so I took that floor plan, flipped it over and drew it in reverse. I'm not a big floor plan guy. I don't like to give out floor plans. Back years ago, guys would have a tendency to figure out the direction they wanted to travel prior to even going inside the door.

So, you know, and we've had I don't know how many bad floor plans drawn, you know, so the last thing I wanted the operators to be thinking about is well here I go left, the shows go left, but really I'm going to go right. And you know, I'm real big into the mindset of the operator so I didn't want to cloud that in that process.

Jon Becker: Makes sense. That's an interesting approach!

Chris Eklund: So basically operators started showing up and we had our team brief and you know, snipers were replaced. Our snipers went to their snipers platinum. I had met with John. I think we probably talked for maybe three minutes. It was, it was pretty quick. As far as the conversation goes. We didn't talk really much about his plan or things like that that were going on and we met actually between the command post and the target location.

So we're kind of in no man's land at that point which is an interesting dynamic because in John's position he's kind of going back and forth. He's got control down range. As a forward commander, you're a lieutenant. But he can go back and forth. When I go down, I stay there. So it's a different kind of one of those differences we were talking about in the teams and how we function and things like that.

But so Jon had told me that they had the apartment. So to get to that walkthrough apartment, we had to basically walk by the target location. You know, so kind of literally saying, hey, what's going on? To a bunch of their operators is we're walking to go do that. Our immediate action team had gotten into place and replaced their immediate action team.

So that was kind of getting the ball rolling. But now we're going to see the apartment first. Look. So where Jon was doing all of these rehearsals for all that time, we're now coming into it.

Jon Becker: Franchise for us.

Chris Eklund: Right.

Jon Becker: We've reset the whole problem, basically.

Chris Eklund: Yeah. So we're turning back the time. Right? So we went up there to the apartment. John was with us. I had a one of our Eod guys with us. And we started just looking at the apartment. We do hostage rescue training a lot we did back then. So we knew kind of the general choreography of what was this was going to look like. But it was nice having this apartment that was the exact same layout.

So as we went in there and started to look at it, as you walk through that door that Jon had mentioned, that one door that goes in, basically it opens kitchen, straight, living room, sort of straight and left. But right there on the left is the entrance to the master bedroom, which there was information that suggested that he had gone in there.

So as we went in there and looked at it, the floor plan in and of itself wasn't difficult. But one of the first things that happened is as you walk into that master bedroom, which was an in opening door, immediately, almost on your left is an out opening bathroom door.

Jon Becker: Oh, so the two doors are in conflict.

Chris Eklund: Well, they are, but again, it's an out opening door. And what if the door is locked and there's information to suggest? So, you know, this guy's probably going to try to put himself in a good position of advantageous, which to me is that bathroom, if he's in that master suite kind of area. So having that kind of dilemma, one of my breacher was there, and I said, what are we thinking about this thing?

And his first question was, well, can we IDC the door? So I looked at the EOD guy, I said, hey, if he's got the baby in the bathroom and we IDC this door, what do you think? And he was like, I said, okay, nevermind. That's all I need to hear, right. I don't need a full disclaimer.

Jon Becker: He's doing the math, and he doesn't like the math work.

Chris Eklund: Yeah. So. And you know, I'm not an explosive guy, so I'm listening to him, right? So then I said, well, ballistic breaching would be great on this thing. You know, out opening door, we can stay out of the threshold. It'll be quick, so on and so forth. So I make a phone call and try to. That county to the south of us, at the time, all of their patrol supervisors had shotgun breaching capabilities in their cars. We didn't have it on the team.

So I made a phone call to try to get it, and was given a very definite, no, you can't have that. So I tried to plead my case a little bit. And about the fourth, no. I said, okay, we're going to have to get away from this. So I went back to the breacher. I said, okay, if you hit the door with a ram on the doorknob, maybe it'll push the doorknob out of the door, would just pull the door open. Now there's a hole. There's no engagement. And he says, okay. I said, well, give it a shot. So now we're in somebody else's apartment. We're about to put their bathroom door.

Jon Becker: In somebody else's apartment, destroying their door.

Chris Eklund: So he lines up on the door, door lock mechanism comes out, goes right into the bathroom. Beautiful. And the makeup of the door, because it's just a – It's an apartment interior door. The force of the hit actually folded the door past the door, stop on the jam. So now it's literally stuck on the wrong side of the door jamb.

So the next plan was, okay, Jon, I want you to take the ram and throw it through the door and make a port in the door. So that was kind of the plan. With that dilemma, I had walked through more of the apartment gone to the back bedroom, looked in the closet back there. There was a walk in closet back there. And it was interesting about this that I remember, and I always come back to it, is it was stacked with stuff. I mean, it was just clothes and boxes.

And, I mean, the door opened, but you could. You weren't putting yourself inside there. You would have literally had to start taking stuff out close from the door and then worked your way to the back, if that's what you wanted to do. So that was kind of one of those interesting things about that.

