Locked In with Ian Bick - I Was the Police Chief of the Virgin Islands — I Was Shot and Almost Killed | Chris Howell Pt. 2

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

Chris Howell returns to Locked In with Ian Bick for Part 2, diving deeper into his rise from a DEA task force investigator in the U.S. Virgin Islands to eventually becoming Deputy Chief and then Chief of Police. In this episode, Chris breaks down the reality of crime, corruption, and violence in the islands, where homicide rates have historically reached around 50 per 100,000 people—several times higher than the U.S. average . He shares what it was like leading law enforcement in one of the most challenging environments in the country, dealing with constant threats against his life, internal corruption, and the pressure of trying to control rising violence. Chris also opens up about the moment it all came to a head when he was shot in a near-fatal attack that ultimately ended his career. _____________________________________________ #Cops #PoliceChief #TrueCrime #Violence #CrimeStory #LawEnforcement #LockedInPodcast #realstories _____________________________________________ Watch part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atbgH6Ypvas _____________________________________________ Connect with Chris Howell: Email: [e-mail] _____________________________________________ Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en https://ianbick.com/ _____________________________________________ Shop Locked In Merch: http://www.ianbick.com/shop _____________________________________________ Timestamps: 00:00 Shot in the Line of Duty (Full Story) 00:19 Meet Chris Howell: Police Chief Background 01:00 Becoming Police Chief in the Virgin Islands 02:21 Corruption Inside the Department 04:30 First Days as Deputy Chief 06:01 Extreme Homicide Rate in the Virgin Islands 10:54 Baptism by Fire as Police Chief 11:24 Crisis Mode: Press Conference & Early Challenges 12:44 Building Trust & Finding His Role 14:40 High-Profile Cases & Major Investigations 17:04 Broken Evidence Room & System Failures 19:19 Destroying Illegal Firearms & Cleaning House 21:41 Building a Police Task Force Team 23:23 Recruitment Struggles & Key Officers 26:40 Street Operations & Crime Crackdowns 28:31 Domestic Violence Calls & Frontline Policing 32:42 Broken Windows Policing Strategy 36:20 Public Perception & Community Response 38:50 Human Trafficking Sting Operation 41:40 Police Corruption & Internal Investigations 45:47 Living Under Threat as Police Chief 51:16 Conversations with Drug Traffickers 53:11 Violence & Homicide Culture Explained 01:01:20 Crime Reduction Strategies & Leadership 01:12:30 Running the Department & Frustrations 01:20:00 Internal Enemies & Paranoia in Leadership 01:26:21 Cold Case: Fallen Officer Investigation 01:38:41 Major Drug Raid & Takedown 01:46:18 Trauma Training & Real Police Work 01:53:32 Losing Officers & Ongoing Violence 01:58:39 Corrupt Officers Exposed 02:01:44 Crime Wave & Rising Violence 02:07:36 Robberies & Escalating Danger 02:13:42 The Night He Was Shot (Play-by-Play) 02:27:54 Surviving the Shooting & Recovery 02:35:14 Rehab & Life After Being Shot 02:44:07 Ironman Comeback Story 02:50:05 Justice System Failures & Aftermath 02:56:12 Leadership Lessons & No Regrets 02:57:40 Final Thoughts on Policing & Corruption To advertise on the show, contact [e-mail] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/LockedInWithIanBicka Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Own the dream. They began firing rounds from that AK-47 into my door. First round comes to the door. It hits my left forearm, and my left forearm explodes. A second round comes, it hits me in the back. I immediately jam on the gas and the vehicle's unresponsive. I was like, I'm dead. I just died.

My name is Chris Howell. I did 20 years with the Virgin Islands Police Department, 14 years with the DEA height of task force. and I did from 2009 until 2012 as a chief of police. Chris Howell returns to the show after serving as chief of police in the Virgin Islands where he dealt with extreme levels of violence, corruption, and constant threats on his life until it all came to a head when he was shot in a near fatal attack that ended his career. So I spent 14 years assigned to DEA doing drug trafficking investigations.

And then in 2009, my former partner, he went to work with the governor, the governor's dignitary protection detail. He had been assigned with me over at DEA for most of my time there as well. And then the governor had approached him about me becoming the chief. And then over time, it turned into the deputy chief is what they wanted me. to initially do. And I resisted it like as much as I could. There was talk about it for a long period of time and it didn't look like it was going to happen. I had expressed my unwillingness to do it. I was happy in the task force. But I also, I didn't want to go over on that side of things

because I knew I wouldn't be a welcome by everybody. I wouldn't be welcome by everybody. during my time in the task force I had arrested or been involved in the arrest of 14 police officers. And so my popularity amongst a lot of the rank and file was not good. And there was also an element of it that I was an outsider. I was not born and raised in the Virgin Islands. So not everybody would be accepting, was accepting to me in general. But then as a chief that, you know, I'd be occupying one of the top positions. and I wasn't from there, and I knew that wouldn't go over well also.

And then I guess the third element, it was that it was a different world. I was never like, I always tried to stay underneath the radar when I was assigned to DEA, although that was pretty much impossible. But I just didn't get myself involved in a lot of the politics in the police department or the government. And it was really outside of my comfort level. but I got that call one morning saying that I had been selected as deputy chief and it was already in the papers and it was a done deal and then I didn't really have a choice at that point. And I, on the first day, I went over to the police department and the police department was located, the headquarters was located in what was supposed to be at like a makeshift facility. It was like a temporary facility.

the original police headquarters had been built in 1970s and they had called abandon ship on it a few years earlier because it had structural problems with it and they were in this temporary facility and I walked into the facility and I had been there it wasn't nothing was a shock to me I'd been there but it was just it was so it was run down it was floors were dingy walls were dingy there's office furniture stacked everywhere it was just it looked like there was very little engagement by anybody in the police department to make the place better. And I was like, it was quite frankly pretty depressing to know that I went from an elite DEA task force where we were doing cartel-level drug trafficking investigations and working with some of the best best in the business to all of a sudden I'm stuck here.

And then the other element of it is the Virgin Islands homicide rate was so incredibly high that and I was able to largely avoid that when I was a cheat, when I was a, when I was a signed a DEA, but now all of a sudden that's going to be my problem. Like, that's going to be something I'm going to need to work on. And to give some perspective, so the population in the Virgin Islands is about 50,000. In 2009, the homicide rate was the highest in the Western Hemisphere and still remained so today. So the homicide rate was basically, it was one out of every 1,400 residents were getting murdered every year. Wow. And if you looked at it across the world, the St. Croix itself, for that year, rated, I think it was fifth in the world.

And they were, like Venezuela was a little bit higher per capita, El Salvador. You were looking at countries with major problems, and the Virgin Islands was within the top five, or St. Croix was within the top five. And making things even worse is the solvability was very low, and then making it even worse is the prosecution, successful prosecution was extremely low. So when you add up all those numbers, your chances of getting away with murder,

meaning that number one, you don't get arrested, and number two, you don't get convicted. Your chances of being arrested and convicted of murder in the Virgin Islands or in St. Croix was between 12% and 15%. So it was a very difficult situation. And I didn't immediately see, the advantages of becoming a chief. It actually took some time.

And my first day there, I had walked through where my office would be. And I walked, and I spoke to the commissioner, and I walked through a lot of the administrative offices. And the first thing that I noticed, which was just mind-blowing me because I was in a police headquarters, is that there were a large number of office spaces. spaces that had, you know, big flat screen TVs on the wall and below it was a bootleg box for receiving satellite, bootleg satellite TV and these offices. And this is the police headquarters. And I'm like, oh, man, this is like, and there was this, it was, it was strange

because there were those that were welcoming, but it was just dependent on who, who was around them. And it was obvious from the first day that I was going to be the odd man out. And, and And people were very nervous of me because I had been involved in federal cases that arrested, you know, multiple police officers. And I think people knew that I wouldn't tolerate any nonsense. And when I left that first day, it was basically a quick meeting with a police commissioner. And he was great. He was like, hey, I want you here. The governor wants you here.

You know, we need to get, we need to get people working. You know, he was trying to give me a pep talk. I wasn't buying it. And he said, and I said, you know, this all has. happened so suddenly I still have open cases of the task force. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do here. And he said, well, go over the task force today, spend your day there, and then tomorrow get a fresh start at it, which one day wasn't going to clear up what I was leaving behind. That was obvious. And I went back to the task force that day on the way I called a former DEA guy that I worked with,

Rick Rambo. We talked about him in the first episode. And Rick is like, this is horrible news. You need to get out of it. You need to find a way out. And I said, Rick, there, there is no. no way out. Like if I don't, if I don't take the position, they may very well move me out of the task force and put me in some sort of like investigative position or worse in patrol or something like that. And at least in this position, I've got some power. I was deputy chief. There was still a chief over me, but I had some power. And Rick is like, if you don't get out of that, they're going to kill you. He's like, you know, things were bad in the task force. That, that is going to be catastrophic. And he knew, he knew about the problems that we had seen in the task force,

the people that we saw that were involved in corruption within the police department. And he was very concerned. And I remember going home that night, and I should back up when I left police headquarters that first day, when I walked out into the parking lot, we talked about this in episode one, there were two police officers, both of which were targets of investigation standing there talking to each other. And they just looked at me and kind of eye-fucked me. And I was like, yep, this is what I'm getting into. And I went home that night after working on the task force and I didn't sleep at all. I just stood in, I just laid in bed staring at the ceiling fan that was spinning above me thinking, like there's got to be way out. Like, I've got to figure

this out. Like, I don't know how this is going to work. And I about early in the morning, probably six, seven o'clock in the morning, I get a phone call and they said there's been a suicide. and this was 9-1-1 calling me. And they said the commissioner is on scene, you need to go on scene. And it was a judge. And it was a local judge had committed suicide. And what made it, I guess, particularly concerning and would cause a fair bit of skepticism among the community

is that morning he was supposed to go start a trial for a police officer who had been charged with a double homicide. And the police officer had done a drive-by shooting where four people had been shot, two of which died. He had been charged with multiple counts of murder. And that trial was supposed to start the morning that the judge had taken his own life. And I got on the scene of it and got through the yellow tape and the judge lived in this condominium complex. And I walked in past the forensic officers that were processing the scene and I saw the judge's body and it was this like surreal moment because the judge lived in a really nice place that overlooked the Caribbean Sea and he see his body and then

behind it is this beautiful picture of the sea behind it and the commissioner approached me and he says you're going to handle the press conference on this so it was really baptism by fire and when I had pulled into the scene there were already reporters that were lined up and I myself, the commissioner, and the public information officer, we walked down this driveway to the press and that was the only briefing that I would get ahead of time and gave a quick briefing. I felt comfortable doing it. It wasn't like it was never had done a press conference before, but it wasn't any way like didn't give me any anxiety either. And I left that scene and I drove to police headquarters and went into my new office.

I had met my, there was a secretary and a special assistant that signed to the chief's office. And I decided, well, this is where it is. It's where I'm going to be. So I got to figure this out. And I began my work as deputy chief of police on that day. And it was probably, it was probably a couple of weeks of kind of just trying to figure out like a space, like a place for me to, like what can I do here to fix to number one survive in this situation but also make a difference within the police department and there were lots of problems there like you there was a like i said a very low level of engagement

by most people there so like and i think because i was receptive like i was never a type of chief where an officer couldn't knock on my door and ask me a question and so some of the officers started to come around, but you really could not tell, like, who was on your side and who was, like, a former friend of someone that you had arrested, another police officer you had arrested. And so it was a very strange environment for me. And I remember walking in meetings where it was like an executive staff meeting, and I was usually late to these things. I'm not one for meetings.

