Trooper Down! Read Online Free PDF Page B

open the door?”
    Louis’s head moved slightly and he mumbled.
    Reaching into the car, Angley gently pulled the officer back against the seat to check his vital signs. He could tell by the trooper’s ashen color and weak pulse that he was in deep trouble. Louis was also having difficulty breathing. As he gasped for breath, he looked up at John and asked imploringly, “Am I gonna die? Am I gonna die?”
    â€œNot if we can help it,” said Angley.
    The Burke County rescue squad was the first ambulance to arrive.Emergency medical technicians Tommy Waters and Phillip Reece began preparing IVs while Angley and Gwyn administered oxygen to Louis. As the medics were lifting the trooper out of the patrol car and onto the stretcher, he suddenly vomited and stopped breathing. Angley quickly repositioned him and Louis took one breath, then another.
    A short, stocky man in his late thirties, Angley took his work seriously, sometimes getting emotionally caught up in the traumas he witnessed as an EMT. He hoped fervently that the trooper would make it and the night would end on a happier note.
    At Grace Hospital in Morganton, nineteen miles from where Louis had been shot, doctors, nurses, and other emergency medical personnel were waiting for the ambulance to arrive. They had already been notified that a highway patrol officer was badly wounded and would probably require immediate surgery. Among the operating room nurses off duty that night was Scottie Rector, Louis’s thirty-two-year-old wife.
    The call came shortly before 2:00 A.M. Scottie, a medium-built woman with brown hair and a soft, lilting voice, picked up the phone. A registered nurse, Scottie couldn’t understand why the hospital was calling her when she wasn’t scheduled to work.
    â€œIt’s Louis,” said Scottie’s nursing supervisor. “He’s been shot and you need to come to the emergency room.”
    â€œAre you kidding?” she said. “How bad is it? How bad is he hurt?” She sat up in bed, now wide awake.
    â€œI don’t know,” answered the woman.
    He’s dead, Scottie thought. Louis is dead and they don’t want to tell me.
    â€œI’ll be right there,” she responded. Dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a sweatshirt, she drove through the rain to Grace Hospital, certain that all of her fears over Louis’s job had finally come to pass. At home, their daughter, Chanda, twelve, and son, Bryan, eight, slept on.
    In the hospital emergency room, John Angley and the ambulance crew had completed their job and were waiting for word on how Louis was doing. Almost immediately, he’d been whisked into a trauma room and surrounded by physicians and a well-trained medical staff who knew exactly what to do. The E.R. was teeming with law enforcement officers, reporters, hospital personnel, and patients.
    Almost immediately after the telecomrnunicator at Newton received word that Louis had been shot, highway patrol officers from Burke and surrounding counties were alerted to stand by for emergency duty. Many off-duty troopers donned their uniforms and checked on voluntarily so they’d be ready when the first official orders came through.
    One of those troopers was Don Patterson. He heard the news through a telecommunicator who called him at home.
    â€œI went straight to the McDowell County line where other troopers were already securing the area,” Patterson recalled. “We set up roadblocks, stopping to check all traffic going through. Detectives from the State Bureau of Investigation were there too, taking photographs and looking for evidence. Louis’s patrol car was still running, the radar unit still flashing 74 mph where he had clocked the Cadillac. Even the commercial radio was on. Then I saw Louis’s revolver lying in the front seat. At that point, all we could think of was, ‘What happened here? Who did this? And when are we going to find