SnapShot: December 23, 2012....That's When I was Going to Kill Him

The night was loud before we even arrived—crowd swelling, fear in the air, and a hurried plan dissolving under the force of people sprinting down a driveway yelling that someone would die if we waited. What followed felt like a standoff measured in inches: two butcher knives flashing, two victims pinned to a garage, and thirty frantic bodies turning a clear line of fire into a moving maze. We had the legal grounds to shoot. We didn’t have the space to do it without risking the very people we were there to protect.

We walk through the geometry of a decision few ever see up close. The red dot hovered above a forehead; the trigger slack vanished and returned as someone stepped into the barrel again and again. We adjusted. One partner worked a shield, another searched for an angle, and I made a plan to strike with the rifle, create room, and end the threat at contact distance if needed. Then the knives hit the ground, compliance snapped into place, and the scene broke open. The victims got help. The suspect went to jail. The memory stayed.

Months later, the story expanded. A traffic stop cracked open the back of a white van and revealed a bound, gagged woman—the same girlfriend from the party—moments away from being driven to her death. Rescue, arrest, and a long sentence followed. That discovery reframed everything we felt that night: domestic violence isn’t a single event; it compounds, migrates, and intensifies when it’s not interrupted. We talk about the ethics of force, the realities of crowded scenes, and how training, patience, and timing can separate tragedy from survival. If these stories matter to you—if you care about the hard choices behind public safety—follow the show, share this episode with a friend, and leave a review to help others find it.

www.StreamlineEventsLLC.com
www.DoubleDownDuo.com

@StreamlineSEE
@DDownDuo

Youtube-Instagram-Facebook

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Date And Mood
• 0:18 The Weight Of Split-Second Decisions
• 1:16 Dual Calls And A Dangerous Party
• 2:24 Confrontation At The Garage Door
• 3:35 No Clear Shot In A Packed Crowd
• 4:40 Compliance And Custody
• 5:34 The Van, The Girlfriend, The Aftermath
• 6:36 Lessons On Domestic Violence And Memory

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to a Murders to Music snapshot. It is December 23rd, 2025. It's only two days until Christmas. That's pretty awesome. This day will always stick in my mind, and I want to tell you about why. In law enforcement, and I don't want to live the glory days, but in law enforcement, we are put into situations where we have to make split-second decisions that might mean taking somebody's life. Split-second decisions that could change or alter the course of our lives, our families, our friends, or those that we deal with every single day. On December 23rd, 2012, there was a situation I was involved in that I will likely always remember. This is the closest that I have ever come to two things. One, somebody being killed right in front of me. And two, the closest I ever came to taking somebody's life. Most of the time when we get involved in those situations, we are up close and personal and actively involved. And this night was no different. We were on patrol, it was a very busy night for us. We were on patrol on the far east end of our city when a call came in, and we it was a very intensive call, labor-intensive call on the far east end. I want to say it was a domestic violence. We had somebody fleeing in a foot pursuit or something. And about that time, a call came in that a fight was breaking out at a party across town. That party was on the far west end of our city. So to get there, even lights and siren was going to take us 15 minutes. So we respond into this, and as we get there, we're getting updated information that there's a man with some knives and he's threatened to kill people and he's going ballistic. So we respond and we stop short of the driveway and we black out. It's nighttime. We pull up along the curb, two or three of us get out and we're talking, and we're deciding what our plan is going to be, and we need a shield, and we need this stuff, and we're going to wait for another cover car. But about that time, three or four people came running down the driveway and they're screaming and they're panicked and they're like, You guys have to get up there. He's going to kill somebody, he's going to kill somebody. Because of this crisis situation, we need to take immediate action and intervention. So we go up the driveway as we were. There was, I had a rifle, another one of my partners had a rifle, and another one of my gentlemen had a hand had a handgun and a shield. And as we go up the driveway, it's a long driveway. And as we approach the house, we can see there's a large party, and we're in an area that is not very police friendly. This is a high gang area, high crime area, and this party, just on the onset, looked like a black gangster party. As we approach this, we can see that there's a man and he's got two people pinned against a garage door, and the bad guy has got two butcher knives, and he's holding them tip down. So just like you see on Psycho, and he's got these knives and he's trying to stab at these two people and they're pinned against a garage door. But as we approach, there's 30 people between us and him. Well, the victims of this see us and they turn and they run towards us, being chased by the bad guy. Well, as the bad guy chases them, now we are within two or three feet of this. And we are we are justified to shoot this guy over and over again, but we can't because of all the people in between us. So now we're three, four feet away from the bad guy. Between the bad guy and us are these two victims, and the bad guy is actively still standing there swinging his knives at these people trying to stab him. And these people are dodging left and right, and they can't get out of the way because they're surrounded by a crowd of people that have them kind of boxed in. So they're stuck in this little fatal funnel area. And I remember looking to my left, because I was on the far right flank, looking to my left, I can see my partner with the shield, and he's trying to find an angle to get a shot. My other partner, he's sweeping wide left, trying to get an angle on the shot, but we can't get a shot off because these people, I move right and I move forward towards the bad guy. I'm literally going to put the barrel of my rifle against him and pull the trigger. He's still actively swinging these things. The victims are actively trying to get out of the way, but they can't move because they're boxed in by the crowd. So I remember looking through my red dot optic at this guy, putting my optic just above his hairline, and that would put that shot in just about the center of his eyes and his forehead. And every time I'm pressing that trigger, I'm taking the slack up, a victim steps up in front and blocks my barrel, and I got to release and try to get another sight picture. Well, the next time somebody came up, I made the decision. I'm going to take the barrel of my gun and I'm going to hit him as hard as I can, and I'm going to knock him down, and I'm going to shove my barrel right into this guy's face and pull the trigger. So as I see the person come up in front of my side optic again, and I go to hit him and knock him down, about that time, bad guy drops both knives. And he starts to comply and he goes down and we take him into custody. And we're able to get the victims out of there, get them medical treatment and aid. Bad guy goes off to jail. So that night, I came very, very close to killing that man. It was about three or four months later that the Portland Police Department performs a routine traffic stop on a white van that was driving down the road. And I don't know what the reason for the stop was. But when they stop the van, they contact the driver, and the driver happens to be the same guy involved in my situation. He's the bad guy. Well, the police department, when they made that traffic stop, they realized something doesn't seem right in this stop. So they investigate it more and they can't see what's in the back of the van, but they open up the back of the van and they find the man's girlfriend taped to a chair in the back of the van. She was taped and gagged and bound, and he was taking her out to kill her. They were able to rescue her, arrest him, and then he got sentenced to, I don't know what the sentence was, but double digits in jail, prison. And that is how that case finally resolved. See, the fight that my night, where I almost killed him, we almost killed him, was because of the girlfriend. It was a domestic violence fight. He got into a fight, people tried to intervene. As they tried to intervene, things got out of hand, and then we showed up. Domestic violence doesn't go away, it doesn't stop, it just continues to grow. And that's what occurred in this case. December 23rd, 2012 was the closest in my career that I ever came to killing somebody up close and personal. It's a night that I will never forget. Ladies and gentlemen, that is a murders to music snapshot.