Bitter Blood (61 page)

Five bullets hit his car in quick succession. The first three struck the car’s body. The last two came through the lower right side of his windshield. The first of the latter two hit him in the upper right chest, passing through a notepad in his pocket. He felt as if he’d been hit with a sledgehammer, he said later. He didn’t feel the second shot. It hit the buckle of his utility belt and deflected into the leather.

Dennis’s car stopped only inches from the Blazer. Fritz halted behind Blanton’s car. With tires squealing, the blue Mustang driven by Spainhour slid past the front of the gray car in the lane next to Blanton and slammed into Blanton’s door. In the backseat, Nobles could see Fritz swinging his upper body out of the door of the Blazer.

“He’s got a gun!” Nobles shouted. “Get down!”

But before Nobles finished his warning, Fritz turned the Uzi on them and fired another blast. A spray of glass went up as at least eight bullets struck the car.

Debbie Blanton dived into her seat. So did Childers and Nobles in Spainhour’s Mustang. Both officers had their guns drawn. Spainhour jumped out, pistol in hand, to return fire, leaving the Mustang in gear and pushing against Blanton’s car. She could see Spainhour through her windshield. She thought he was a madman and that he was going to kill her.

As Nobles tried to get down in the backseat, a bullet struck the 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson pistol he was bringing across his chest. The bullet broke in two, and both pieces hit Nobles under the pit of his right arm. In the excitement, he didn’t realize he’d been hit. He looked up and saw Susie’s face in the windshield of the Blazer. He would remember her as having a blank, unconcerned look. He drew a bead on her but stopped himself from pulling the trigger.

“I could’ve taken her right out,” he said later.

In the front seat, Childers’s left arm was bleeding where it had been sprayed with broken glass. With his other arm, he used the butt of his pistol to break out the rest of his window. He could see Fritz, and he got off one quick shot toward the windshield, but it struck low, missing its target.

In his cruiser, Dennis was telling himself not to panic. His siren was driving him crazy. He reached to cut it off, trying to compose his thoughts.

“I’ve been hurt,” he was trying to tell himself, but it came out over the radio, faintly, almost a cry.

“Ten-nine?” the dispatcher said, asking him to repeat.

“I’ve been shot,” Dennis said.

“All units, three-o-three has been shot,” the dispatcher said immediately. “Two-forty-one, two-sixty, two-sixty-one, and one-sixty, assist out in Friendly Hills area.”

When the bullets began to fly at the busy intersection, people all around ducked for cover. A woman pumping gas at the Wilco station crouched behind her car after a bullet hit her windshield. A woman mowing on the Guilford College campus dived off her tractor and clung to the ground. In the Wachovia branch bank on the corner, tellers rushed to the door when they heard the shots. When they saw Spainhour standing in the road with a gun, they locked the door and scrambled out of sight, thinking that a robbery attempt might be in progress.

Fritz had been almost boxed in. Travis and Sturgill had come up behind him. Dennis was beside him. Blanton, the gray car, and Spainhour were in front of him. But Fritz backed up and, banging fenders, maneuvered out of the trap and turned left onto New Garden Road by the campus of Guilford College. As he pulled away, Spainhour fired toward the rear of the Blazer with his 9-millimeter pistol.

The command car made its way through the wreckage and took off after Fritz, followed by Sturgill in the SBI car and Fetter in the Camaro. Spainhour jumped into the blue Mustang and started to back away from Blanton’s car, but in his excitement he put the bullet-riddled Mustang into the wrong gear and slammed again into Blantons fender before wheeling around and rejoining the chase.

“I think I took a hit,” Nobles said from the backseat.

“How bad is it?” Spainhour asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never been shot before. It’s burning.”

“Take that shirt off and let me have a look,” Childers said.

Nobles worked his way painfully out of the shirt and turned his shoulder to Childers.

“I don’t see any exit wounds,” Childers said.

“I’m all right,” Nobles said, dabbing angrily at the blood with his shirt. “Let’s go get the son of a bitch.”

