Trooper Down! (33 page)

“Keep us advised,” said the telecommunicator. “We'll get you some help on the way.”

“Whoever's got a map,” Cook interjected, “look for Mountain Home Church. You'll see two roads that go up by the church. Come up and turn left. He saw us there, spun around, and took off. We've
exchanged gunfire with him and don't know if we hit him or not.”

“We didn't,” added Miller.

Unhurt by the barrage of gunfire, Shornook had driven to the end of the gravel road, crashed through a gate, abandoned the Jeep, then fled into the woods on foot.

By the time the backup officers arrived at the scene where Miller and the other troopers were waiting, Shornook was long gone—at least for the night.

Lovin was taken to a local hospital where he was treated and released. Though his eyes would remain sensitive for two to three months, miraculously there was no permanent damage.

“I didn't need anyone to tell me how lucky I was,” he said. “I knew that if the bullet had struck a little higher up the windshield I would have been hit in the brain. It was all a matter of chance.”

That night, he went home and had a long discussion with his wife about the merits of being a highway patrolman. Two days later, he was back on the job.

After the shoot-out, David Miller had trouble sleeping.

“I don't remember any specific nightmares,” he said, “but I do recall twisting and turning a lot. I'd wake up with my clothes so wet with sweat I'd have to change. After that, I refused to think much about it.”

Gary Cook says the incident didn't begin to affect him until it was over and he was safely at home with his family.

“That's the time you look around and wonder if being involved in this kind of work is really worth it,” he said.

David Gladden maintains the shooting ruined his diet.

“I've been eating junk food ever since,” he said. “And I started smoking again. That was the first time I'd been shot at and have it come so close to hitting me. It was not the kind of sensation I expected. In fact, it was the most exhilarating feeling I've ever had—because he
missed.
”

Monday night, a short time after the shooting, the weather took a turn for the worse. By dark, a cloud cover had moved in and thick fog was rolling into every crevice and ridge on Sugarloaf Mountain.

Trooper Leah Weirick, instructed to report for duty on her day off, was among those officers who had to man a lookout post during the night.

“They put me on the road where Shornook had been sighted,”
she said. “It was cold and rainy. We couldn't sit in our cruisers because we had heard that Shornook would kill a trooper in order to get a car.”

For the next twelve hours, Weirick and two fellow troopers sat back to back, Indian-style, around a tree, waiting, watching, and listening.

“We couldn't talk,” she said, “because we weren't supposed to make any noise. So in a situation like that, you just think. The first two or three hours, I was convinced I was gonna die. I thought, ‘This is crazy. I have a fifty-yard-range shotgun and he has a 500-yard-range, high-powered rifle. He can pick me off from anywhere.'

“About the fifth or sixth hour, you realize it's like deer hunting. You sit perfectly still so you'll be the first one to see or hear anything, you'll be the first one to get him. Then fatigue sets in and you start imagining things. I had already been up for two days so I was tired to begin with.”

By the next morning, cramped and sore, Weirick's kidneys were sending out SOS signals. At noon, she told the other troopers she absolutely had to go to the bathroom. As quietly as possible, she got up and went behind a tree.

During their watch, the troopers had neither heard nor spotted anything of significance. Later, they discovered that Shornook had also spent the night in the woods—only a hundred yards from where they sat.

“That was enough to give us the shakes,” said Weirick.

Tuesday morning, November 26, the search entered its third day.

A contingent of law enforcement officers from various agencies had set up an ambush at Ivory Marshall's home the night before, figuring Shornook would return there for food and shelter. But he never showed.

So Lieutenant Randy Case, of the Henderson County sheriff's department, formed a tracking team to go after him.

With him were three volunteers: Henderson County Deputy Victor Moss and two state troopers, Randy Campbell and David McMurray.

Case and Moss would track, while Campbell and McMurray served as lookouts.

They set off at daylight, amid cold rain and a heavy, damp fog. Driving up the lonely mountain road, Trooper Randy Campbell, seated next to Moss, had a strange, uneasy feeling.