So we had established a plan. You know, we train hostage rescue for known and unknown locations. And basically the plan that we had come up with, which, again, not talking to John, our primary entry point was going to be through the wall. We were going to use the explosive breach that was on the wall. The window that they had ported was certainly in the mix with that along with the walk through door. But I didn't have a whole lot of information on what was on the other side of that door yet.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So that's inward swinger obviously.

Chris Eklund: Inward swing. Yeah.

Jon Becker: And so we've heard these moving furniture.

Chris Eklund: Right. So inward swinging potential. Right.

Jon Becker: Yeah. There may be a giant pile of dresser behind it.

Chris Eklund: Right. Right. So that that wall became the primary entry point and I had actually worked it to where we were going to do a known location response to the master suite area because that's where the information was that he was in there. And then I was going to run an unknown contingent through the rest of the apartment to try to get as much access to it as quickly as we could.

Jon Becker: So two entry teams, one going direct to the split the bedroom and then the others trying to clear the rest of the…

Chris Eklund: Yeah. So that that wall put us more towards the front side of the apartment but was pretty central in the apartment. Right. So about that time, once we kind of wrapped all that, we moved over to the door or over to the target and started again. Now we're relieving the deliberate team, Jon's deliberate team. And guys are like, hey, let us leave the parking lot before you do anything. This is the conversation we're having.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Of course.

Chris Eklund: I recognize that kind of stuff because they've been there 16 hours. One of their cops has been shot, you know, so it's, a tough thing to want to let go of.

Jon Becker: Yeah, sure.

Chris Eklund: But still, I think is as weird as we SWAT people are, you know, those conversations still happen. Like, hey, wait till I leave the apartment, the parking lot, you know?

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's also just gallows humor.

Jonathan Bigelow: Right.

Jon Becker: It's like, you know, you don't know how long it's going to take.

Chris Eklund: Right.

Jon Becker: You know, as you're leaving, it's like, God, if these guys go in there and in 5 seconds resolve this, you know, I'm going to hate them.

Chris Eklund: Right.

Jon Becker: Right.

Chris Eklund: Yeah. So like I said, my team got there about 06:30. I started to move over to the target location at now 07:30 because I knew that living room window had been breached. As I'm walking to the apartment, I had two operators grab a dumbbell robot because I wanted it thrown in. That window was one of the first things because I wanted to get recent eyes into the apartment.

So I had two operators go around and do that. As they did that, I also called and had the explosive breach put back on the main entry door. I wanted it back there. I understand why Jon took it off, but I wanted it there.

Jonathan Bigelow: You know what? I'm sorry. I don't mean to interrupt, but I think. I think I screwed up. I think I screwed up our timeline. I want to go back and let me know, interrupt you, Chris?

Chris Eklund: Absolutely.

Jonathan Bigelow: But I think this. It should be noted that this event, the patrol event, started on the 10 June, that late night hours of 10th June of 18. SWAT response was the 11th, early morning of the 11th. So we never made it to the 12th.

Jon Becker: Got it. Yeah. Sorry. We said it started on the 11th and transition to the 12th. It actually starts on the 10th and transitions to the 11th.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yes.

Jon Becker: Got it. I realized you guys were up for a long time. They just kind of run together.

Chris Eklund: Sorry.

Jon Becker: Okay, so, Chris, you were setting us up. You were replacing the charge on the main entrance.

Chris Eklund: Yeah. So we put that explosive charge on. So now we have the explosive breach charge on the wall. We have the one on the door, and, of course, we have the rook with that living room window. And if I kind of draw the picture, if you're looking at the backside of this apartment building, if you go from where that master bedroom is on the front side, you basically have a small bedroom window, then the large living room picture window, and then two bedroom windows further left, if that makes sense. Just a, cause I'm probably going to talk about some windows here, and just to kind of give some context to where I'm talking about.

Jon Becker: Walk me through that one more time.

Chris Eklund: So, if you're looking at the back of the building, where the target location is from, basically where the stairwell is, the breezeway, you have a standard bedroom window. The next window to the left, as you look at it, is a larger living room window. Then there's two windows further to the left that are also definitely bedroom windows. Does that make sense, kind of drawing?

Jon Becker: Bedroom living room. Bedroom. Bedroom.

Chris Eklund: Yeah. Right.

Jon Becker: Or bedroom living room. Bedroom with two windows.

Chris Eklund: Yeah. And I only say that just because I'm going to talk about some bedrooms that were getting windows and things like that. So just kind of draw a picture, if I can, mentally. But totally. So, yeah. So that charge goes back on. We have the plan with the known location, unknown location, split to the wall, and that dumbbell robot that we threw in, we were able to confirm that he had essentially taken all of the stick furniture that was in the eating area.

So a dining room table, some wooden chairs, some of the other furniture from the living room, things like that, and kind of pushed it up against the door, which was a tight confined space. Anyways. I mean, it was a short hallway foyer entry into an apartment that was now jammed with furniture.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So Jon's suspicions, like their team suspension, suspicion of this was accurate. There's stuff piled across the door and the door is not a valid entry point.

