Original subtitles

[ominous music]

[line ringing]

[sobs] [bleep]

Damn it!

And, you know, they say,

the measure of how much you love someone,

is how many tears you shed for them.

[gunfire]

[dispatcher speaking]

[officer speaking]

When you're negotiating, you want to be able to see

inside the mind of the suspect.

I was thinking about the psychological aspect of it.

[Kirk Felker] I started hearing bullets go by my head.

[gunfire]

I was essentially passing out from the blood loss.

[officer speaking]

[David Kleensang] You knew it was either going to end with him surrendering

or with gunfire,

and I had to play the game.

But it's who comes out on top.

-[dispatcher speaking] -[officer speaking]

[theme music playing]

[David] On June 12th, the day of the call,

the dispatcher called me on the phone

and says, "Dave, you need to head to Alliance.

There's something going down there."

There was a hostage situation.

[David] A subject had entered the pharmacy.

There were three employees in the pharmacy at the time.

The pharmacist himself, who was also the owner,

and two employees.

The two employees were able to run out.

One of them ran to a neighboring business

to call 911.

[David] The pharmacist was taken hostage by the suspect

and the suspect barricaded the doors.

My area of specialty at the time was hostage negotiations.

But prior to this incident, I had actually only

dealt with two situations as a negotiator.

And they were relatively minor.

I was thinking, "Dave, you need to get to Alliance

before the situation at the pharmacy gets a whole lot worse."

[gunfire]

[Kirk] I was the first on scene.

When you get a call like that, you know somebody is at risk.

And I'm going in.

That's what I do.

I smelled gunpowder.

It's something that heightens your awareness,

and I was just hoping that somebody hadn't been killed,

and that's when I encountered the suspect.

It happens in slow motion.

I did not recognize him.

I did see that he was holding a gun.

I gave him a command to drop it.

He almost smirked and extended the gun toward me.

[gunshots]

[Kirk] I got shot in the arm.

It was bleeding pretty heavily.

I didn't want to become a liability

to another officer having to come in and save me.

So I made the decision to exit the pharmacy

at that time.

[gunshots]

I have spotty recollection of of what happened next,

but I was essentially passing out from the blood loss.

The next thing I remember is waking up in my room after the surgery.

There it is, So, entry-exit. Kind of came in and just blew everything up.

After coming back from surgery, things were foggy.

I had a lot of concern for the people that were on scene.

I did wonder about what the motives were.

I didn't know if he was local or from out of town or who he was.

[David] We now know that whosoever involved is violent.

Shooting an officer meant that you were dealing

with somebody that was on the extreme scale of dangerous.

I was going to have to be careful

to try not to anger him.

Try not to to make the situation worse,

[dialing]

[line ringing]

This is the first contact that anybody had had

after he entered the pharmacy.

It was unusual in the sense that he was threatening with explosives.

Uh, that's kind of odd,

but he was calmer than I would have expected him to be.

In trying to figure out the mind of the suspect,

his demeanor told me one of two things.

Either he was in extreme control of himself

or that he was resigned to what the situation was.

He was taking the aggressive stance.

That was his way of trying to control the situation.

[line disconnects]

I received a call from a CI. Confidential informant.

He was very agitated, excited,

He says, "Dave, Fat Andy," he called him,

"tried robbing the pharmacy."

When the CI told me it was Fat Andy,

well, then I knew right away that it was Andy Gonzalez.

That was a big problem.

Because Andy was the primary suspect in a homicide case.

And so now the pharmacist was in extreme danger

because of what we knew about Andy.

I knew that he had killed a guy.

[LorriJo Koch] Oh, that's my boy, my boy.

That's my boy.

This was when I had so much hope for him.

So much hope.

And I really felt like he was headed down

a path that would provide him a future.

And...

And that he would be happy.

He had been through so much.

Larry Gonzalez was my husband.

and Larry had a history of sexually

and physically and verbally abusing Andy...

as a little boy, but I didn't know anything about it

Ange would deny it over and over again.

When I left Larry and moved out

to get a divorce,

Ange was was very, very emotional.

His brother and he was still living there.

He seemed to withdraw more,

but ate more.

I think it might have had to do

with his coping mechanism being food at the time.

Food was his friend.

When he was in middle school, they picked on Ange because he was a big kid.

Ange had brought a gun to school,

because he wanted to put fear

in a group of boys

that were going to beat him up.

Although it was a bad choice,

he never loaded the gun, never threatened anybody.

After that, Ange went through a very, very dark time.