“I felt like something terrible was gonna happen,” said Campbell, “and I started to mention it to Vic, but didn't. Then it passed.”

During the night, fifteen to twenty officers from the state prison department had secured the abandoned Jeep and were still at the scene when Campbell and the others arrived. The lawmen gathered in a circle, discussing which way Shornook may have gone.

“The prison team had found tracks Monday night,” said Deputy Vic Moss, “so we followed those until we got to a place where someone had bush-hogged the trail, causing the tracks to stop. We turned and took a lower road that went across a spring. There were muddy places on it we thought might hold more footprints.”

The mud, however, offered no clues.

Another road lay further up the mountain, but the men had to cross a meadow to get to it.

No one spoke as they started up the ridge toward the meadow, for Shornook could be anywhere, lying in wait.

They walked four abreast, ten to twelve feet apart, Campbell and Moss in the middle, flanked by Case and McMurray. The two deputies and Trooper McMurray carried a .223 Mini-14 while Trooper Campbell was armed with a borrowed sub-machine gun. Randy Case had a hand-held radio for communication with officers at the command post. All four were dressed in camouflage fatigues and wore bulletproof vests.

Halfway across the field, the fog began to lift. From the woods, a sudden shot rang out and the officers hit the dirt.

“My god,” thought Trooper Randy Campbell, “he's gonna shoot us in the head!” He raised up, fired off thirty quick rounds, and fell back down. Seconds later, Shornook—hidden behind an oak tree directly above the meadow—released a barrage of gunfire.

Deputy Vic Moss was struck first. The bullet entered the left side of his nose, plowed through the roof of his mouth, and exited out his right ear. To Moss, it felt like everything inside his head exploded.

“I could hear the yelling and the sound of guns, but it seemed a long way off. I remember thinking that since I was hit in the head, I was probably going to die. Then after a few seconds, I thought, ‘Well, I ain't dead yet. It's gonna take a better shot than that to kill me.'”

Campbell was lying next to Moss and had just reloaded his gun when he noticed Moss wasn't firing.

“Shornook was just peppering us. It's a wonder he didn't kill us
all. Vic was lying with his head on his arms, moaning, so I crawled over to him and lifted his head. The wound looked bad, but not real bad. He asked me if he was gonna die and I said, ‘No, you're gonna be all right, but we've got to get you out of here.'”

Case and McMurray, aware that Moss had been hit, told Campbell they'd cover for him while he pulled Moss from the line of fire.

Then Trooper David McMurray called out, “I've been hit!”

“The first thing that passed through my mind,” said McMurray, an ex-marine, “was, ‘Why doesn't it hurt any worse than that?' I'd always heard gunshot wounds were painful. This felt like I'd been hit with a hammer. So I thought, ‘Okay, either I'm not hurt bad at all, or I'm hurt
real 
bad.' But I could still move my leg.”

In fact, the bullet had struck McMurray's thigh, hit a magazine clip inside the pocket of his fatigue pants, and bounced off. The impact split the skin and left several large bruises, but did no major damage.

Case asked McMurray if he was all right, and McMurray, now realizing he'd been shot at, rather than shot, said yes. The two men continued firing while Campbell struggled to get Moss off the mountain to safety.

It seemed like hours to the four officers, but the shooting lasted only a matter of minutes. By then, everyone-—including Shornook—was running out of ammunition.

Before disappearing back into the woods, he stepped out from behind a bullet-scarred tree and gave a loud rebel yell, followed by “Fuck you, you sons of bitches!”

What Moss remembers most as he was half-dragged, half-carried down the mountain, was the faint but eerie sound of Shornook's laughter echoing across the ridge.

Moss, a thirty-seven-year-old father of four, knew he was seriously hurt, but had made up his mind he was not going to die.

“I never lost consciousness,” he said. “My vision had cleared but there was a loud roar in my ears. All of us got in the patrol car—McMurray in front with Randy Case, me in the back with Campbell. I had to hang on to the seat because it was a rough road and Case was driving fast. He wanted to get us out of there so we could get to medical help.”