Chris Eklund: Yeah. So kind of what was happening simultaneously to that is the rook team had the platform on and they put a team of five, uh. Cause they wanted to start probing this master bedroom window. So they start going up and again with the information that he was in there, they go up to that window and as the platform raises, they start looking in the windows. They don't see anything inside the window as far as the suspect or any kids or anything like that.

But they do confirm that the bathroom door is closed. And so kind of draws my attention back to the issues that we had at the walkthrough apartment dealing with that. As they are doing that. There was a – So we had gotten this, we had had this rook for many years and we had just upgraded it. And one of the upgrades was that the new platform was larger, but it was also somewhere around 1000 pounds heavier.

And we had probably had it back for a couple of months. And as the five operators are up on the platform dealing with this window, basically there's a hydraulic release which causes the platform to kind of jerk and fall forward.

Jon Becker: Oh God!

Chris Eklund: Yeah. So one of the operators actually fell and they ended up extracting him. He had hurt his back.

Jon Becker: So they fell off of the platform.

Chris Eklund: He fell on the platform. But the way he fell, it was. It injured his back when it's the.

Jon Becker: Platform with the shield on it, right?

Chris Eklund: Yes.

Jon Becker: So he falls, basically gets thrown into the shield. Thrown into the shield.

Chris Eklund: Yeah, that'll do it. So they ended up extracting him with his injury. So he's out. And of course I'm hearing this all play out in my mind. So again, you know, as soon as I get that little brief instance of negativity, like it's not a thing anymore. So now if there's any consideration of putting operators up into the living room window, my confidence at this point in that hydraulic release with five operators on it again and repeating the same thing is not in existence.

Jon Becker: Yes. Falling off a cliff.

Chris Eklund: Yeah. Right. So now I'm really dealing with that wall and that door entry is my primary thoughts. So they had done that and there was a few conversations happening outside. Of course, when you get on one of these things, all of your operators come up with every possible idea that's known to man as to how we're going to fix this thing.

And again, kind of as soon as there's a little bit of a negative that outweighs the positive for me, like, maybe we should do an explosive breach through the floor of the ceiling from the apartment above and just kind of right into the bathroom. Well, what if the ceiling falls on the baby? No, that's not a thing.

Jon Becker: Right.

Chris Eklund: So I'm kind of playing all these different ideas, getting, you know, bounced off me and things like that. And they put the ram on, on the rook now, and they move over to the far left window as you're looking at it, which is going to go into a bedroom that would be at the deep end of the hallway in the apartment.

So the rook operator, that plat that. I'm sorry, that ram has five cameras on it, one up, down, left, right, and straight ahead. And as he pushes the ram through the window, it actually catches the leg of a set of bunk beds. So there's a set of bunk beds kind of in the corner, and one of the legs, basically, is going straight down the center of the window the way it's set up in the room. So the ram kicks that leg, the bunk beds fall to the floor, the top, and falls down to the bottom. And the operator comes up on the radio, and he sells the command post. He's going to be giving him a call.

So I kind of give a little bit of time for that phone call to happen. And then I called the rook operator on my phone, and I said, you got kids, don't you? He said, yep. I said, okay. Probably no sooner that I hung up the phone with him, I get a call from my lieutenant. And that conversation is, do you want to go soft? Do you want to go hard? And I said, well, we're going to go hard. He says, okay, start putting it together.

Jon Becker: So kids at this point are dead.

Chris Eklund: Not confirmed, but they didn't move, right? So now we're talking life preservation at this point. So he says, okay, start putting things together. And I walked over to my team, and we had talked through this a bunch of times, and I had the talk where I looked at all of them and said, who's not ready to do this? Which they all were. And I said, hey, you guys want to go soft? Do you want to go hard? And they all said, we're going to go hard. I said, good, because that's what I told the lieutenant.

So we started putting things together. We had our final assault position, which was going to be kind of almost towards the top of the stairwell going to the second story, and now were going to go up, turn right into that adjoining apartment and then turn left to step through the wall. And then I had a secondary team who was going to come up the other stairwell and be basically responsible for that main walkthrough door into the apartment.

So now we're kind of about, you know, quarter to nine at night. So we've been working this thing for probably 2 hours and 15 minutes or so and get one kind of, one kind of final conversation with the command post, make sure everybody's good. I said, yep. And he goes, okay, on you. So I line my team up towards the top of the stairs, give a countdown for the breaches. They go off with just that little bit of tiny bit of, you know, separating both of them, not both going off at exactly the same time. I give the countdown, I give our call to initiate the rescue. I was the third person up the stairs.

And as I turned right into that apartment for like two steps through the threshold, I was completely blind just because of all the dust and everything from the, from the explosive breach as I came through and was able to see, I saw my number two operator who's turned around looking at me, which is obviously not the desired effect, and he says, failed breach.