All the cars in the chase sped away, leaving the wounded Dennis in his car. A volunteer firefighter who had stopped at the intersection was the first to run to him.

“Just give me a minute,” Dennis said. “I want to compose myself.”

“Three-o-three, an ambulance is en route,” the dispatcher radioed at 2:51.

Thirty-eight seconds later, LeClear pulled alongside Dennis’s car and jumped out.

Greensboro police who had been summoned to the scene knew nothing about what had happened and had no idea who the assailant might be.

“As soon as somebody can, will they give me a little information, please,” Patrol Captain Allen radioed impatiently.

The first report the Greensboro police dispatcher got was that the shots had come from a red car, and she put that alert on the air. Nobody informed her that the assailant was being chased by five law enforcement cars and observed by an SBI airplane.

In the command car, Dan Davidson was worried. He had seen the Mustang in which Childers and Nobles were riding get hit by a spray of bullets, and he had heard over the car radio that an officer was shot. He thought one of his men was hit.

“I said, ‘Oh, Lord, I’ve brought one of these boys down here and got him killed,’” he recalled later.

He kept looking back. Only when he saw the blue Mustang coming was he able to concentrate on the matters at hand. Then he asked if anybody had extra ammo for a .357 Magnum. He had only six shots with him.

Just past Guilford College, New Garden Road, on which Fritz was traveling, runs into Fleming Road, and New Garden juts to the right. Travis saw Fritz taking the right turn, and he led the procession of police cars in pursuit. A few hundred yards beyond that intersection, New Garden curves sharply left. Travis was starting into the curve when he saw something that caused him to slam on the brakes and skid off the road.

The Blazer was stopped sideways in the road, straddling the center line, and Fritz was standing outside, Uzi in hand. He opened fire as Travis hit his brakes.

All of the police cars slid to a halt on the right side of the road, and the officers began bailing out. Ed Hunt dived from the command car and rolled over on the ground, getting off three quick shots, as Travis crouched behind his car door.

Fetter came out of the Camaro firing an AR15 assault rifle, causing Fritz to get back into the Blazer.

“I think Fetter saved our lives,” Barker said later.

He and Davidson had been trapped in the backseat of the vulnerable command car, which had only two doors, and as they were still trying to get out, Fritz took off again. Travis and Hunt climbed back into the car and resumed pursuit, but Fetter got the jump on them and took the lead.

“He stopped right in the middle of the road and returned fire!” Travis radioed.

Just four minutes had passed since Dennis had been shot.

“Damn,” Hunt said, feeling his back pocket. “I lost my wallet.”

Fritz drove leisurely, rarely topping thirty-five miles per hour, and the police cars kept their distance, staying several hundred yards behind.

“When a man’s firing on you with a machine gun, you don’t run up his tail pipe,” one officer later observed.

Several times Fritz stopped again on blind curves and at the bottom of hills, but the airplane warned the pursuing officers in time for them to stop.

Greensboro police, meanwhile, were in confusion. First reports from the scene sent them after a red Camaro and a Mustang—the officers’ cars. One Greensboro officer called in that a black Blazer was involved and he was behind it. But he was on the opposite end of New Garden Road. Several cars rushed to stop the Blazer after it turned south on U.S. 220, the officers ordering the hapless and innocent motorist from the vehicle at gunpoint.

At 2:55, Travis radioed again. “This is a black Bronco. The occupant is Fred Klenner, white male, thirty-two.”

But his transmission was weak and hard to understand.

“Ten-four,” the dispatcher said. “It’s a white male, thirty-two, name of Red Fleming. It’s a black what kind of vehicle?”

“Going to be a black Mustang,” another officer radioed, adding to the confusion.

At 2:56, a Greensboro officer called impatiently from the intersection where Dennis was shot. “I want to know if we’ve got an ambulance for the officer.”

Dennis was conscious but in great pain. His vest had stopped the bullet, fired from less than ten feet away, but his chest and shoulder looked like raw meat, and he was in shock.