Case, having radioed ahead that an officer was down, worried that Moss might be worse off than he appeared. Moss was thinking the
same thing. Despite his wound, he was still able to talk, though his words were somewhat garbled.

“Randy,” he called from the back seat, “tell me the truth. Am I going to be all right?”

“All of us reassured him as best we could,” Case recalled. “But it was, after all, a head wound. So what could we say?”

On the way to the command post, where help was waiting, Case passed Buncombe County Sheriff's Deputy Randy Moss, Vic's brother. He was standing by his patrol car, waiting to hear something, anything, about Moss's condition.

“I wanted to stop so bad,” said Case, “but I drove right past him. I felt too great an urgency to get Vic off that mountain.”

Later, after Moss was transported to the hospital, Case returned and explained to Randy Moss what had happened.

Shot with an Ml carbine .30 caliber rifle, Moss suffered severe nerve damage in his facial muscles, a shattered jawbone, and substantial loss of hearing in his right ear. If the bullet had struck one-half inch higher or lower, doctors told him, or the angle had been slightly different, he most likely would not have survived. After undergoing reconstructive surgery, he spent ten days in the hospital and was out of work nearly four months. Today, he still has trouble distinguishing sounds and will probably never have normal hearing in his right ear.

By 5:00
P.M. 
Tuesday, officers on Sugarloaf Mountain—now four hundred strong, representing thirty different agencies from across the state—had resorted to broadcasting a message over a public address system, urging Shornook to come out of hiding and give himself up. Each announcement was met with silence.

The weather was proving just as stubborn. Continuous rain and fog cut visibility to near zero, hampering the search even further.

One man from Burke County, attempting to track Shornook with a trained dog, said the fog was so thick all he could see at the end of a fifteen-foot leash was the animal's wagging tail.

In another attempt to flush out Shornook, Sandra Horne, the woman who had taught Shornook how to survive in the woods, offered to come to Sugarloaf Mountain and try to talk him into surrendering. Officers, however, vetoed the idea, saying the situation was too dangerous to involve civilians.

It was a frustrating end to a long and discouraging day. Three
officers had been wounded by Shornook so far, and several others fired upon. Even worse, authorities were no closer to a capture. The only good news was that Shornook was finally contained within a four- to five-mile perimeter.

Completely surrounded by law enforcement officers, more intent than ever on apprehending him, his time was running out.

“If the guy doesn't move,” said Henderson County Sheriff's Captain Tom Hatchett on Tuesday evening, “we'll stay in our positions and wait until morning before we do anything. Somebody else will get hurt if we rush this thing.”

That night, the woods were full of strange happenings.

A Sugarloaf Mountain resident reported hearing her garage door open and close. When officers responded to her call, they found meat missing from her freezer in the garage.

A second family came home and discovered a door partially open. Then someone found an unfamiliar, slick-soled shoe print near the house.

At 5:12
A.M.,
there were reports of a gunshot and an unexplained light in the woods. Police officers watched for several minutes as the light moved swiftly through the trees, but an investigation yielded nothing.

Even some of the troopers got spooked.

One of the stories circulating about Shornook involved the amount of firepower he was carrying. In addition to rifles and pistols, it was reported he had hand grenades.

Somewhere on the mountain, an explosion went off and a trooper on patrol said everyone in his car—and those in surrounding cruisers—bailed out.

“We just knew the guy had a grenade and was going to blow us apart,” he said.

Another officer heard leaves rustling in the woods and got on the radio to call for help.

Trooper Jay Kerr was “roaming”—patrolling up and down a designated stretch of road—when he caught the report and responded to it.

“I had a female trooper with me and we pulled up and got out. It was pouring down rain. Several other troopers had also arrived. Everybody put their lights out and got behind their cars. Then this
female trooper looks over at me and says, ‘I can't help it. I'm scared to death!'

“‘Well, I'm scared too,' I told her.

“‘You
are
?' she said.