So I said, no way. And I literally moved him to the side and looked around the corner and it was a breach. But what we didn't know is that the wall had, the interior of the wall was not like any interior wall I'd ever seen. I mean, it wasn't just 16 inches on center. It was two two by fours, 16 on center with cross braid pieces and everything else like that. I mean, it was pretty robust for an interior wall.

Jon Becker: So that's a structure wall.

Chris Eklund: Yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Bigelow: Holding like whole nother level of apartments above it.

Chris Eklund: Yeah. And I'm a SWAT guy. I'm not the builder guy. So, you know, so I stuck my head out of, of the apartment door and I look, and they had a successful breach on the other entry door. The door was literally just kind of. It was off hinges, but it was there because of all the stuff that was there. They pulled that out. And right about at that time is when I got on the radio and called the command post.

And, you know, you never forget when you tell somebody failed breach on a real life operation. And even they would say there, like, the air just came out of everybody back at the command post. So a couple of things that happened. We made the decision that we're going to start moving the furniture out of the way.

Some people have talked about just rushing through the furniture and things like that, which it wouldn't have been effective based on what he had there. So they start basically methodically pulling furniture from the other side of the door out into the hallway. The two operators that I had go into the apartment first that were going to be the first two through the wall. I basically told them, you guys go downstairs and set it out. You're done. For a little while.

Of course, they looked at me like all good operators would and said, we're good. I said, that's fine, just go downstairs. Because in my mind, they were just about to go through a wall following an explosive breach on a hostage rescue, on a guy who would shot another officer and things like that. And then it was failed. So just like the air came out of the command post, at some point these guys are going to have a crash, too. And I just kind of wanted them to go just away.

Jon Becker: Yeah, just before the adrenaline. Adrenaline dump.

Chris Eklund: Thank you.

Jon Becker: Where the adrenaline dump hits them and.

Chris Eklund: Right, right. And, you know, I have no reason to even say that it would happen, but it was just a thing. So they started working the furniture, got that pulled out, and that was probably a total time, maybe 20 minutes ordeal, something like that. And while that was happening, we had put teams of two back on the platform on the rook, and they were launching 40 millimeter gas rounds into the apartment, some tri chamber. I'm somewhat of a fan of, you know, those closed doors with the closet and right angles and things like that to where you can affect those closets and things like that.

So by the time it was over and we had gotten all the furniture out to where we were going to make entry, pretty much every door or every room in the apartment had been affected, with the exception of the hallway bathroom.

So we started to make an entry. First thing we came to was the master bedroom door, which was closed but unlocked. So that came open, actually, I'm sorry, I'm confusing my doors. That master bedroom door was locked and closed. I called a breacher up to work the door. And this is a guy who has hit thousands and thousands of doors.

And this was another one of those times where reality struck and he literally drew the ram back and threw it at the door while he was running out of the threshold. I've had conversations with that guy after, and it was just. It became a real thing. You know, you hit so many doors and there's no reality.

But again, coming back to Kevin being shot. It became a thing. So that's kind of what really drew my attention into the mindset of operators and things like that. Over time, the door came open and that master bathroom door that opened out that we thought was going to be such a problem just popped right open and there was nobody home. But now we had to go and continue to look through the rest of the house.

So we moved up into the living room to a point right where it went into the hallway. The first door on the left was cracked. Closed, but cracked. The bathroom door was on the right towards the end of the hall that was closed. And then the bathroom, the bedroom door straight at the end of the hall was closed. Before we entered into the hallway, I again had brought one of my grenadiers in, had him put, I think, three or four rounds of 40 millimeter through the bathroom door. One to see if we get any kind of a response to just to kind of fill that final last spot.

So we're literally standing in the living room shooting into the bathroom door that's about 15ft down the hall. So we had no response there. Moved into the first bedroom on the left, another set of bunk beds that was kind of opposite wall. One of the male kids was up top. The second male child was on the bottom bunk. They had both been shot in the head. We continued to move down the hall, got into the bathroom. Nobody was there. Made entry into that last bedroom straight where that initial set of bunk beds had gone down. And that's where we found the twelve year old daughter and the one year old daughter both shot in the head.

The only thing we had left at that point was that closet in that bedroom that hadn't been cleared. Operators moved over to it, turned the knob, pushed it open and it opened about six inches and it was stopped. The operator looked and it was basically the suspect's foot was stopping the door. We. I called in a breacher came in. He worked the hinges and the guy had. Was self inflicted gunshot wound to the head of. Pretty recent.

Jon Becker: Coward.

Chris Eklund: Sure. But it had. It was. We were certainly in the apartment at the time he shot himself.

Jon Becker: Oh, really?

Chris Eklund: I would guesstimate it was probably the time that we were firing the 40 mm into the. Into the bathroom is when he did it. In fact, some of the operators heard a small pop. They thought it maybe was a gas canister or something that hadn't gone off yet. But by all best estimates it was probably him in the closet. It was a pretty small caliber hang. I think it was a 32, something like that. And he was inside that closet.