And when I walk into the meeting, you know, it's before the meeting had begun and everybody was talking, and I'd walk in the room and all of a sudden the room would go quiet. I was like, yep, this is what I'm dealing with. with. And I asked a friend of mine that was in this and had witnessed this phenomenon several times. I eventually asked her. I said, why do they do that? And her response was, and I'll never forget it, she goes, because they're afraid of you. And so that's the environment that I was kind of dealing with. And I think like kind of like where things started to shift. And I don't remember, it probably was a couple, maybe two weeks into the working as the deputy chief,

that I was driving into work one day. And if you remember from episode one, there were two major events that occurred, one of which was the attempt on my DEA partner's life, Anheldeia's life, which left his father shot. There was that event, and then there was a police officer who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, almost around about the same time. Now, those two cases were still open cases. No arrest had been made. And the task force had begun working with the VIPD on those cases,

and there were supposed to be a collaboration where they were sharing information with us, and we were sharing information with them. And we were doing sharing, but it wasn't a two-way street. So we never had access to their case files. We never saw what they had. And I was driving into work one morning, and I realized, wait a minute, they can't tell me no anymore. And so instead of going up to my office, I went to the detectives bureau, and I said, I need those two case files, complete case files on my desk in five minutes. And I sat there and I read those case files from cover to cover.

And then I picked up the phone and I called Diaz. And I said, hey, I need you to come down here. Diaz was working for the governor at the time. He was working on his dignitary protection detail. and Diaz comes into my office and and I said, hey, I just read the case files for your father shooting and the murder of this police officer. And the belief was that the same group had carried out both. And I told him, I said, look, the case file for your father shooting is weak.

I said, there's not a lot there. I said, the other one, it is pretty good. And I said, you know, there's a witness that we knew about that FBI had interviewed that was present when that police officer was tortured and murdered. And I said, how would you feel about these guys going to prison for that versus your father's case? Because I don't feel that we have, I don't feel we're going to get there with your father shooting, but I think we could get there with the other one. And he said, I don't, I don't care what they go to prison for as long as they go to prison. Now, there wasn't a lot left to that organization. That organization, if you remember from the first group, slowly these guys started getting murdered not long after Diaz's father had been shot.

But there were two key players in it that were involved, we believe were involved in both incidents, one of which was pretty high up on the food chain. So when the murder started after Diaz's father was shot, the drug trafficking organization that was part of that group was essentially a little. The key target there was eliminated. Then he had the violent crime organization, which did enforcement for that group. They were still pretty intact, but they weren't, I believe, and this is purely speculative, but I believe once people started getting murdered, they kind of went into hiding. And when the lead target had relocated up into Georgia, there was another guy who was involved that he was still living in the Virgin Islands, but he was keeping a very low profile.

he was started to work kind of a little bit for another drug trafficking organization. But when he was in his home, his home was like, he was like barricaded in his own home. He didn't want to leave. And I felt like we could prosecute those guys, but it needed two things. The first thing is it needed a willing prosecutor. It wasn't really a matter of evidence in the case. The evidence was there. And the evidence really did not change over the years.

There were things that needed to be done in order to shore up the case. but the evidence was there. And then the second thing it needed is the evidence itself, the way the Virgin Islands Police Department was storing evidence, was the most egregious thing I had ever seen in my career. It was so bad that, in my opinion, had you had a really good defense attorney, they would have kept any piece of evidence out.

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starting in the early 1990s, and there was one not long before I became chief and our deputy chief, and each one was worse than the first. And I didn't feel that there would be any opportunity to like, my concern, I guess you should say, is that we go through the trouble of arresting these guys, we put together a good case on them, and then we get that in front of a judge and a defense attorney starts picking apart their evidence, and they've got access to these OIG reports. They were published and they were online. And then they'd be in trouble that you wouldn't be able to prosecute it.

Like the evidence would get thrown out and the jury wouldn't hear the full story and then the guys would walk. And when you go after guys that are this violent and this bad that they're willing to torture and murder police officers then dismember their body and dump them at sea, you don't want to chance that. So I knew I had to, in my opinion, I had to fix that property and have evidence room first. and I knew that would take time. So that began the process of like, all right, I found, I found that I, like, there's, there's a silver lining in all this. And that silver lining was I might be able to, I might be able to bring down the guys that shot my, my partner's father.

And then what I did is I knew that I wasn't going to be able to do all this by myself. And I needed, like, to build a team. and in the process of of looking at the property and evidence room I went into the old police headquarters, the abandoned building and I learned that they were still storing firearms in there and I went met with forensics and I said, I need to see

I need to see what evidence is left in this facility and I didn't know at that point if he had evidence and still active cases or in there or it was just old cases that they didn't bother to get rid of and on a on a on a like tuesday afternoon walked into this building with forensics they they key into this one door and it's an old office space and it's the craziest thing i've ever seen it looked like a soviet post-war stockpile of firearms they are everywhere there there are rifles stacked on desks the leaning up against desk stacked up on floors there it is it is everywhere and i said well how many guns are in here and they go we have no earthly idea. I was like, well, what cases? Like, are these active cases or inactive cases? And then they're like, again, we don't know. There's some of the stuff dated back to the 1970s. And I'm walking around and it's insane. I'm like, how, how, if someone were to break in here today and steal a bunch of

guns, how would you guys know it was gone? And they're like, we wouldn't. And they said it actually happened once. They said, someone broke in and took guns. I said, well, how did you know they took guns if you have no account for any of this. And they're like, because they left a trail of guns leading out the back door. They kicked in the door and took as many as they wanted. And I was like, you got to be kidding me. And they're like, this isn't it. And I was like, what do you mean it's not it? And they're like, come with me. And they bring me down into another room, open the door. And they've got these plywood cabinets that someone built with padlocks on them. And they open them up. And rifles were in that one room, handguns were in this one. And then. And then,

there's shelves with just handgun stacks like all the way up to the top of a next shelf. The guns on the lower shelves are supporting the shelves and the higher shelves. They're just packed into this thing. And I start looking it over and like every gun you can imagine is just piled into these between these two rooms. I mean, there were two fully automatic Uzi's. There were AK-47s, AR-15s. There's tons of tech nines.

There was Uzi's. There was Mac Tins. There were just small handguns. There's even like wheel guns. Anything you can imagine. And I'm a gun guy. I like guns. But I'm like,

this is the biggest liability of the Virgin Allen currently has. We have to do something about this. I went to the police commissioner and I said, are you aware of this? And he goes, I was not aware of this. And I said,

we give me permission right now to destroy all these guns? And he's like, yeah, let's get rid of those. It's like, all right. We're on it. So I had to get, this was kind of like the start of me building a team of guys that I had some faith in. And I pulled guys from the Special Operations Bureau, the acronym SOB. They were basically the SWAT guys.

And then I pulled guys from my K-9 unit. And I said, everybody meet us here this morning. And we had gas power chop saws and we just started cutting up guns. We did it for three days. In total, we destroyed. I think it was 4,800 firearms. Wow. And what we did is we, none of them, a lot of them didn't have evidence tags left on them.

Like they had evidence tags had just disintegrated over time. And what we did is at the time the landfill had a program where you could bring in an old car. And they had a car crusher there that would crush the car and then ship them off to the mainland for scrap metal. So after we cut them all up, we had them in boxes. And we brought them down there and we loaded up a car that are getting ready to put in the car crusher. and then crushed the car around it and then they disappeared. So that problem was fixed. So that was the first, the first start of it, but it also started to get me, it started like,

it started like me working with some of the guys in special operations and also in, in canine. And then they, there was a program that I learned about shortly thereafter called the experienced law enforcement program. And what it was is the Virgin Islands had gone stateside and recruited officers to come work in the Virgin Islands. There wasn't a ton of them. They might have started with seven or maybe ten guys. They, but they were dropping like flies. Like these guys would come down accustomed to the way things were in a state side apartment where things, you know, had some semblance of order. And they would come to the Virgin

Islands and they were like, I'm done. Some of them didn't even last a week. And the only ones that remaining were guys who were former island guys themselves from the Virgin Islands himself and then there was one guy who was a Jamaican cop or he actually wasn't a cop in Jamaica but he was from Jamaica his name was Ralston Wright and Wright grew up in Jamaica and then he he he went on to run track in the Olympics for Jamaica and took a bronze medal in the Olympics for Jamaica he then went and got to bachelor's degree and joined NYPD and then after 9-11 he left New York went to Atlanta, joined Atlanta PD and he was assigned to the Red Dog unit and I don't

know if you've heard a Red Dog. Red Dog was like a notorious unit probably in the like 1990s early 2000s and Red Dog was like a street enforcement team and they were just a bunch of bad asses that went out and looked for trouble and they were they were going after drug dealers they were going after guys with guns you know, all the serious stuff. And they became pretty notorious. Like they were no screw around guys. And Wright was one of them.

And then he got recruited out of Red Dog and came and worked in the Virgin Islands. But he was burning out quickly. Now, he was from the islands. He was a Jamaican. But at the same time, he wasn't from the U.S. Virgin Islands. So he was kind of in the same category as I was, like an outsider. And the other thing about it is we had him in the patrol. Division and he was just knocking dicks in the dirt left and right. He was getting guns and drugs.

He was doing what he was doing in Red Dog in the Virgin Islands and he was running circles around everybody else. And so Wright had showed up in my office one day and he was like frustrated. He's, he was assigned a patrol division and he's like, I'm thinking about resigning. He's like, I, you know, I can't get backup. Like he had just had an incident that happened that there was a call for shots fired. He pulled over a vehicle on traffic stop. He was working solo. And there were, there were four guys in the car. And he had called for backup and all four of them were armed. And he would carry like four pairs of handcuffs on him. And he was, he ended up dealing with four people all armed by himself before backup arrived. And he was, he was starting to question

whether he wanted to continue doing it in the Virgin Islands. And the other thing is I found out after the fact that he was seeing things that were really shady that was going on and that didn't sit well for him either and and he had come into my office and he said he was thinking about resigning and his main complaint was like i don't if i call for backup i don't even know if anybody's coming and at that point i said all right i wanted to save this guy obviously he was like i had seen the statistics of of officers i was starting to track all that like who was doing what and like i said he was just a quantum leap ahead of everybody else as far as statistical information went. Like he was he was pulling more arrest and he was getting drugs and guns off the street at a level

that no one else was. Even he was, he would single handily, he was getting more arrest in guns than even entire squads, even entire zones. It was like all coming down to this one guy who was doing the majority of the work. And so I reassigned him on that day over to Special Operations Bureau and I said, look, if you, if you get into something and you call for backup and no one's available, here's my cell phone, I will come out. And the following morning I was going to work and I hear over the radio that there is a domestic in progress. And it was right at the shifts change. So there wasn't anybody responding.

And so I said, I'll go. So I started up this long stretch of roadway heading to this house where this domestic is. And I look in my rear mirror and there's right in back of me. And so it's right now heading to this domestic. And just like a minute before we got to the house, we got the 911 dispatcher said there's been shots fired in the house. So we get to the house and we pull in the driveway and it's this, it's this house that has like the stairwell on the outside of the house leading from. so you can get to the upstairs of it. There was no inner stairwell all from the outside of the house.

We pull in the driveway and I look over there's a neighbor standing in her doorway. And she points to the upstairs and then very honestly backs into her house and closes the door. They're like, all right, here we go. So right and I draw a weapon weapons. We start heading up the stairwell. We get up to the top of the stairwell. There's an open door there and we look down this hallway and we see this woman lying in the hallway on her back. and she's not moving.