Ninth grade, tenth grade.

[sighs] He was expelled from school,

suspended for fighting.

But this picture is when he got his GED.

And Ange wanted to be a chef.

He was a happy kid. A happy young man.

Thought he was really going places.

Until he found drugs.

It was a Tuesday morning in June.

It was beautiful outside.

It was gonna be warm.

I got ready for work. I was excited.

It was a good day.

We just started and one of the nurses

came in and said, um, "We have a situation."

The nursing home I worked at

would have to go into lockdown mode.

There is an active shooter in Thiele's Pharmacy,

and he's got Charles.

And I don't know how to explain to you folks. I don't.

But a mother knows or has... has this feeling.

She knows.

I knew. I just knew it.

I was going downtown to the pharmacy.

I was gonna go get my son and get him out of there

and ask him what the hell he was thinking.

I was gonna go chew him out.

And I remember I jumped out and I took off running.

And somebody tackled me.

And told me I couldn't go there.

And I said, "That's my son.

I'm going, I'm going." And he said, "No, you can't."

I just remember thinking, "I've just got to get to him."

If I can get to him, we'll take care of this.

This... We'll get this taken care of.

I said, "Don't...

underestimate what a mother is capable of."

Even though the intentions may be good,

it has been shown many times in past incidents

that allowing a third party to become involved,

such as Mom was wanting to do,

uh, only has negative effects.

The Josh Bullock case

initially started as a missing person case.

He was a suspected drug dealer,

especially being marijuana.

He, all of a sudden, disappeared.

A hunter found Mr. Bullock's pickup.

The truck was virtually incinerated.

Who could do something like this?

Somebody that was extremely unstable.

We received from a couple of different sources

that Andy was dealing for Mr. Bullock.

Andy had apparently not paid Josh.

That's when we really started

looking at Andy as our prime suspect.

I said, "Andy, I'm Dave."

I was expecting someone that was excited,

agitated, upset.

[David] I had to turn around and tell myself

"You can't really ask him any questions about the homicide,"

because with a hostage situation,

you do not want to, you know, aggravate him.

You have to concentrate on just the one thing.

The negotiations.

The next thing he said was, "I want $250,000 cash.

And I want a plane at the airport.

There's something else going on here."

[David] Normally, with negotiations,

the negotiator doesn't say yes or no

to demands that are made by a suspect.

It is always routed through this group of decision makers,

my supervisors, and then you respond back.

Well, that group hadn't had time to gather.

I felt like I shouldn't delay an answer to his demands.

So, it was contrary to protocol,

but I just told Andy at that time...

I said, "Andy, you know that isn't going to happen."

It was a risk on my part.

It was going to tell me a lot about how things were going to go.

And he just said, "Okay."

After first contact with Andy,

that's when I found out

that officers had arrived at the scene.

They were told to go in next door.

This building was adjacent to the pharmacy.

They were going down a hallway.

They did not know that the end of this hallway

was a common wall with the office

where Andy and Charles were.

I'm not sure if Andy heard radio,

if he just heard...

but because he heard them,

he just started firing blindly through the wall.

[David] There were two officers pinned down.

Well, this would be

your worst nightmare for those officers.

They are not expecting that there's going to be

bullets coming at them through the wall.

[David] Knowing that those guys were in the building,

my number one concern was for their safety.

They already knew that Andy would shoot through walls.

If they did anything to attract his attention,

he wouldn't have any hesitation to do it again.

When I got back on the phone with Andy,

what my plan was,

was that I could convince him

that the best ending to this situation

was for him to just come out of the building and surrender.

[line ringing]

[David] His speech was very slurred.

He sounded very lethargic.

I knew he had been ingesting drugs.

So that also led me to believe that that was the motivation

for the robbery to begin with.

Drugs, as opposed to money.

That added another facet to this situation

because I didn't know which way the drugs would push him.

If they would push him

to be more violent and aggressive.

He was very paranoid about noises.

If he heard something, he would,

"What was that? What's going on? What are they doing?"

Andy said that he would come out,

but whenever he said that,

there was always a "but."

"But I have to do more drugs."

[David] I had to play the game.

I had to put on the facade that I trusted Andy.

But there was absolutely no reason that I could trust him.

I was on and off the phone with Andy.

Sometimes he would not answer.

[line ringing]

I finally figured out that he was either making a call,

an outside call, or receiving an outside call.

Andy being able to talk to somebody other than me,

I can only view as a detriment.

We don't know who he's talking to.