But again, I kind of come back to the fact that thinking about that closet before on the walkthrough and then finding him in that closet.

Jon Becker: A little bit of foreshadowing.

Chris Eklund: Yeah. Yeah. You know, and kind of one of the things that I kind of talk about when we, when John and I do this is, you know, from what we got out of this is when you do these walkthroughs, which are a great luxury, try to look at just the bare walls. Don't see it for what it is, but see it for what it could be. Right. So that closet being jammed packed full doesn't mean the closet over there.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Chris Eklund: Is jam packed full. You know what I mean?

Jon Becker: Yeah. The neighbor being a hoarder does not mean that the suspect as a hoarder.

Chris Eklund: Yeah. I mean, it might have been a great place for another explosive charge, thinking differently, you know, potentially knowing he was in there. So. Yeah.

Jon Becker: So why don't we talk through. Because, I mean, obviously there's a lot – There's a lot to this. Let's talk through some of the lessons learned here. I mean, do we know have any approximation as to when the kids were killed?

Jonathan Bigelow: I think based on all the looking back and reviewing some of the CAD notes and stuff like that, when I think pretty much after the initial volley, the shot fired by suspect, Kevin going down, Manny returning some fire and then extracting Kevin, then working on him, is calls initially came into the comm center saying, hey, there's stuff going on. And our reaction to that was, well, yeah, we were there for.

Jon Becker: There were shots fired.

Jonathan Bigelow: There were shots fired. That was us and him and, you know, back and forth. What I think they determined was or they suspect, I guess you could say, is one of the occupants, whether it was below or above or whatever, like a good four minutes had elapsed before. Hey, I just hear. Heard shots in the apartment, like above or below.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Jonathan Bigelow: And it was a. They described, I think. I think they described it as like a cadence type. I heard a couple. And then I heard a couple. Yeah.

Jon Becker: Went into one bedroom, shot both kids. Went in the other bedroom, shot both kids.

Jonathan Bigelow: You know, and I think the – I think even the medical examiner had said they had, you know.

Jon Becker: Yeah. You guys never had a chance.

Jonathan Bigelow: No, no.

Chris Eklund: And it was a thing for me and I know for my guys. I mean, it was. It was apparent that the kids had been dead for some time. Right. So.

Jonathan Bigelow: So that hit home, I think, with my team. We debriefed after the fact and they were just torn. Well, one, not only because it's like, why did Orange county get to come in and immediately start doing work? And that's like, guys, what are you talking about? That's not our play. That was on them.

One, I don't like to say this a lot, but It's – I don't feel bad. I guess I do feel bad. We all feel bad for the fact that four. Four kids, you know, lost their life to an evil maniac. But I don't feel bad that my operators didn't get. Have to witness what his operators did.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jonathan Bigelow: You know, that's. It's just a whole nother level of just that socks to deal with. So imagine being on scene for 17 hours, and then you witness.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jonathan Bigelow: And then you saw that, you know, so which horrible.

Jon Becker: So, yeah, in many ways, it was. It was merciful that it wasn't your team.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah, I said, so we debriefed, and they said, you know, a big thing was, well, we didn't get the win. We didn't get the win. There wasn't like, who said? And I reverted back to some of the early training that we did where we did a hostage rescue scenario on a kid daycare. And the scenario instructor said, you know, put this scenario together where ten kids end up dying and the self inflicted, the hostage takers just killed themselves.

And we ended that scenario with a deliberate, you know, emergency hostage rescue. And we were like, wait, wait. We didn't even get to kill the hostage takers, and everybody's dead. What is this? And they were like, he's like, well, whoever said that you're ever gonna do that, be able to win like that? So I was like, man, that's – It's deep when you realize that.

And I think Clint Bruce, who was like, he delivered a lot of speeches, but former Navy SEAL, you know, talks about. He's in former Navy SEAL, and he talked about how it's. We always win. It's. It's not the always win factor. It's not. We're always victorious. It's the – Whether you define you are victorious, you're winning as you are victorious, or you realize what you came short of, you fix those problems, and you'll get beat another day a different way.

But, so I just said, guys, we were there. We were prepared. We were ready. If we had green light, we would be go. We'd probably encounter the same problem.

Jon Becker: It's an interesting training question. I was with the team recently that they were doing a medical exercise and had a teammate, and they had to medevac the teammate, and they get him to the mock doctor, and the doctor was like, he's dead. And the team was like, why would you do that? I'm like, why? He's like, cause that's a real possibility. And they then subsequently had a horrific event. Oddly enough, the same guy shot very badly.