And we yell, you know, please come out, you know, yell several times, no response. And I say we're going to have to clear it. So we go and we start working our way in. And as we start to get in the hallway, all of a sudden this guy comes out with his hands in the air. We grab a hold of him, throw him on the ground, put him in handcuffs. And before we can even search him, another patrol officer had arrived. and we grab him right right grabs an arm i grab an arm we lift him up and it's the it's a kid he's like he's like a 16 year old kid that's chacked up with a 40 year old woman that's his girlfriend and

obviously he's you know the domestic is between those two and the woman's been shot and we hand the guy off to the patrol officer and i said to him i said he has him and search search him before you put him in a car put him in the holding cell for us will be down when we can. And he goes, okay. And he starts to bring the guy down the hallway. And I said to him, hey, he hasn't been searched. And he was, got it. So, okay. So then we tend to the woman. And she's been shot in the back. And when the bullet exited through her front, it took her intestines with her with, with it. And so she's got like this exit wound in her stomach with intestines hanging out of it. And she's like kind of in and out of consciousness. And we're putting pressure on the wounds.

and we got EMS on the way and all of a sudden forensic officers start showing up detectives show up more patrol officers show up and I tell Wright I'll I'll brief them you go down and deal with the guy

he's like all right so EMS takes the woman I brief the detectives and we I get in my car start heading back toward Wright at this police station where this guy is being held

and Wright calls me and he's like deep Jamaica make an accident he goes, man, I got to lose my fucking mind here, you know, these people gone crazy. I said, right, what's going on? He goes, you need to come here. I said, all right. So I get to the, I get to the station and right is like pacing outside the building. And I said, I get out of the car. I said, what happened? He goes, man, I walk into this place. First thing I smell is weed. This guy's burning a joint in the cell. I said, you got to be shitting me. And he goes, he goes, So is they find a gun on the scene?

He says, I said, not yet. And he says, look, he had this in his pocket. He takes out a loaded 9mm magazine. I said, oh, shit. I said, I bet you he stuck that gun in the back of the patrol car. And he goes, that's what I'm thinking. So I said, all right, I get on the radio. I said, Central have that unit that transported this guy come to the station right now.

And right is like, he's so pissed. He's just pacing around. He can't stop moving, right? And he's like, Chief, the desk officer is literally like 15 feet away from the cell. How is it she cannot smell them, the guy smoking weed in the cell, right? He goes, I smell it from the time I walk through the door. Like, how is this even possible? I was like, right, I don't know.

So the patrol unit comes back and he's like, hey, what's up? We don't say anything. We just open up the back door, start searching the seat. Gun shoved on underneath the seat, right? like shoved in between like the the the people are full of surprises especially when you travel together thankfully verbo is not when you book a verbo you get verbo care and 24-7 live support so your house doesn't surprise you like your friends might if something's not as described or doesn't work verbo's there real people real support any time book today on the verbo app if you know you

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You know what I'm talking about. So I said, all right, I'm going to relieve you of your duty. Give me your badge and gun and go home, right? And he's like, he's shocked that I'm even saying it, right? So I go up to my office and I'm just pissed. And all of a sudden I get a call from the commissioner. And he's like, hey, did you relieve an officer of his duty? I was like, yeah.

And he's like, why did you do that? And I tell him the story. And he goes, well, the problem is, under the police rules and regulations, if we relieve him of the duty, we still have to pay them. They still get full compensation. So you just basically gave him a paid vacation. And I'm like, who agreed to that shit? Like, that doesn't make sense at all. I go, this guy's lucky to be alive.

And he's like, and I was like, I was shocked. He's like, get him back because you're basically paying him to stay home right now. and I'm like, oh, God. So this is just like more of the nonsense that we're having to deal with. But that event, like, solidified me that I had a solid guy. Like, Wright was going to be a guy I could trust. And so I got this idea that we would do, we would start doing like heavy enforcement of like street level stuff.

And there's a, in New York they came up with, they were the ones that they were kind of like the um how do i say this they they did heavily what they called broken's windows theory there where you start to enforce like the smaller things and then the criminal element realizes you're serious about crime and then it causes a decline in all crime across the board and so i decided i was going to take the special operations bureau and the canine team these guys up together and we would do street level enforcement of gun stuff, drugs, drug stuff, anything in progress, we would go to those calls. And, um, right was like one of these guys that he didn't have any family on island. So he was like

working all the time. Like I could call Wright anytime a day or night. He was, he was in. If I, if I was, if I, if I needed help or I wanted to do something, right was in. So the special operations bureau had sergeants assigned to it. But Wright knew it really kind of became my go-to guy. and I would go out and I'd work with them. Now at this point, I'm working like insane hours. So I'm doing my deputy chief stuff during the day. Come nighttime, I'm out doing saturated patrols with my guys on the nights that are out.

So some nights, you know, I would, or some days, I would work like eight to four, go home for an hour, then come back at five and work to sometimes. three, four o'clock in the morning. Sometimes if it was really busy, I wouldn't go home at all. Like I would just, I'd work till sunrise. And I was just working ridiculous hours. But the saturated patrol stuff was really starting to take off. And there started to kind of be a buzz and there was almost like a little competition among the guys in saturated patrol. Like, who's going to be the first to get a gun arrest tonight? Who's the first to get a, you know, drug arrest tonight? And when I would work with them, the numbers of, um, there's numbers.

of arrest and seizures would just skyrocket because the chief was out there working with them. They would work extra hard. And what happened was one night I was working with, and normally I'd work with Wright, but there was a group of guys that I would work with. I'd get paired up with probably about three or four different guys. One night I was teamed up with a guy named Dirk Marshall. And Marshall was another solid guy, former military guy, and no-nonsense guy. we had pulled over a DUI on a traffic stop.

And it happened that where we pulled the vehicle over, it was right in front of the government house. And while we're talking to the guy and the passenger, I noticed there's a camera crew filming us, and it was from the government access channel. And they asked, it's okay to film. And I was like, yeah, it's fine, I don't care. I had no idea what they would do with the footage

or anything like that. And we complete the traffic stop, ended up arresting the guy. and literally like an hour later I get a phone call from the governor and the governor is like hey I was just watching you guys on the government access channel and I had at this point I had forgotten they were even filming it really it wasn't anything that was noteworthy to me and I said I'm governor I don't know what you're talking about and I know by the way I know it's not normal that a governor would call a chief police but this governor was an exception he was he was really really truly I'm a really believe that he wanted the best for the Virgin Islands. And he had a lot of faith in me. He called me and before I took the position and asked me if I'd take it. And crime was such, was one of these things that really drastically affected, like he was getting a lot of pressure from the public. Like he got to get a hold of crime. You got to get VIPD under control. So he was like

one of my biggest fans. And he had a lot of faith in me to do a good job. And, you know, I had a cell phone number. I could call him. And he, so when he called me, and he told me that they'd aired it, I was like, huh, I didn't even know what they were going to do with it. And I said, I hope is okay. And he goes, yeah, I think it's great. He goes, it's great publicity. And he says, I think you should do it more often. He says, I think you should bring the government access camera crew with you. I was like, okay. And then it kind of like left my mind. and the following day I get a call from the public information officer and he says hey the governor wants us to film you guys working and what happens is that that kind of like fluke thing turned into episodes called cops v i and so they were the the camera crew would actually ride with us and looking back at them they're really corny like they were it was it was the lowest lowest budget thing you could you can imagine but they would air them on the government access

channel and they were starting to like get attention people started to talk about it and the guys that were that were featured on the shows the guys that were on saturated patrol they started to get almost like i wouldn't call it a fan following but they were getting noticed they could be in a grocery store and someone will walk up to him i saw you on cop's v i and and it motivated them to work even harder So I was like at first I wasn't like I wasn't crazy about the idea of it, but then I started to see that the guys would start working harder. And the community, we were getting the community's respect. And we were also getting the attention of business owners who wanted to support the efforts of what I was doing in the chief's office. So I was like, it's a win win.

Like I like, yeah, we'll do it whenever you want to do it. And, and we started to take on like with this whole broken windows theory, I started. started getting the guys taking on some of these issues that had been problems for a long time that had never been addressed. And one of them that I talked about in the first show was the prostitution that was going on. And it was clearly human trafficking. If they were going on to this day, there's no other description for it. You had got, you had girls that were brought specifically on island for the acts of prostitution. And they were almost like indentured servants to the people that they, they worked for. And, and, and,

And so I said I was going to, I was going to, we're going to do an undercover operation and try to try to do this and take some of this down and dismantle some of this. And we're going to bring cops via with us, right? We're going to bring the camera crew with us. And so the plan was, it was a very half-baked plan, but I got, I got, now keep in mind, we could have walked into these, these places of prostitution, these bars. and we could have solicited prostitutes in full police uniform. They wouldn't have stopped them. They would still, they would still be unhappy to sell a sex. But I took two police officers and I gave them marked money.

And there was one one place of prostitution that we said we're going to target because it's been there ever since I can remember. and the way it worked is there was a bar and the prostitutes would hang out in the bar and the Johns would go in there have a few drinks eventually they would ask a girl for sex and the girls would bring them to these like little shacks that were behind the building in order to get to the shacks there was a gate that was at the same at the street level and the the prostitutes had a key had a key for that gate the path to lock on the gate and they would open that padlock and then there's this very narrow not hallway like corridor that would led down to almost like a courtyard area where you had these

four rooms that were just like they were they're like shacks and they were made out of a combination of galvanized steel and some plywood nothing was painted the floors in them were dirt there was a mattress on the floor that had that may or may not had sheets in it they were nasty they they were like you needed a shower when you left one of these places you didn't you did not want to go in there the corridor leading down to it was so narrow that you have to walk sideways down in order to get to it you couldn't be straight up so the undercovers go in there and they solicit three girls the one told them it was his birthday and he wanted the three way and the girls bring them in the back and the plan was they were going to text me which room number they were in now most of us had not

been i don't think any of us had ever been back there before we knew there was rooms back there we didn't know how many. And we said, you know, start counting the rooms as you're walking and tell us what room number you're in. Like the first one, second, one, third one, whatever, right? So I get a text and they say they're like in third and fourth. But when we got, we went there, we had some guys go in the bar and secure everybody in the bar. We breached the gate, cut the padlock off, work our way down the corridor.

And we get in the courtyard and we're like, well, where do they start counting? Like the rooms, like, we have no idea. They said they were in three or four. We had no idea which was which. So I said, hit all of them, right? So the guys started breaching the doors and we find her undercovers. We pull them out. We rest the girls.

And like to describe how disgusting these places are, I don't think I could put it to words. But to give you some perspective, at least, there's no running wandering them. There's a daisy chain of extension cords that provide illumination in the room. but it's just a single like desk light with fabric draped over them that's sitting on a milk carton on the ground. Some of them may have had like plywood floors. Other ones may have been just dirt floors. In the corner there's a bucket, a five-gallon bucket, half-filled with water, and there's used floating condoms in there from the Johns that have been there before.

And then some of the rooms, the girls have been treating themselves for venereal diseases, and there's used hypodermic syringes with whatever they were treating themselves with. sitting on there like it was it was disgusting like you can't just describe how disgusting they were the smell alone like would give you the gag reflex and I remember the first bucket I looked into I had friends or had one of my guys behind me he was uh his name was Jason Mavaros and Jason was a canine guy and I said don't look in there and immediately he did he looked in there you know he'd tell not to of course he's going to and he's like he started like gag. He's like so disgusting. And so we were successful in arresting the three,

three prostitutes and found out afterwards, all three of them were living with a police officer. Wow. And all three of them were illegal, but they were working as prostitutes and they were living with a police officer. That was one of our, one of our undercover operations we did. But we'd also take on things like scrap metal yard. We do, we do all the small. all stuff. But at the same time, we were just, we were, especially with Wright, we were getting guns off the street like crazy. So I was still doing all my deputy chief stuff and I'd begun the, the rebuild of the property and evidence room. And my intention was to give them a state of the art facility that would compete with any nationally recognized standards. Like there should,

there should be no stone on turn. Like a police department lives or dies by their evidence, and they had the potential of definitely dying. And, and I, and, I, So I begun that, the reconstruction of it. And when I needed additional help, I would, I'd call on my special operations guys to help, whether it was moving equipment or relocating things with the destruction of all those firearms. They were kind of my go-to guys. And the, this was the, like the first time during the time that, I became when I was deputy chief, I learned that there was a potential that there was a contract on me.