Three minutes later, another officer at the intersection radioed a signal fifty—everything under control. “He’s still with us,” he said of Dennis.

The highway patrol had been alerted about the shooting and also was sending cars to join the chase. Sturgill radioed that he was in pursuit on New Garden Road, heading for 220. Sturgill’s was the third car in the line of police vehicles.

“Can you get some Greensboro units out that way?” he asked.

“We have several units en route,” said the highway patrol dispatcher. “Are you behind the Blazer?”

“We’re pursuing him at a distance. He’s stopping and returning fire. He has an automatic weapon.”

“What’s the license number on it?”

“It’s a black Blazer occupied by a white male, white female, and two small children.”

This was not only the first mention of an automatic weapon, it was also the first time that children were said to be in the vehicle. The transmission went only to the highway patrol dispatcher.

Travis’s transmissions to the Greensboro dispatcher were now breaking up and inaudible, and the only information the dispatcher got came from the highway patrol.

Fritz reached U.S. 220 and turned north, firing back at the pursuing cars as he turned.

“Any possibility of getting an HP roadblock on 220 north?” Sturgill asked.

Two highway patrol cars were headed south on 220 from Rockingham County, but they were still many miles away. Other cars coming from U.S. 29 to the east were even more distant.

Several Guilford County sheriff’’s cars in the area were responding to alerts from their dispatcher, who had phoned the highway patrol for information. Corporal Hubert Jackson was going west on N.C. 150 toward 220, only a few miles away, when he radioed his position. He turned onto Strawberry Road, which intersects with 220. Warrant deputies John Patzsch and Ronald Scott were in an unmarked car in Summerfield, a community just a few miles to the north. They drove to the parking lot of a bank at the intersection of 220 and 150 and waited there. Deputy David Thacker was coming south on 220 near Summerfield. These deputies knew only that an officer had been shot and that the suspect vehicle was headed north on 220. They had been told nothing of a machine gun—or of children in the vehicle.

As Fritz continued northward well under the speed limit, holding back traffic, drivers of some civilian cars, unaware that a chase was going on, began passing police cars at the back of the pack. Sturgill moved into the center of the highway to hold back the befuddled drivers.

Gentry had not realized that Spainhour was still in pursuit with two wounded Kentucky deputies in his car. When he found out, he angrily ordered Spainhour to drop out and head for a hospital. On the way, Spainhour was stopped by Greensboro police, who thought his Mustang was the suspect vehicle.

Sturgill, meanwhile, was giving regular reports to the highway patrol.

The procession was at Lake Brandt. At Strawberry Road.

At one point Sturgill radioed that Fritz had a farm in Rockingham County and likely was headed there.

Guilford County deputy Thacker was just south of 150 when he saw the Blazer coming toward him. He pulled into the parking lot of a Food Lion supermarket to turn around as Fritz passed. Jackson was waiting in that parking lot. Fritz saw both deputies and gave them a big smile. Thacker turned on his blue lights and siren and came out behind the Blazer, followed by Jackson.

Fritz turned right at 150, and Deputy Patzsch pulled out behind him, ahead of Thacker and Jackson.

“He’s not stopping,” Patzsch radioed at 3:05.

“Did you advise westbound?” another, more distant deputy asked the dispatcher.

Fritz opened fire again, sending Patzsch off the road. Suddenly Patzsch came back on the air, his voice filled with alarm. “He’s got an automatic weapon!” he called to Thacker, who’d moved in to fill his position behind the Blazer. “He’s got it pointed at you.”

“Ten-four,” Thacker acknowledged, sounding remarkably calm. “Subject will have an automatic weapon, firing at this time.”

His mind was not nearly so calm, though. The first thing that popped into it when he heard the submachine gun was something his wife, Robin, had asked him: “David, why don’t you get a normal job?”

Fritz veered into the left lane as he fired, going head-on toward an approaching Volkswagen van. The van swerved right into the eastbound lane to avoid a collision, then back into the westbound lane and off the road, where it stopped, the driver thoroughly rattled.