Fortunately, he survived this time and in the real world. But it's an interesting question for teams that are training because you do tend to train to victory because everybody, you want to win.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah. Don't kill my guys. Don't kill my guys.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Yeah. Like, my guys all survived and everything worked out fine. And unfortunately, you know, that isn't always the case. And in this case, there's not much either team could have done. I mean, maybe you could have gotten the suspect a little bit sooner, but he was – He already had a plan that was. He was going to execute no matter what you did. So it is very frustrating.

Chris Eklund: Yeah. And I think, you know, always the training.

Jonathan Bigelow: Right.

Chris Eklund: I mean, to John's point, I just finished a hostage rescue evolution with my team and set up a scenario, and they weren't winning it like, they won it because they had the opportunity to save. We used dummies that, you know, real that put out blood and things like that, and it puts it on a clock to how soon you stop the bleeding and things like that.

Oh, well, and, you know, so that they have the opportunity to win and that they can stop the bleeding and, you know, get them to greater care and things like that. But they're shot. Like the victim and the suspect are shot when they get in the room by design, because can you now transfer from that thought process of we always go in, we positive target ID on our suspect, we shoot them, and then we, you know, set up and evacuate the hostage. Well, okay. Can you go in there and transition to medical care?

Jonathan Bigelow: Right.

Chris Eklund: Because those are very real things, too.

Jon Becker: For sure.

Chris Eklund: You know, we always do the best we can to try to, you know, cover as much of the structure as we can on these hostage rescues and get operators there and, you know, create dilemmas for the suspect and everything like that. But it's still a period of time, I think there was an incident not too long ago in a bank where there was a hostage rescue, and they played it back on. Body worn from an explosive breach to first shot on the suspect was 1.8 seconds, which is pretty good.

Jon Becker: That's amazing!

Chris Eklund: Yeah. In that time, the suspect had three victims on their knees in front of him. He was able to shoot two of them. So, I mean, it's an interesting thing. The other thing is, I think that we – How do we know what we have a hostage scenario? We all SWAT guys. I mean, that's what SWAT teams do, is they're there for hostage scenarios.

And, you know, it's a very black and white way to look at it. When you say, well, you gotta have a hostage and you gotta have threats and you gotta have means to carry out the threats. Well, kids in an apartment for exit. I mean, at what point do you make that decision where something has gone wrong here? You know what I mean?

Jonathan Bigelow: So with their own dad.

Chris Eklund: Right.

Jon Becker: Yeah. With their own father who has not threatened them.

Chris Eklund: Right.

Jonathan Bigelow: Who's not said anything.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Chris Eklund: So you have no threats. You know, there's a weapon in play, but you don't. I mean, you obviously know that it's been in use before. Right. But, you know, when do you draw that? And I say it to my guys all the time, this is not a black and white world we live in. It's very gray.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Chris Eklund: So those conversations have to be had with commands and say, hey, listen, we might not have this thing, but have you thought about this thing? You know what I mean? And that's kind of one of the big learning points that I take away from it is how do you look at this? And, you know, could it be, is it absolute or is it implied? You know, things like that? Do I need to have a gun to have means to kill somebody?

Jon Becker: Well, and you raise a really valid point, which is, I think it's very easy, like we were saying earlier, you know, training to victory, training to win. It's very easy to create a training scar where this is what a hostage situation looks like and it always plays out this way. And like you said, one and a half seconds, shoots two victims. Like, it doesn't always play that way. What do you think the best way to resolve that from a training standpoint? What can teams do in training that you think helps to counter that?

Jonathan Bigelow: That's a good question.

Chris Eklund: I mean, it's definitely a question that I think deserves some thought. But I would tell you that we always try to train our teams for the best victory and the best win. We want to be able to say that our teams are the best. So we create this performance that makes us kind of believe that. But when they come under adversity, I mean, I know that when my team has come under adversity, it's always better on the other side.

So I don't know if there's an answer to where you're creating losses, and then they come out better. Of course, you don't want them to be so beat down that they can't. They don't ever believe in themselves. But there's a fine line between what's reality and what's not. You know, we often run hostage rescue with no port and covers or break and rake teams working at the same time.

And it takes forever for the operators to get to that room if they don't know where it is. You got to kind of remind them, hey, we're going to have other assets in this thing. You know, we're just a small group of guys right now running CQB reps for hostage rescue. You don't have those other assets in place that we're going to have that will help us win this thing? You know what I mean?

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah, I mean, I can't. I don't think I could say more on that. That's pretty good. The scenario sucked. I mean, John, when you talk about what are the. Some of the problems that we encountered or how we tailored or, you know, identified shortcomings and stuff like that, we looked at second story apartments, you know, just the target location. Okay, this sucked. We really never trained or thought about this location before. Let's acquire equipment, let's acquire training and tactics on this specific.

So if you could think about the most horrific type of target location, I guess you could say is like, this is gonna suck. Train on that. You know, relying on outside resources and it's. It's not to knock again, you know, those that came to assist, whether it was the listening devices or the explosive breaching. But I – relying on outside resources, when you have the ability to in house train those and. And be able to communicate without those on a tactical level, hey, stand up your own. And that's what we've done since then.