Now, we had heard, there was one contract that I knew about when I was assigned to VIPD or when I assigned to DEA. This one came across from an informant who was a DEA informant for me. And then when I left DEA, this informant still kind of was, I could still call on that informant for information. they were by far one of the best informants I had, not by, like, not in the sense that they were giving me, like, incredible information, but their information, what they were giving, when it was always accurate. And when I was using that informant in DEA, if the informant alone, their word alone was enough for me to get a search warrant. Like, I could tell a judge that this informant's been providing me information for two. years has resulted in X amount of arrests, X amount of seizures, and the information they provided has never been false. And so I had a lot of faith in that informant. And when I came over as

a deputy chief, that informant was still providing me information, but the information had shifted. And I got a call how this goes down is, I guess, important. So I was, I was a good. So I was I was heading into work one day, and I get a call from Wright. And Wright says, I got a real situation here. And he goes, can you meet me? I'm on a traffic stop. And I said, well, I'm heading into an executive meeting. I said, how important is it?

He goes, I can handle it, but I kind of need to know what to do here. I said, well, what do you got? He says, I pull over this vehicle on a traffic stop. A woman driving the vehicle. It's a beat up truck. It's just shouldn't even be on the road. It's not registered. While I'm talking to her, I started to hear baby crying.

Originally, I thought it was coming from inside the truck. I look in the truck. There's no baby. So then I asked the woman, do you hear that baby crying? She says nothing. She just stares out the windshield, won't even look at Wright. So then Wright thinks that maybe the sound he's hearing is coming from like the bushes and someone's like abandon a kid.

So he tells the woman to stay there and he walks in the bushes but the sound goes away. He's realizing, nope, it's not coming from the bushes. So he walks back up to the vehicle. And then here's the sound again. And so he says to the woman, do you have a baby in this vehicle? She says nothing. She stares through the windshield. And at that point, right, it's like, nope, something's not right.

So he tells the woman step out of the vehicle. So she sighs and then steps out of the vehicle. He puts her in a handcuffs and sets her in the back of the vehicle. He begins searching the vehicle. And zipped up in a purse in the back seat is a new. newborn. It had just been born. Embelical cord still attached. And Wright is like, what the hell was this woman planning on doing? So he freaks out, calls me and is like, what do I do here? And I go, get an ambulance there, bring the baby to the hospital, make sure the baby's okay. And I said, let me call the attorney

general's office and find out like how they want to charge, like what list of charges. And I said, what do you think her intention was? And he says, I think she was going to abandon. the kid somewhere. She, she, she gave birth to this kid at her home, like a day ago. And, like, the kid's butt-ass naked, ambilical towards still attached, zipped up in a purse. Like, what do you think she was doing with it? I said, all right, understood. So I call the Attorney General's office. Now, the Attorney General's office and I kind of didn't have a great relationship. when saturated patrols really started a rock and roll, we were making tons of arrest. And I was getting calls from the Attorney General's office, and they were pretty livid about it.

Like, they're like, we're going to dismiss these cases because we can't keep up with the number of people that you're arrest. And I'm like, I'm not going to tell my guys not to arrest people because you guys can't keep up. Get more attorneys or do what you ever going to do. We're a police department. This is what we do. And so there was like, there was not a great relationship with them. And at the same time, I'm trying to figure. out a prosecutor that I trust that I can go to to prosecute the case on the police officer

who's been tortured and murdered. And so when I make the phone call, it's like my heart is like beating in my chest. I'm like, who am I going to get? I get to the first, I get to the secretary and I said, I need to talk to a prosecutor. And they said, please hold. And as I'm sitting there and hold, I'm like, oh, God, who am I going to get, right? And all of a sudden, prosecutor comes on. It was not a great pick, right? It was like, all right, so here's what we got. And I explained the whole situation. I said, I'm walking into a meeting, but can you call the officer who's on the scene? He needs a list of charges. I said, all right, I'll call him. So hang up with him. And I text right quick and said, hey, I'm walking into this meeting. You got a prosecutor should be calling you

now. I take a couple steps forward in the hallway. I'm getting ready to walk through this door. All of a sudden, the informant calls me. And the informant says, you got a problem. I said, tell me. said, you know a dirty officer? And I said, yep, it's one of the two that was sitting in that parking lot. The same ones that had followed Rambo back in DEA, the same that was connected to that violent crime organization needs to take you out. And I said, okay, I said, is there an actual contract? He says, I don't think there's an actual contract yet. The drug dealer doesn't want to, the drug trafficker doesn't want to do it.

He was like a professional. It's the best way I can describe it. He was, now, don't get me wrong. if we intercepted a load, he would kill all the officers that were there. He would have no problem with that. But he was smart enough to realize you don't just arbitrarily kill a cop because you have a suspicion they might arrest you. And certainly not a chief of police.

And I said, well, he said, the informant tells me, look, it's not the father you need to worry about. It's his son because his son's an idiot. And the son is trying to make a name for himself. And the son's involved in a bunch of, homicides. So you need to worry about the son, not the father. And, and, but eventually this, this dirty police officer is working on behalf of this drug trafficker. And I said, what's this, in what capacity? So aside from me, like giving him intelligence information and

telling him he should, he should whack you, he's also telling him, like he's helping them run loads. Like, he's acting as a lookout. He's giving him a police radio. When they run loads, he even uses of police units and escorts the load back to the safe house. I said, well, do you know where the safe house is? So the informant says, I don't, I don't know where the safe house is. And, and I said, will you ever get word of when the load is coming? A load is coming in. And I said, how big a loads are we talking about? And he, the informant says, I don't know if I will get like heads up. And if I do, it'll be like very, very short notice. And the informant says, they bring them in on this one particular launch ramp and then they they leave the load on the boat

put the boat on a trailer take it to the safe house and unload it there i said okay i said how much how how big a loads we're talking about a couple hundred kilos at a time now i knew who the traffic trafficker was for my time in d-ea and i knew he was a no no-shit trafficker and he was he was serious and uh and the information concerns me and i i hang up up with them and I walk into that meeting and this is like I'm not paying any attention to what's going on in the meeting, not that I would have missed anything, but it's like an executive staff meeting, but I'm thinking about, all right, how am I going to deal with this? And like, I don't want to tell anybody about it because the animosity toward me in the VIPD was such that if like the commissioner,

not necessarily the commissioner, but if people in the administration and certain key members in in the administration, learn that there was a potential contract on me, they would use that information to get rid of me. They'd be like, he can't stay here. It's a liability issue. He's got to go. So I've made up in my mind that I'm not telling anybody. And I've got to figure out like how to deal with this myself. And as I'm contemplating this, the public information officer walks in the meeting and kind of motions to me since I need to talk to you. So I step out of the meeting and she goes, did you guys find a dead baby zipped up in a purse this morning? and I was like, not dead, but yes, to everything else.

She goes, I've got like national news calling me on this right now. I was like, well, how did it get out so quickly? And she said, I don't know, but it's out. I need a list of charges. And I said, okay, so right then. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like. playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower.

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She's doing the best she can. She didn't have a car seat, so she zipped it up in the purse. And I'm like, I'm sitting there and like I could feel like sweat running off my forehead. And I'm like rubbing my forehead. And in front of me is the public information officer. And she's like, what? And I'm like, hand over the phone. I go, they don't want to charge.

And she's like, what? And I was like, they don't want to charge. And I go, well, listen, they, we think that she was going to abandon the kid. And I, she gave birth to this kid in her home. It's completely off the radar. like yesterday. Like, I don't feel comfortable telling my officer not to arrest. And he says, tell him not to arrest because we would dismiss charges on it.

He said it won't even make it in a court. Now, once he said that, I don't have any control anymore. Like, we can't make an arrest unless we have a good faith belief that you're going to prosecute. And I've already got a prosecutor saying, we're going to decline prosecution. And I was like, this is out of my hands. And I hang up with him. and before I hang up with him, I said, what do you want us to do with the baby?

Because you're not asking that we give the baby back to the mother, are you? And he's like, that's exactly what I'm telling you to do. And I said, I don't feel comfortable doing that. And he's like, he's like, well, I'm sending down, which was the equivalent of CPS down, and they will give it back then. And I was like, holy shit. So we hang up the phone and I'm like,

I got a call right now. now and tell Wright what's going to happen, right? And before I can, the public information officers in the background just going, this is insane. Like, what are they thinking? And, and I get a call from Wright before I can even call him. And he's now gotten the word directly. And he's like, what do I do here? I'm at the hospital with the baby. What do I do? And I go leave. I go, it's out of our hands. There's nothing we can do. You can tell he's just broken. He's like, the doctors even say I saved this kid's life. And we're going to give the kid back to the mother that likely, you know, in his opinion,

he thought she was going to abandon the kid somewhere. And I was like, brother, this is out of our hands. There's nothing we can do about it. I said, just hit the streets. Just don't, you can't, we cannot fix this. And so he's like, all right, chief. He goes, this is screwed up, but I'll do what you say. So he leaves. I tell the prosecutor, or I tell the public information officer, I said they're not, they're not prosecuting.

There's nothing we can do about it. And she goes, I literally have CNN calling me right now. What do you want me to tell him? And I go, tell him we referred the case to the AG's office for prosecution, prosecuted our opinion and give them their phone number. So that's their problem now. And I walk back into that meeting. I sit down the rest of the meeting and I'm like, this is like another thing that is chipping away. at morale, like, and I'm worried that right is going to resign, right? And I finished the meeting and I cut orders right after the meeting transferring that police officer who's advising this drug trafficker to kill me. I transfer him from west into the island to east end of the island. And I was like, at least he won't be on the same side of the island as the drug traffickers anymore. and I cut the orders and hours later he shows up in my office and he's furious and he's he's like

almost like emotional he's he's he's got tears in his eyes and he's like you're going to cost me money i was like it's a lateral transfer how am i costing you money and i go you're doing the same job on the east end as you were doing on the west end so how tell me how i'm costing you money and it starts to get like heated in there and i was like and i was like and eventually I just said to him, I go, listen, you and I both know why I transferred you. And I go, I know what you're doing. And I said, if you can continue to do it, there will be consequences to it. And he just got quiet and walked out of my office.

And that was that. And then not long thereafter, it was probably maybe a month after. I had a military helicopter over on St. Croix, and I was doing marijuana eradication with my guys, right? It was just like, and I mean, marijuana is still illegal, but it was this, this was like an opportunity that we used in DEA just to get some time out of the office to take a break from things. And I was using that. I'd parlayed that into my time as a chief, like just an opportunity for our guys to feel like they were getting something done and have some. fund, right? And we, I over flew, um, this area near where that trafficker lived and I spotted a stolen vehicle in the bushes. So we didn't deal about it, didn't deal with it at the time because we were doing,

you know, time in the air is this fuel time and, you know, but I knew it was there. I made a mental note of it. And the vehicle was like in this, this dried out, um, uh, ravine and a short distance from the trafficker's house. And the, like a day later, I sent one of my canine guys into recover the vehicle. And while he's down there in the ravine, someone on top of the ravine starts shooting at him. And so he takes cover, he calls for backup and the person flees. He doesn't get hurt or anything like that. But I knew immediately that's going to be that trafficker's son because he was stealing vehicles.