We don't know what's being said.

At around noon, I was at my parent's home,

and we were just waiting.

And the phone rang and it was Ange.

And he said, "I just wanna tell you I love you."

And I said, "What are you doing, Ange? Why... Let Charlie go."

I remember, he said, "I... I can't deal with this right now.

I can't... I can't deal with this right now."

Because I was so insistent, you know?

"Let Charlie go. Come out!

Please come out."

And he said, "I can't deal with this right now.

I gotta go, Mom. I just wanted you to know

you're the best mother I could have ever had.

I love you."

I remember those few words.

I will always remember those.

And I thought to myself, "I wasn't a good mother.

If I was a good mother,

you wouldn't be sitting in a pharmacy, holding... holding a hostage.

You'd be happy and have a good life."

And I just remember that feeling.

But then he hung up.

After that, there was an unspoken sense

that everyone knew,

this was not gonna end good.

[David] After we were back talking again, I explained to him

if he surrendered what would happen.

He expressed his fear of getting hurt.

His comment to me was, "Well, after I'm laying down on the sidewalk,

they're going to dogpile me and I'm going to get hurt."

[David] He had a double set of standards.

He had no qualms about hurting, killing other people,

but he did not want to get hurt.

Then he became jittery, nervous.

I felt like something was always holding him back.

There was some kind of barrier.

I didn't know the reason why, all of a sudden, boom...

When Andy told me that he had killed his dad, I was shocked.

That was a totally new piece of information to me

and definitely makes the situation

a whole lot different and a whole lot worse.

[Cody Buskirk] The morning of June 12th 2012, I was asleep.

And I woke up to a phone call, not from the police department,

but from my mother,

who had heard a local Alliance police officer

was injured, shot on duty,

and she was scared that it would have been me.

I didn't know which one of my coworkers,

my friends, was injured.

And I shot out of bed

and called the police department

to see what I needed to do next.

When we first arrived at the residence,

we discovered that the front door

had been barricaded with a coffee table and a chair.

So we force our way through.

We're able to push through the furniture.

We identified an individual laying there under three blankets.

After uncovering him, we identified him as Larry Gonzalez.

He had a single gunshot wound to the abdomen and was clearly deceased.

We saw guns at every entry point and exit at that residence,

as well as an arsenal kind of laid out in the bedroom.

It seemed like he was ready for a standoff at his house.

It would have been easy to pull in the garage and shut the door behind him.

And now he's in the house and his rifle is right there when he walks in.

I think he intended to get what he wanted and get home

and Felker stopped him.

[David] That floored me when I heard that.

It just kept compounding how violent he was.

I remember I got a call from the police.

And he said to me, "Lorri, I just want you to know

that we found Larry, and he's dead."

And I really didn't give Larry much of a thought, honestly.

I didn't process that Larry was dead.

I couldn't process that

because my focus was primarily on Ange.

The next phone call, it was Ange on the phone,

"Ange," I said, "you killed your father."

You know, "You shot your father. You killed him."

And suddenly it went from the calm demeanor to this frightened voice.

This... this shocked voice. This voice that was not calm.

It was scared.

And, "I killed him in self-defense, Mom.

I killed Dad in self-defense."

And the phone went dead.

Why would he do this?

Why... why would he kill his dad?

My instincts tell me that it is highly probable

that Ange killed Larry because Larry had put a gun to his head,

and threatened to kill him.

I've watched Larry get into altercations

with his kids.

I watched him try and beat up Ange.

So yes, I... I truly believed that what Ange was saying was...

He didn't mean to.

He didn't mean to.

I didn't see enough to say yes or no,

it was self-defense.

Um, I saw a single gunshot wound to the abdomen.

And then he was covered up in blankets.

And that speaks to me

that Andy didn't want to see him.

There might be, you know, guilt, shame, remorse.

When Andy mentioned the killings,

I didn't really feel that he was remorseful.

Admitting to the killings

just reinforced how psychotic he was.

But I had to be careful.

I didn't say what I was thinking.

I want to ask him about it,

but the whole purpose

of this negotiations

is to try to keep him calm.

To try to get him to come out.

We had been talking about him coming out.

He said something along the lines

of that he wanted to, but he couldn't.

We had been talking for quite a while,

and Andy's cell phone was about ready to die.

We did not want to lose contact with him.

Charles made the comment about,

"Well, my phone's out on the counter and it has a full charge."

Andy told Charles to go out and get the phone.

Andy followed Charles.

[Andy breathing heavily]