I think Warren county has done since then as well, is stand up our own explosive breaching program. Get that equipment that is necessary. What about those listening devices? Train those people on your own team.

And so we don't have to call in those and put those in harms a way that not necessarily we have the time to dedicate that and then just overall, I think the underlying thing is, man, we stretched our guys way too long into the fatigue factor. We were operationally not ready should the call be said, hey, go go, go. So that was a failure on our board to say, we got to give this up sooner, you know, so recognize that fatigue factor. And I think now it's max, 12 hours. And that's max.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Bigelow: Set the hard cap and that. I mean, that could be 8 hours. I mean, we're in Florida, you know, I couldn't imagine doing this in Wisconsin.

Chris Eklund: When it's cold or.

Jon Becker: Yeah, hold.

Jonathan Bigelow: You're looking a four hour operational window of people outside standing there waiting.

Jon Becker: I interviewed, I actually, the guy that's going to be keynote Jon Becker: t the NTOA tomorrow morning, Bob Kuntz, who's a submarine, you know, submarine captain, and he talked about how there are just certain things they call trip wires that when that happens, we change this. So, you know, if another vessel gets within a certain distance of a submarine, then the submarine has to change course, period. No questions, no ask.

It's an interesting question whether there should be a tripwire for teams, because it does also take the emotion out of the situation. If you say La SDSEB was recently on a barricade for 42 hours before they handed it over to LAPD and the discussion afterwards, well, why'd they hand it over? And the other discussion was, why'd they wait 42 hours? Right?

It strikes me that if you are a team commander setting a tripwire or your team where, if we get to this point, were going to transition the problem, it doesn't matter what state it's in – It doesn't matter if it looks like it's coming to fruition, we're transitioning the problem.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah, I think we hit on that before. I think when we talked previously that, like, retribution should not be, oh, I'm good. We're. No, it's going to be our team that take this guy down. We're not in the business of retribution.

Chris Eklund: But one point that may even actually.

Jonathan Bigelow: Be the tripwire, and that might be like, hey, you guys are too invested, you know, because of what happened. That might be the trip wire.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I was just in a meeting with a bunch of SWAT commanders, and this was a topic that came up is you have a good relationship with your local team. One of your guys gets shot, what do you do? And it was, it was split, you know, but there was, there's certainly an argument, and the argument I would make is that if an Orlando officer is killed and Orange county kills the guy, it is easier to defend that Orange county, even if the guy needed killing and was going to go the hard way, no matter what, it is easier to defend both from a civil liability and a press standpoint to say no. We stood our team down and handed the problem over to a different agency that was not emotionally involved.

Chris Eklund: Yeah.

Jonathan Bigelow: One thing that I also think that needs to be hit on is we had the ability, we had the luxury, I would say, of having that extra apartment, that mirror image practice on it and all this. And it was almost, we even. I remember saying this to guys, this is somebody else's home. Don't damage the apartment. Right?

As you walk through. Don't, you know, come on, guys. All right. Bad. Hey, we're talking about lives. So if I were to do it again and we had the same setup. We had the same setup, or the breaching through the wall is the failure on our part. Was not. Tell the explosive breachers, hey, put the charge up. All right. You think it's gonna go? Yeah. All right. Now.

Chris Eklund: Good.

Jonathan Bigelow: Set it up. Ready to go. Now go over to that apartment, cut the wall on that same side apartment. Walk away, see what you're worth.

Jon Becker: See what's there.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah. Investigate. Oh, that's gonna cost money.

Chris Eklund: All right.

Jonathan Bigelow: Money or lies? What are we doing? Go do it. And they would probably come back saying, we need to change.

Chris Eklund: It may not have been the same wall, but, you know, I know cases where they've actually peeled the wall back and then they go to work the target wall, and it's concrete on the inside. I mean, but it's. It's just a matter of, you have to look at those things. I would never do another charge like that again. And not, and I don't believe that our breaches would not peel the wall back, but it would certainly be a conversation of, hey, let's look and see what the inside of this wall looks like to give us a better idea.

Jon Becker: Another thing that i've heard teams do is, especially during the problems that are during the day, is go back and pull the original blueprints, call public works, call the city building department and say, what do we have? Are there blueprints available? Because that does give you at least where there is structure in the building. What else did this change for your teams? Or do you think should other teams should be thinking about.

Chris Eklund: Well, again, and I talked about it kind of when I was going through the scenario. You know, the mindset of your guys is huge, especially for a team leader perspective. And, you know, even operators, if your guys aren't somehow locked on or you haven't seen them not locked on yet, and then you witness that those are real conversations to be had, like I said, that breacher hithenne a thousand doors, zero defects, you know, and he's a guy who looks like a breacher, you know, like, he's that guy.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Chris Eklund: But making sure that there's a real understanding of what's going to come out of this and what the reality is now. Right? I have a tendency to tell all the guys on my team, hey, there's always somebody on the other side of the door with a gun. And I tell them that all the time because I want them to be ready.