He was involved in most. multiple homicides. He was, he was into all sorts of trouble. Meanwhile, his dad is, is running loads, like major loads. And I think he was just trying to build a name for himself. I was like, I've got to deal with this problem sooner or later, right? And by this time, aside from doing all my chief stuff during the day, I was doing saturated patrols at night with my guys, you know, hitting the streets with them. And I would, because the homicide rate was so out of control, I would go to every homicide or suicide that was happening on the island. And I would do the briefings of the police commissioner, the government's house's people,

the governor's people. They had a public information officer as well. So I was kind of like the go-to guy for all that. So sleep deprivation had become like a major situation for me because I wasn't sleeping and I was getting calls. When I did try to have some time to get some sleep, I was getting calls and getting woken up for a homicide. And I would go to those scenes.

And that's when I, like, I was, this, this had been going on, you know, now for probably a good year. And I, I started to notice that there was what I called the homicide culture or crime culture on the island. And a lot of these homicides would take place in like housing projects. And the victims were people that. everybody in the community knew but when a homicide would happen people would come out in droves to see dead bodies and it wasn't like it was very it was very weird because a lot of the people that they were seeing bodies of were people that were they knew and when i'd arrive on the scene some of them it almost was like how to describe it almost like not a joyous atmosphere but like

like there was excitement it was the excitement of it people were joking people were taking photos. There was one scene that I was at, that there was a guy right up at the edge of the police line tape. There was two bodies on the ground. Exit wounds, entrance and exit wounds to the head. Shell casing spread everywhere. Crime tape blocking all these droves of people that had come out. And there's this guy and he's got what I only can guess is a six-year-old daughter up on his shoulders to give her a better view of the bodies. And I'm like, what the hell? It's like crime, like violence in the eye. had become so normalized that people were just accustomed to it.

And it didn't have the same effect as it would with like a normal community. Like it was it was so it happened so often that people had just become immune to it. And I remember leaving that one that one scene and like trying to digest this in my head is like, how do they get to this point where where murder has just become normal? almost like a sense of entertainment. It was it was a bizarre environment. Now a couple of about a week after the information or my officer had gotten shot at by what we assumed was the drug dealer's son. I was driving down the highway and I spotted the the drug trafficker and so I was like all right this is good a time as any so I pulled him over on traffic

stop right in the middle of the highway. He pulled him over on a traffic stop right in the middle of the highway. He pulls over the side of the road. And I was in plain clothes at the time. I take out my gun and I tuck my shirt over my holster. So if I've got to pull quickly, it'll be readily available. And I walk up to his door and he says, hey, chief, how are you doing? I said, I'm good. He says, was I speeding?

I said, no, you weren't speeding. I said, I actually need to talk to you. He's like, all right. I said, you got a minute? He's like, yeah. I said, come on out. So he gets out. And when he gets out, I notice he's got a bulge on his side. He's got a gun on him too. And I don't, I notice it and I don't say anything. And I was like, in my mind, it's hard to like ignore that. But at the same time, I'm like, I'm not here for that. And so we, we walked to the back of his car. And it's another one of these very strange, surreal moments because here I am the deputy chief of police and here he is and a very

no shit serious drug trafficker that's running thousand, you know, probably a thousand kilos a year. And, uh, and we're leaned up against the bumper of his truck and we're talking. And I said, I said, hey, you know, you know what I do just as much. I said, I know what you do just as much as what you know that what i do and i said you know i'm not in that business anymore right and he says what you mean i got the drug stuff i said i'm a chief now i don't i don't screw around with that i said the most we do is guys that are slinging crack on a corner i said that's not i'm not in that business anymore said now don't get me wrong said if i came across you bringing in a load i'd fucking go head to head with you and he looks at me he goes and i go head to head with you and i said yep i know

And I said, I don't think it'll ever come to that. I said, because we're just in, I'm just in a different business now. I said, but there's a problem. I said, I like to think as you as a professional. You've been in this a long time. And he goes, I think of you the same way. There's like a mutual respect between the two of us, right? An obvious mutual respect.

I said, but this bullshit with your son shooting in my officers, I go, I can't have that. And I said, you want me back in that business doing drug trafficking cases? that's the way to do it. I say with one phone call, I could have DEA and FBI all over you. I said, if that's what you want, then we can shake hands and walk away

and I'll make that phone call. If not, I need you to do something with your son because if he does that again, I'm putting the full way to the federal government on top of you. And he looks at me, and he's got kind of this,

like, like, deadpan look on his face. And I don't know which way the conversation's going just by the look on his face. face and then he extends his hand he goes chief like he's going to shake my hand he goes i will take care of this you will not have a problem with him after this and i said that's what i need to hear and i shake his hand i said have a good day he's like you two chief we walk back to our cars and we drive off

we never had a problem with son after that so he uh he uh he's probably still running cocaine today if i had a guess like he and but he also Like I said, he was a professional. He had been in the business long enough that he knew he didn't want, he didn't want that. That's those sort of problems on top of them. So after that incident, did you feel in your mind that you were safe from, you know, any hits or contracts being put out on you? Because you confronted it head on. With that one, I think it was definitely, I'd lessen the chance.

But that wasn't the end of information that there may be contracts on me. Um, not specific to that particular trafficker, but others, others came up. And, uh, I think that definitely lessen the chance. You still had a son who was a wildcard, but I felt like his, his father, um, had control of his son to a certain degree. And keep in mind, the son was involved from what we could tell. The son was involved in a lot of different stuff and the homicide stuff. There was a back and forth between that group or his son and, uh, another group that

was involved in drugs and they were dropping lots of bodies. And then there was one incident that I remember that there was a, he wasn't, I don't know what that guy's story was. I know he was a criminal. He was a pretty bad guy. He's a really bad guy. And some younger kids had robbed him and they picked the wrong guy to rob because there was, I think there was four, three or four.

guys that were involved in that robbery, like a strong arm robbery where they stole his gold chain. And we had an informant that told us that it happened. And the informant said, hey, you need to find these three kids or four kids. They were probably like 16, 17 years old, 18 years old before he does, because he's going to kill him. And then the same day we got that information, one of them ended up, we ended up finding the body for one. And then the second, a couple days goes by and we found the other two bodies. So, like, homicide there was like, it was, there were just, there were a lot of people that were willing to commit homicide without even thinking about it. Like, the littlest thing could get you, get you killed. And I guess I, I, I weighed that against when I'd hear there's a contract on me.

I was like, well, this is the place that lots of murders are happening. So it, I took them all pretty serious. But I also was like, I was trying to, like, balance it because I also. knew that if I started making people aware of this, it was going to be the end of my career there. And I was trying to keep it, I was trying to keep things together. And there wasn't too long after that that DEA called me. And they were up on a wire and they intercepted a call. And they didn't know who the, they didn't know who the source of it was, but they said there's a contract out on both right and me. And because by that time, this is right before I became a chief.

I moved from deputy chief to the chief of police police position. Like we were just running and gunning unsaturated patrols. And we were like, we had annihilating drug turf. So we were going after, we were getting tons of guns off the street. And we were bringing these people forward. But as quickly as we could arrest them, they were dismissing them over at the AG's office. So that was still a real problem. And I had, but right before I became a chief, I had finished that property and evidence facility.

And that came online. And that was like, that was gathering some attention from the business community that was, that was seeing the saturated patrols making an impact. They were reading about arrest in the newspapers. Then they were reading about the property and evidence room. And I started getting contacted by business owners who wanted to, like, donate money to the chief's office to, like, continue to go after this sort of stuff. And there was a, there was a program there that's still there, as far as I know. It's called the Economic Development Program. where you'd have business owners from the states that would come down.

They'd set up business in the Virgin Islands, and there were certain things they had to do, but they would get huge tax breaks by doing it. Jeffrey Epstein was one of those. Jeffrey Epstein had come down and set up an economic development company in the Virgin Islands to get those tax benefits. And there were a lot of other ones, too, legitimate ones, that had come down. And not long after I moved from the deputy chief of police position,

to the chief of police position, I was contacted by two investment bankers and they said, hey, we want to do a fundraiser for you. And I didn't want to touch any money myself. Like, I didn't want to give anybody any excuse to say I was doing something improper, but I realized this was a huge opportunity because getting funding from the Virgin Islands government was extremely difficult. So if I had like a fund that I could with a phone call say, hey, I need to, I need to buy this or I need to buy that. And it would be done quickly. that would make my job much easier. So what I did is I contacted a 501c3 fiduciary and said,

hey, I want to start up a fiduciary for the chief's office with you guys. And I don't want to ever see the money. You guys handle the money. You guys make payments. You guys receive it. I don't ever want my hand involved in it at all because I just don't want anybody to question, you know, question me about it. and I got that set up, and then they had this fundraiser, and they brought in a bunch of other EDC companies to that fundraiser, and the governor came as well, and we got not a ton of money,

but it was a good chunk of money where I had some, like, I had some ability to, like, spend money, and when I needed things, it was, it was available, and that was a huge, huge asset to me as well. And I met a lot of interesting people during that fundraiser. There was the, I would say generally the EDC program was a legitimate one. There were obviously some that were not. And I think in the beginning when it first started, there was a lot more that was not. But part of what they had to do by owning an EDC company in the Virgin Islands is they had to make charitable contributions. And I was tapping into that ability that, and it was proportionate to the amount of money they were saving in taxes.

And some of these bigger companies that were saving big money had the potential of donated big money to the Chiefs office. And I'll get a little bit into that a little bit later. But that was a huge asset for me. And then, like I said, DEA had contacted me and said they intercepted a call in a wire saying that there was contracts on Wright and both Wright and I. and it was like one of these that they knew who made the call and they know who received the call, but they didn't say enough information to know who the contract was coming from. And I pulled Wright in my office and I said, hey, this is what's going on. And Wright had the same belief that I did is like if we make people aware of this,

they're going to use this as an excuse to get rid of us. So we're not telling anybody about it. So from that day forward, I started carrying a Benelli M4 shotgun in my car and Wright was Karen is AR-15 with them at all times. And if Wright was working, I would always, I was going to work with Wright from going forward at that point. And, you know, we don't know how good that information was, but it was enough to get us to arm up.

Like we were, we were being careful about what we were doing. And there, like, all during this time that I was, I was a chief, there was, there was, I told someone one time, I said, it's like. When I wake up in the morning and I go to work, I begin navigating in a minefield. It's like there's people inside the department that are working against me. There's people inside the department that do not want me there. And they, I just have to be careful about how I go about everything and outthink people. I remember one morning I came into work and my secretary looked at me like oddly.

She goes, you didn't just get here, did you? and I said, yeah, I just got here. She said, when I came here, your door was open. And I yelled, I thought you were in there. So I said, I yelled, morning chief, and I didn't hear reply. And then I heard your back door close. And we went into my office and someone had broken in my office. I was like, all right.

Well, and there was nothing, there's nothing there to get, right? But it was an environment that was, you couldn't. tell who was on your side or who wasn't on your side and people that you would swear were on your side you would always have to you knew in the back of your mind that it's malleable like it could change just depending on who's who's in front of them like they like people didn't want to like they didn't want to be I don't know how to describe this it people didn't want to pick sides and I think they also knew that chief's positions were always temporary. There was no one that's going to be chief of their entire career. Maybe you do four years, maybe you do eight years, but if the new

governor comes into office, you're not likely going to survive that. And I think that people, there was self-preservation of people, like not to be too friendly with you, even if they were on your side, because of that. Because things could change. And then You know, they're left out there in isolation. So very odd environment to work in. And I do, I did work with some really good guys. Like, and, but I also, I never gave anybody like too much, like credit, with exception to maybe right.

