We Are All Broken
The place where the light enters you
We surrounded the man’s mobile home, evacuated the neighbors, and were waiting for the tactical team to get into position.
Our hostage negotiation detectives managed to get a “throw phone” into the rear of the man’s home, in the hopes he would pick it up and talk to us.
Sadly, he never did.
I was a young rookie cop back then. It was my first “suicidal, barricaded gunman” call. I was positioned on the perimeter of the man’s modest property, with instructions to keep onlookers away.
The man was elderly and, according to neighbors, suffered from chronic back pain and depression. He had several surgeries that failed to fix his back. As one neighbor put it later, “I think he just had enough. He was broken and unfixable.”
“But in the end, one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.” — Albert Camus
Hours went by. Efforts to talk to the man failed. And then we heard a gunshot, followed by smoke coming from within the mobile home.
SWAT team members forced entry into the home, where they found the man dead of a self-inflicted gunshot. He had started a fire in his room, but fire fighters were able to quickly extinguish…