But, of course, however many times there's not, then they stop believing me. Right? But that's just kind of the idea, and I think that's one of the biggest things. And again, that kind of spun me into really paying attention to the operators from a mentality perspective. Like, where are they at right now? Are you really good? If you tell me you're all right, you're probably not good. Right?

Like I say, you know, the other thing is, we immediately went to shotgun breaching after this. You know, you go to these teams, and I've done. I've had luxury to visit a lot of teams who have a lot of stuff, and there's always people who are like, well, they have it. Why don't we have it? And basically what I've come up with is people have all the equipment they have because bad stuff happened there.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Chris Eklund: You look at, like, the LAPDs or the SEBs or things like that that have no wants for any equipment, and it's because they have so much happen there. Right. NYPD, ESU, same way they have it all. So it's kind of a double edged sword. I mean, if you can forecast all the things that you want, that's great.

Jon Becker: But I think it's also a place where other teams, lessons learned, come in hand. It's one of the rules that I play in my day job is we work with so many teams that we see what's working, we see what's not working, and we see that there are certain tools that are, you know, they're a one trick pony, but when you need that trick, like the shielded platform on a rook is an example of that where, like, I'm going to use that every day.

But when you need that, you need that. Like, you really need it. And I think it is. I don't think we spend enough time, like you said, forecasting ways that can go wrong. It's an interesting kind of contrast in the culture of SWAT teams because on the one hand. Everybody believes in Murphy, right? Like it's an open joke. Right?

Like, you know, I don't care how many times you do something, it's not going to work. That, you know, the rook, you could have trained with that thing a thousand times. That platform was only going to release on an op at an inconvenient time. But it is intentionally making yourself uncomfortable, intentionally testing the limits of your training. I had interviewed a SEAL commander recently who said he used to make his guys run high risk CQB runs at the end of really long days.

Jonathan Bigelow: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Like, okay, let's all pull it down. No, we're doing this one more thing right now, and you need to be really.

Chris Eklund: Sharp because they never happen when you're first waking up and you just had your cup of coffee and things like that. Yeah, of course. And I think, you know, Jon and I have been doing this debrief, talking about this for three years, at least. And, you know, it's things like this where people can kind of get that information. Like, I know I've taken stuff that I've learned and heard in debriefs before and directly applied it to what I'm working with right now because it dawned on me right then, this is not a win. Like, we don't tell this story, I think, because it's a great scenario. Right?

Jon Becker: No, it's terrible.

Chris Eklund: But I think there's a lot that people can take away from it. And see the. You know, John talks earlier about, you know, he calls it a ballet. And when we do the debrief, he actually put a picture of a ballet happening. And I'm like, okay, well, for all of you in the. In the class, you know, imagine there's marbles all over the floor of this beautiful ballet. And that's what happens to us when we take it. You know what I mean? So you kind of read into those real. What's the worst possible thing that can happen here? You know? And I think we could draw a lot from that. Other people's experiences.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's kind of the premise of the whole show. Right. Like, that's. That's what I'm trying to do with this thing, is so many of the decisions you make, you make because you have a paradigm and you recognize, oh, this is like this other scenario, and you can't have too many of those. The ability to look at something complicated and see patterns in it is one of the things that makes great leaders great leaders. And I think it's critical that you are a student of the game and constantly trying to push your knowledge.

Chris Eklund: Well, yeah, and I think that's huge because we all, as a types want to be the ones who solve all the problems. I have yet to find anybody who has thought of something recently that hasn't already been thought of. It's happened before.

Jonathan Bigelow: I think at the end of the debrief that we do, we really try to hit home. It's like no matter who you are, no matter how many resources you have or how many training hours or how really, how good you really think you are as a team, we're not here to say that you're not. But really take that, identify your team status by looking at, take that hard, look in the mirror and let me. Are we really that good? Because we had that. We thought we were that good. And then we got. We're handed a problem that sucked. And not that we didn't tackle it, but, well, we got challenged.

And then train realistically, train hard. Train different contingencies, trains transition. Get your technology in order and just, man, think of a thousand ways to have suck happen to you and then train it really in order to move that operational needle in two degrees in the right direction.

Jon Becker: So I think that's a really good place for us to stop.

Jonathan Bigelow: No, you don't. No. Because you know what? Kevin was a warrior. I'll tell you that. He hung on, man. He hung on for several more years after that. 2018 was his incident, and he finally succumbed to his injuries, 2021. So I just like to give a shout out to Kevin. There's a contingency of officers that do an outstanding job. They walk his kid to the first day of school every year since. So, you know, we lost one too early, too soon, but he was a great one. So just like to maybe possibly end it with that.

Chris Eklund: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: That's where we should stop. Thank you, boys!

Jonathan Bigelow: Appreciate it!

Chris Eklund: Thank you!

Jonathan Bigelow: Thank you!