I felt like Wright was always solid. And I, and part of that is because he wasn't from there. And Wright had already expressed an interest to leaving one. time before. And I think if things got too weird, Wright would, Wright could go anywhere. Right at that point had a master's degree. He had three police departments under his belt. I mean, he was, he was a really solid guy. And his resume was, was, was, you know, pretty impressive that he could probably go to any police department and work, but he was, he was working with, he was working with me. And, uh, there were lots of stories with Wright and I that, um, you know, we go out. We,

to joke like when we work together we can have a gun arrest within 15 minutes of walking out the door or drug arrest and a lot of times it was like that like we would right right as far as being a street cop goes right was probably the best i've ever met like wright's instincts were incredible um he learned the island very quickly uh people knew him he had a real reputation now and they call them a jamaican or they call them yardy which is a term for jamaican um and uh he was like a no nonsense guy and what was happening is it wasn't just he was known among the the criminal element he was also known among the business community and I found out years later that the business community would come to write like if they were getting if they had a

police officer that extorted money from him they go to write to get it get it back and right was one of these guys that was no nonsense and the rumors were starting to starting to spread that I had put right into that place. And he was actually a federal agent, you know, brought in to stamp out corruption within the police department. And Wright would never tell me when he would do things like that. Like if business owner came to him and said, hey, this officer extorted money for me,

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available at the prepared foods counter. Get Summer Splash Savings Now at Whole Foods Market. You're going to prison. And I didn't find out about that until years later. And then Wright had, again, And years later, after I left the department, Wright had told me about an incident where he was responding to a robbery and progress call. And they had robbed a restaurant in an area called Sunny Isles, which is like a shopping center. And there's this footpath that led up into an area called Sign Farm, which is a residential neighborhood from the shopping center.

And by the flight of the path that these guys were fleeing, Wright believed they were heading up that shortcut. So he was up on top of the shortcut when the guys actually came up. And he drew down on him. One of the guys got down on the ground, Wright got him in custody. A second guy continued to run. But there was a patrol sergeant that was in that neighborhood deeper in the neighborhood, right radioed to him and said he's going, you're going to cross path with him. He's heading up toward you right now. And so Wright quickly scoops up this guy, gets him in custody, puts him in the backseat of his unit.

goes back goes around the neighborhood to where the other the sergeant was and the sergeant standing there on the roadway and right assumed he's got him because it was it was directly where the guy was running and uh he gets out and he goes he got him serge and he goes no never saw him and he's like he was literally running he jumped that fence right there you know right saw it from the opposite side he said he literally jumped that fence and sergeant goes never saw him and uh he says Well, I don't have a cage in my vehicle. Can you transport this guy for me? He's like, yeah.

So Wright gets him out of his vehicle, goes to transfer him over to the sergeant's vehicle. It's got a cage. As he's putting him in, he sees cash spread all across the front seat and on the floor of the car. And Wright knew he took a, he, the guy paid him to let him go. He gave him the money from the robbery to let him go. And Wright pretended like he hadn't seen it and walked back to his vehicle. And then he hears a serge call to him. and he uh right is like he's got his open door and uh he's standing behind the door as the sergeant's

approaching and right unclips his gun because he thinks the sergeant may just kill him and uh the sergeant says hey you know i i know you saw that on my front seat and it's not what you not what you think it is and right goes okay if it's not what i thought it was it's no big deal you know he wasn't going to confront him about it. He couldn't prove it. In his mind, he knows what he's pretty damn sure what happened. And the sergeant says, it's just sometimes, you know, and then cuts himself off. And Wright says, hey, if you say it's not what I thought it was, then it's not what I thought we're good. And he goes, are you good? And he says, yeah, I'm good. He goes, you don't need anything? He goes, nope, I'm good. And he goes, all right. And they walked back to his car and he leaves. And Wright said,

Years, this is years later, right, said that he, he drove to the next stoplight and he sat at that stoplight. It was, you know, late at night. And he's just the single car sitting at that stoplight. And he walked, the, the stoplight goes from red to green, back to red again, keeps cycling through. And he's sitting there with his hand on his phone about ready to call me and tell me, what happened. And he said he just, in the end, what happened? There was, there was another call

where they requested backup. Someone else had called for backup. And he decided, I'm just going to go to that call. And I'm not going to mention ever again. I'm having to mention this again. And I asked, I asked right when he told me the story, and this is year, like I said, it's probably, it was probably five years after I was out of the police department. I said, how come he didn't call me? And he said, because I know who you were. And he said, had I called you? And he said, had I called you and told you what happened, you would have raised hell. And you would have grabbed that serge up and we would arrested him. And he said, I'd never be able to work here again. He says, I would be in the same position you currently were, where no one knew, where you didn't know

who you could trust and who you couldn't trust. And the ones that couldn't be trusted would be these people that knew that I was straight and I wasn't going to tolerate any bullshit. shit. And I said, well, didn't you do that when, wouldn't it be the same thing when you were returning money to people that at work story? And he says, it was different. He said, it was different because those were a different group of people. So this was a sergeant, you know, it was, it was, and he said, I, I was constantly questioning if I was navigating all this correctly. And he said, in hindsight, he goes, I think I did a pretty damn good job, but I always wondered whether I was doing it right.

Like if this is, this is an impossible situation and I was always wondering if I was doing it right, is what he told me. So, um, and then the property and evidence room opened. The new facility had opened.

I was now, uh, chief. And at that point, um, we needed to like shore up the investigation, uh, on the police.

officer who had been kidnapped, tortured, murdered, and dismembered. And I assigned the case to the cold case detectives. And where that event took place was an abandoned, like generator building that was connected to a hotel that was abandoned as well. And we brought in the informant, the FBI informant, who was present when it happened, and brought that informant back to that location and there was the room was probably not any bigger than this room here and in the middle of the room she described it to the letter she said there was a steel pole that ran down the middle of the room and they had him handcuffed to that pole and they had him stripped down to his underwear and they had shot him in the hand originally and she was actually in the room with us with an FBI

evidence response team and she she said so we kind of like played the the the officer like how how was he he's like all right down your knees your hands up like this he puts his hand up because they had put a gun down gun at him pointed a gun at him and he raised his hand up and they shot him through his hand and we said all right where was he positioned in the pole how was he and she described it and there was a lot there was like a lot of leaves and dirt and stuff on the floor and we started sweeping it back. We found the imprint point where the bullet had passed through his hand and ricocheted off the floor. And it was like, all right, this information is good. Like there was no doubt in my mind. So we spent days out there processing that location. Now, she didn't know what happened

to his body. She knew that they dismembered it, but she didn't know what had happened to the body. And we were processing the whole hotel thinking maybe they may have dumped it. There was a, there was a large septic tank there that we were waiting in that septic tank and waiters seeing if there's any body parts left in that but we didn't find anything related to his body we did find some spent shell casing in that room and so we were doing work to shore up that homicide case and it got to the point where it was like all right we're we're ready to go we need a prosecutor like we need a prosecutor that that is has the gumption to do this now i always believed and i still to this day that there's a very thin line between incompetence and fear and the virgin islands and and any

prosecutor who was afraid to prosecute a homicide in the virgin islands didn't do so blindly they they had good reason for it there was a prosecutor's house that was burnt down he did most of the homicide cases prosecuted most of the homicide cases he lived out away from everybody else. These guys went up there, broke into his house, and burned its house down to the ground. So there was reason to be concerned. And we needed a prosecutor who was a little bit crazy because by this point, this is over a 10-year-old cold case. And I hadn't reached a comfort level with anybody yet, but there was one prosecutor who he had done quite a few homicide cases and prosecuted other cases. And he was the same one that was allowing us to do some of the wild stuff.

And he was even tagging along with us on some of the wild stuff. And he was starting to like get my attention. And he had gone with on the prostitution sting. He was advising us on some of the lower end stuff. We did a scrap metal operation where these guys were, these guys would steal anything for scrap metal. They were breaking into churches and stealing the baptismal bull so they could get scrap metal off of it and sell it.

at these places that were fencing it. They're even stealing the goddamn hubcat, or like the, what do you call it, the manhole covers off of manholes in all through town. When we actually did this operation, we found a bunch of manholes covers that they had just stolen that morning. And this prosecutor was like down with everything.

And the true test of it came one morning. I was in my office working, and one of my detectives came in my office. And he says, I got a situation here. And I said, what do you guys? And he's like, I want to write search warrant, but it's going to be a problem. I said, well, what's the problem? I said, tell me the scenario.

He says, I got a cold case. He says, I got an informant that says they murdered this guy. And the way they build houses in the Virgin Islands is the first thing they do is they dig a big hole, right? And then they pour a floor on that hole on that whole concrete pad. Then they build up the sides of it. And then they build the house on top of that. And that hole, that concrete box on the bottom is a water cistern, where rainwater's caught from the roof, goes down in there.

That's where you get your water from for the house. And the information he got is that this guy built this house, built a cistern on it. Before they poured the cistern floor, they had a guy that was murdered, and they dug the hole a little bit deeper, put his body underneath the floor of the cistern. So now you have in the ground of cistern, the body underneath it, cistern goes up, house goes on top of this, house is completed. So he's like, how do I get that body without destroying the house? I was like, well, I don't think you can. And he's like, I said, how good is your information?

He goes, it's good. Informant is good. I said, who's living in the house? He said, well, the guy's in prison right now. The guy that owns the house. So no one's living in it. And I said, perfect. So he goes, have you ever written anything like this before?

And as I pull up my keyboard and start typing an affidavit and support a search warrant, I go, never. And he says, you think the judge is going to allow this? I go, no, I don't. And he goes, what about the AG's office? And I go, probably not. But we'll give it a shot. Now, I've done some crazy affidavits before, right?

We would do covert entry warrants where we were, we were allowed to go break in. into a residence and install cameras or equipment, you know, that sort of stuff and then sneak back out. I had written some crazy ones, even ones that allowed us to tranquilize the guy's dog so we can pull off these covert entry warrants. Great stories about that. They will have to say that for another day. But I had never written one that they would allow us to actually destroy a house in order to go get it. And there really is truly no other way that we're going to be able to figure this out. So I write up this affidavit in support of a search warrant that will allow us to tear down the house in order to get to it.

Or we didn't know to what degree we'd have to tear down the house, but there's going to be destruction, right? And so I write it and I hand it to him and I said, bring it to this prosecutor. And it's the same one that has kind of caught my attention. And when he leaves there, I kind of like laughed myself. There's no way in hell, right? And later on the day, I get a phone call from the same prosecutor.

And he says, he says, We're talking about other things. And then he goes, oh, hey, I saw that affidavit you sent over. He goes, and I go, yeah, I go, how did that go? And he's like, yeah, I authorize it. It's front of the judge now. And I was like, holy shit, he agreed to this, right? And then I thought, well, there's no way the judge will.

And like 20 minutes later, the officer walks in with a big smile on his face. He's got the signed affidavit for my judge. So I was like, holy shit, now we've got to tear down this guy's house. So we called Public Works and we got heavy equipment out there. And we tore the whole house down. And we dug out that whole cistern. And when we got down to the bottom of the cister and ripped out the floor and they started digging and they go, this is virgin ground. It's hard rock.

There's nothing's down there. So we tore down the whole guy's house for nothing. And I said to the cold case detective, I said, how long is the guy in prison for? And they said, he said, the next 15 years. And they go, well, that's good news. I said, dig the whole bigger, throw all debris in it. Throw it all in there and then bury it back like we were never there. 15 years, they'll figure that out. So we'll all be retired by then. And that's what we did.

Who pays for that, like to rebuild his house? Insurance? I doubt insurance to pay for that. I really don't know. I mean, it wasn't a great house to begin with, but it did have a poured concrete cistern in it, which was some money into that. And then there was like a wooden house built on top of it that I think he was using as an indoor grow at one point because it was all set up as an indoor grow. And like I said, he was in prison. I think he had 15 years left on maybe a homicide case that he was involved in. So he should be out of jail now. But I never heard anything back on what happened with all that. Wow. So, but when I realized when I had that prosecutor that agreed to that, I was like, all right, we got the right guy now. If anybody's going to do it, it's him. And, uh, and I approached him. And I said, hey, I said,

Are you familiar with this police officer? And he said, yes. And I said, at this point, this case is not going to get any better. I said, it's only going to get worse as memories fade. I said, we've got an informant that was there when it happened. I think the informant makes a very credible witness. And I said, would you be interested in taking a read of this case file? And he says, sure.

So he read it. And he came back and he says, yeah I agree with you I think that this case won't get any better and if we're going to do it now's the time and so there were two people that were that were there one is this organ that lead guy in the violent organization the other guy is almost like a minion to him and they were they were involved in the actual the murder of the guy and dismembering his body and and then there were there were other people that were involved in the dismemberment of the body and cleaning up the mess. The problem with the case at this point is the statute of limitations.

The statute of limitations was seven years. So the only thing, the only crime that did not have a statute of limitations was murder. So the only charge we had available is to charge for murder. And it was a bit of a stretch to charge some of these underlings with murder because they weren't actually involved in the murder itself. They played a role. And in a case where the statute of limitations hadn't run out, there's all sorts of things you could charge them with accessory after the fact,

aiding and abetting, conspiracy, all these other charges you could throw at them. But the actual murder case, murder charge was the only thing we could throw. So it was an all or nothing thing. And a lot of times, if you can bring something in front of a jury, a jury may say, yeah, we'll agree that it was assault in the first degree, which is assault with intent to commit murder, but not murder. and especially with the Virgin Islands, you know, juries are often, they have like these split things. So this is very much an all or nothing thing.

We either are going to get a conviction for murder, otherwise they're going to walk. That's the only thing we have available. So this is starting to get me a little nervous. And we, and then the other part of it is like, we're going to need a bunch of people to take this thing down. Now, when I was assigned to DEA, we would import. a ton of people. Like we would, we bring in agents

from all over the country to help out with big search warrant operations. And we could do that to a little bit. We could do that a little bit here. We might be able to get a few from Puerto Rico.

We might be able to get some air assets and stuff like that to help with the operation. But largely it's going to be Virgin Islands police officers. And obviously trust is a major issue. And generally speaking, I think everybody that was in the VIPD,

they wanted that case resolved. They wanted someone to pay for that case. But at the same time, it was very difficult to tell who was connected to who. Like there was a police. That organization had a, had a, it was like two parts. It had the violent crime part of it and then it had the drug trafficking organization. The drug trafficking organization was essentially eliminated after Diaz's father was shot because they all started getting murdered. And then, so you were left with the violent crime.

crime part of it. And even that, a lot of those guys were gone. But you had those two main targets. And the one was a really bad guy. Like we had information he was involved in multiple homicides. And obviously, you know, and he was the one that was up in Georgia. And obviously you want to do this as quietly as possible. You want to gear up for this major operation to get these people in custody. I think there was five in total that we were able to secure arrest warrants for. But you had to do it quietly so people didn't get spooked and they just they just take off and you never see them again and what i did was i grabbed right and i grabbed a couple of other officers and i said i need intel i need you go out and figure out where these guys sleep where do they lay their heads at night and i

need not only where they're doing it primary residence i need to know their girlfriend's residence i need their secondary girlfriend's residence i need to know their mom's mom and dad's house i need to know brothers and sister's house. I need everything I need. So that morning, if we don't find them in that primary residence, we know where to go next. And so I got them rental cars and I said for the next two weeks, all as I want you to do is gather intel. And that's what they did. And then when they came back with it, I looked and I felt confident what they had done. I said, here's what we're going to do. I said, tomorrow morning, meet me in my office. They walk into my office. We walk into the conference room and every personnel file for VIPD is sitting in my conference room. I said, we're picking a

team here today. And so we're not leaving until it's done. If anybody has any question about anybody in these files, I want to know about it now. Don't come to me two weeks from now and tell me I wasn't confident we should have picked that person. If you have any question at all, we boot them. We're not taking them. And so we went through every personnel file and we got a team. It was probably pretty close to 100 people total. And then we reached out to the feds. We got a team from them. and then we reached out to Georgia. And it was near Atlanta, the police department near Atlanta, reached out to a SWAT commander there.

And I said, here's what I got. Now, that SWAT department was big. They probably, I think they had five teams total. Each team has barricats, you know, armored vehicles. They're all equipped of shit. Like, their equipment makes us look like nothing, right? And I talked to the lead guy, and I said, Lieutenant, here's what I got.

And I told them the story. I told them how they kidnapped this police officer. They tortured them. they murdered him, dismembered his body. And I said, I need a SWAT team. I've got an arrest warrant for a guy who's up in your jurisdiction. I need a SWAT team to go get him. He walks in to his SWAT commanders, and he's got five commanders or whatever it is.

And he says, I need a volunteer. And I need one team to go arrest this guy on this morning operation at the same time of the Virgin Allens is kicking indoors down there. And all of them raise their hand. They said we're all in. So five SWAT teams for one guy geared up to go to Georgia. And then we got Customs volunteered to Black Hawk helicopter. And the first target that we're going to hit was this was the guy who was the minion guy.

And he's living in this poured concrete house with bars on all the windows and doors. Everything's locked up tight as a drum. He's basically a prisoner in his own home because by this point, almost everybody tied to the drug trafficking part of that organization have been murdered. and a bunch of guys that were involved in the violent crime part of it had been murdered as well. So, and he's still on Ireland, but he's concerned, obviously. And he's been doing some freelance work for the same trafficker that his son was advising me, advising that I needed to go. And that was going to be our first target. So we send out orders from my office that says to everybody that's involved in the operation,

and the order says, we don't tell them what it is. We just said your order to report on this morning at 4 a.m. Actually, we did nighttime warrants. It had been like 1 o'clock in the morning. Your report at this place at this time. And you're not to disclose this to anybody. And that morning I pull into headquarters where we were doing the briefing at this abandoned police headquarters. And there's just the parking lot is full of people.

And I walk up and it was like, I don't think anybody had gotten a letter like that before. And so they knew whatever it was, this was not an ordinary operation. This was something pretty significant. And I walk in and I've got like just a room full of people and it's quiet. Normally, you know, people know each other. there's conversations you know there's a bit of a bit of a noise in the room this time nothing it's stayed quiet and i was like they know like they know they might not know exactly what's happening but they know it's serious like they they they understand the gravity of what we're about ready to do

and i said i started the conference the the the briefing and i said uh i'm trying to remember how i put it i said uh i said something to the fact of um this morning we're going to arrest the people responsible for the kidnapping torture and murder, a police officer, and I say his name. And I remember there was like, almost like a gasp in the room. Like people kind of knew, but that was like their suspicions were, there was no suspicions anymore. They knew it. And the room was dead silent. And I said, we've broken you off into teams.

Here's your team leader. I said, we're going to hit them one at a time. I said, in Georgia right now, they're geared up and ready to do. to go, they're going to grab our fifth guy there. I said, I said something like, this will be the most significant case that you'll do in your career. Like, no questions asked. And a lot of these guys were friendly with the police officer, and they all wondered.

Like, but there was also, I think everybody knew whoever did that were really bad people. and I think people were nervous as well. And so I teamed up with a SWAT team and my special operations guys and K-9, and we got into a minivan, two minivans, and we were followed by a search team for our first target. And what we would do is we would roll the first target. We'd breach the door, go in, grab the guy, turn them off, turn them over to a transport team. and then turn the scene over to a forensic team that would process the house and then rolled to the next house. That was the plan. And at the same time, I got into that van.

I'm sitting there in the front seat. And I call one of my guys that's at the airport with the Customs Black Hawk guys. And I said wheels up were five minutes to go. And he says, all right, on the way. So I waited until I started to hear the rotor noise and then I call up the SWAT commander over in Georgia and I said, hit him. And then they said, Roger that. And helicopter gets overhead and I said, all right, let's do this. We start rolling out and we drive directly with just a caravan of cars behind us. There's probably 20 cars behind us. And we had staging areas

that we'd pick up the next group, the next team, after we cleared the first house there'd be a staging area for to grab up the next team and then we'd just go from there to there so we go to the first guy's house and black hawk is slow and low they're like and this is like 2 o'clock in the morning there's a black hawk it's probably 200 feet above the house just beating the shit out everything on the ground including us and uh we go up to the go up to the bars and uh my swat commander had a had a cutting torch and he starts cutting the lock and i was like fuck this and I hook on some bars onto the to the to it and then connect it to the van the back of the van and about the same time I was ready to start pulling he had cut the lock and we made it in

and we started breaching doors inside so when we get inside we're meeting locked doors and we start clearing rooms we're going room to room helicopter up overhead loud as hell and we get to this last room and it was like the door's the door was locked and I said breach that door so we we take a baton around, knock down the door, and the guy is just, he's sitting there ready to go. He's just like hands in the air.

He doesn't want anything. So we grab a hold of him. He's wearing a pair of underwear. We took him just like that. A pair of underwear, hooked him up, hand him to the transport team, and then got in our van,

took off, met the next team. We just did that. Meanwhile, up in Georgia, you got five SWAT units rolling in on this one target's house. They said they never threw more flashbangs

than one house in their entire career. They broke out windows. They put ladders up to the second story. The story broke out windows there, dropped flashbangs in the upstairs. And they get this guy. And like, I get a call from this SWAT commander in Georgia with this deep southern accent. And he says something like, your boy damn near shit his pants, man. We got him in custody.

And I was like, all right, thanks a lot. And so ended up sending two guys up to Georgia to gather him up. And then we all meet back at. headquarters when it's all done and said with and within a couple hours we had everybody in custody and uh i was like all right it's a good day you know it's like this finally you know it's 11 year old homicide at this point it's finally it's finally gonna you know we're finally going to see some justice for his family and you know obviously like one a great day and the atmosphere at police headquarters after that was like it was joyous it was like we uh i had my secretaries come in they were cooking breakfast

for everybody, you know, the FBI was hanging out with us. The DEA guys came along for the ride. And it was just a really good, good feeling like we had just done something, you know, something significant. And so we continued with, we continued with saturated patrols. We were still making good headway with that. Property and Evidence Room was done. We had gotten the information from now from two different sources that there was a contract, there were contracts, but it looked like the first one had worked itself out after I had a conversation with a drug trafficker. The second one, we never, never heard anything about it again. Well, I, at about the same time, I went up to Chicago to a conference called the International Association and Chief Police Conference. and I had never been to this conference before,

and I was kind of like stumbling my way through things. They had a big trade show where vendors were there, you know, selling different stuff from law enforcement. And there was also, there was some training stuff available that you could, you know, go to these different training seminars. And I stumbled in on what I thought was going to be a training seminar, but it was actually, it was a group of doctors that were giving a speech about what kills officers in the line of duty.

And I'd, I'd, I stumbled into it late, but when I got in there, they were talking about statistical information. And they said that two out of three officers killed in the line of duty. They don't die from gunshot or stab wounds. They die from the subsequent blood loss. And when I had heard that, it was like one of these real significant moments in my life. It was like, how is that even possible? And then they went on to say that if you equipped an officer with a trauma kit that contains a hemistatic agent, a pressure bandage, and a tourniquet,

two out of three officers that got killed in the line of duty last year would be alive. And I was like, well, this is like every officer should be carrying these things. When I left that conference, I went back to the Virgin Islands. I said to my secretary, I said, hey, do you know any doctors that can teach trauma management to my guys? And my secretary says, I know a doctor who's an emergency room doctor. And I said, would they do it? She goes, I don't know. I'll call her.

So she calls her. and she comes in, she meets with me, and I said, can you do this? And she says, my brother's a Boston police officer. My father was a Boston cop. She goes, yeah, I'll do it. And I had met a vendor at the show that sold trauma kits. And we ordered trauma kits. And she began working on first teaching my special operations guys and canine guys how to use the kits.

And I was busy doing chief stuff. And the process was they were going to train my guys first. the special operations canine guys first and then those guys would train everybody else in the department and I had enough trauma kits to give out to everybody and not long thereafter we were working saturated patrol and we were just we were just we were bored it was like it was like a slow night and there was a street festival going on in Christianstead and we were trying to avoid that we're letting the patrol guys deal with that and it had had wound down it was pretty much done and then we get a call on the radio that there's been a stabbing in town and then more information that comes in that says multiple people stabbed and we start we we can't because the street is all blocked off we can't get directly to the scene so right and i park probably like four blocks away and basically abandon our unit we begin running to where the scene is and it's along this border walk along the waterfront and we get there and there's multiple girls that have been stabbed like

16 year old girls and uh they were still actively fighting when we got there and it is a mess like there's blood on the street there's blood splatter along the walls of the building like this this is a horrific scene and there's this one girl who um in the fight she her top had gotten torn off so she's just wearing like a skirt and a bra and she's young she's like 16 17 years old and and And when she's flailing around, I see blood coming off of her. And I grab her, I come up from behind her and I grab her behind the waist and I spin her around. I said, stop fighting. You've been stabbed.

You're hurt. And I swear to God, I've never, like, I don't think I've ever in my career seen this. I literally saw like life lead her body. And I saw her eyes turn to different color and her face lost all expression. And she just kind of like collapsed to my arms and I lowered her down to the ground. And she had a stab room just underneath. her clavicle. It was probably just a one-inch stab wound just underneath her clavicle. And looking over her body and she's covered in blood. Like her skin is covered in blood,

but I could see that that wound was probably the only wound on her body. And I start pointing pressure on the wound and a doctor or a nurse is in the crowd. And she says, I'm a nurse. Can I help? And I like, I pull her out of the crowd and said, yes. And so she comes over and I'm keeping pressure on the wound and then a couple of my officers show up and they start helping and they pull out gauze and they're putting pressure on the wound

we've got EMS coming and I got other guys arriving and the I kind of like stand up because they're dealing with the girl to kind of like assess the scene and I hear chief and I look down

and there's a female officer there and she's got tears in her eyes. And she says, I think she's dead. What do I do? And I look over the nurse and the nurse shakes her head like this, like a slow shake her head. Like she's gone. And I go, there's nothing you can do, help other people.

And that event, like, would swim in my head for weeks to come. And it, like, emphasized the importance of, like, we need to get all these guys trauma management gears. Like, everybody needs to have it. They need to get this training as quickly as possible. and and and and then um and so i put my guys into like overtime mode and i start to i start to pressure the doctor you know teach more people let's get we got to get these things out as quickly as possible and uh and that one event for weeks to come maybe wants to come maybe even to this day

sticks out as like one of these events and i'd been to plenty of homicides i'd seen lots of dead people but it was it was I don't know maybe it's because I saw that girl literally die like it affected me like it was it was I remember waking up in the morning and eating breakfast and I would sit at the the kitchen table and it would enter my mind and I probably sit there for 10 or 15 minutes and hadn't eaten anything and then go to work without ever having it eaten anything it would just for whatever reason it just it deeply impacted me and it was and it was these girls got into a fight over, if I remember correctly, it was like something that was posted on social media.

That's what they were pissed about, that they were willing to kill somebody over something posted on social media. And I thought it was just so, it was such a waste of a life. And that really, that event really pushed me to the trauma management stuff and the importance of it and training as many people as I could. and getting the kits and staying on top of it. And we brought in extra trainers from Department of Defense came in and helped out and did training.

And the doctor and I became friends. And when we would do big operations, she would ride along with just in case there was an officer that got hurt. She ended up going to a tactical training where we were repelling down roofs and she was along for the ride. She was like fully vested in it. And although that event was like obviously a very horrible thing that. impacted me, it really, it was one of those pivotal moments in my life that it would change the course, it would change the course of my life significantly. And there was starting to, with everything going on, they were starting to get like, everything that I was doing was starting to get

some momentum. And one day, Wright was in front of a judge for advisor rights, which was pretty much a daily thing because he was arresting people like crazy. And the judge afterwards says to write, hey, I want to talk to you a minute in my chambers, which is a very unorthodox request, right? And Wright goes in there and the judge says to him, listen, he goes, you are an amazing police officer. By far the best police officer I've ever seen. And he says, and your chief is doing an amazing job. But I'm very worried about you too. And the judge, told him if one of the criminals on the street doesn't get you, I'm worried about someone inside the police department that you guys are stepping on toes. They may. And she goes, I think you guys need

to be very careful. And she says, I would hate to see you go. But at the same time, I think it's best that you and the chief, you know, there's an expiration date to what you're doing. And I think you guys need to get out while you can. And Wright came and he told me that. And we completely pat. we just it went right like we it it wasn't really even in our minds that we would leave at least not in my mind i think at that point i had almost like stockholm syndrome i was like i was so vested in it and i was seeing the good things that we were doing and i was seeing the changes um but that whole expiration date thing was everything in the virgin islands like anything you did there nothing would last forever and like i gave them a state-of-the-art property and evidence for

facility, but it was only as good as the time that I was there. Because once I knew, once I stopped caring about it and I put it in the hands of other people, it was, it was going to fall apart. It would go back to what it was before I got to it. And I was, but I was unrealistic about it. I was, I had drank the Kool-Aid by that point. I was fully invested. And, and, and the, the, you. And the, But Wright was not really in the same state of mind. And he knew that he was making friends, but he was also making enemies. And he was making a difference, but it was coming at a cost. And one day, he was working the streets.

I wasn't working with them at the time. They rolled into a very notorious drug neighborhood. And there was a drug turf where these guys, open-air drug market, where these guys would sell, whatever. And we recovered quite a few guns there. We had lots of problems there. And Wright was searching the area. And there's a piece of paper nailed up on a tree and the drug turf, right in the middle of drug turf. And it's his work schedule.

And when he saw that, he was like, I'm done. And he came into my office and he tendered his resignation effective immediately. And he says, I'm out. I'm not going to do. do it. He goes, if I got to watch the criminal element and the people inside the police department, and I'm just done. And so he resigned. And I think we talked about it in the first podcast that before our source was murdered, before Diaz's father was shot, and there was an attempt on Diaz's life. Like, there was this, um, there was this, uh, almost like,

like you felt like something was building like something was going to happen but you couldn't like put your finger on it it was like is things just didn't feel right it was almost like a premonition like something bad is going to happen when wright resigned like i was like i felt the same way and i i couldn't wrap my head around it um and i know now of course what that was but at the time I couldn't wrap my head around it. And when Wright resigned, I didn't want to talk him out of it. Like, I wanted him there, obviously, because he was like the only guy that I truly trusted inside the police department. I mean, there were good guys.

But Wright was one of these guys that if I gave him assignment, I know it was getting done. And I didn't have to baby him. I didn't have to give him any explanation. If there was a way to get it done, Wright would get it done. And he was just, he was just so good at his job and such a smart street cop. It was like a huge loss. And so about not long thereafter, I got a call from, we'll call him a concerned citizen. And the current concerned citizen told me that a police officer, he woke up in the morning

and there was a drunk police officer on his porch passed out. And the police officer was talking some crazy stuff about drugs. And he wanted me to know about it and didn't know what to do. Well, that police officer was the same police officer, who we've talked about multiple times through this, that was involved in advising the drug trafficker to take a contract. out on me. Same one that was involved at the violent crime organization that

shot Diaz's father. The same one that was involved in the organization that tortured murder of this police officer. And the story was that this police officer

was out fishing one day and found, I think it was four bales of, or five bales of marijuana, and instantly saw dollar signs. So he drugged these bales of marijuana aboard his boat. He brought him back to shore, and he started spreading the word that he had marijuana for sale. And his plan was to package them the bales into one pound packages and sell them to whoever wanted them.

He brings them back to his house. He begins packaging them up, opening them up, breaking up the bales into one pound packages, and a helicopter flies over his house. Now, the helicopter had nothing to do with anything. It was just a random helicopter. But he sees the thing fly over his house and he shits his pants and thinks that DEA is about ready to hit him. So he drags the marijuana into his backyard and it's now nighttime and he starts burning it. So he's dowsing it and diesel fuel and he's burning it at the same time he uncaps a bottle to rum and he starts drinking. By morning, all the marijuana is burnt.

He said he had to go to the gas station several times to get more diesel. And he's drunk as shit and he's passed out on this guy's porch. I send DEA down there. DEA interviews him and he tells the story. Same thing he told the concerned citizen. He tells DEA. So he's drunk. DEA's like,

his statement's not worth anything right now because he's drunk. So they said, we're going to send him home. He's going to come back tomorrow. We'll try to interview him again. I said to DEA, I go, you guys had any idea about this? I said none.

It's complete, like complete news to us. as it wasn't your helicopter they're like fuck no like we have no idea who's helicopter it was it wasn't law enforcement though no one's no one's on to him but he thinks that he thought he was he was like we're getting ready to hit him and uh he they said he's also like super paranoid because he's told like every drug dealer on the island he's got weed is for sale and people are shown up at his house left and right not believing that he doesn't have it anymore and so and he's also worried about like whoever's load that was coming and whacking him because he spread the word that he found it. So he's got like multiple

problems and a lot of it is paranoia at this point. And so they send him home following morning. He comes in sober and tells the same story to him. Now we had knew that he had connections to that same group that was responsible for the police officer's murder. And I tell him, I said, look, if he, you know, we've got this case, but he can make the case even better. Like we he'd make a good witness if he comes forward. So they said, we're going to, we're going to interview him about that too. So they lock in the statement from him about what he did with the marijuana with no intentions of prosecuting, right? There's no evidence at this point.

And then the DEA agent who's doing the interview used to be a NYPD homicide detective. So he's the right guy, right? So he takes a picture of the police officer who's been murdered and he sets it down in front of him. And he goes, tell me about this here. The guy starts freaking out. He's like, you're going to get me killed. I can't talk about that. I'm not talking about that.

He's crying. He's a mess. He's like an emotional. He's like just emotional and crazy. And they try to push him a little more. He won't give. So they decide we're going to send him. Send him home.

We'll bring him back over the, on Monday. It's like a Friday at this point. We'll bring him back on Monday and we'll try again. Long story short. He doesn't make it back on the Monday. And the only way I can say this is he is no longer a police officer. He is no longer in the Virgin Islands. And that's really all I can say about that.

But he is out of the picture now. The concern with him providing information to drug traffickers has been alleviated. It's no longer there. So that happens. and with right now gone, I start to concentrate and try to get things back in focus with saturated patrol. And we still had a good group of guys there. And what I was doing is I was trying to get them like focused in on specific things. We had we had done a really good job of going after like street level stuff.

But we were still getting we were still getting lots of robberies and serious. crimes like home invasions there were um there were still lots of work for them to do and but they were also being tasked with lots of like search warrants their the regular work canine work all that sort of stuff and we kind of lose lose track of it um and we hadn't done saturated patrol for a little bit for maybe maybe a few weeks and i start reading reports what we which we called the unusual occurrence reports, like anything serious that happened during the course of the next, the 24-hour period, the previous 24-hour period, when I get in my office, I would read those reports and see what happened. And what I was seeing was a string of armed robberies. And I was like,

I got to get saturated patrol out. Because if they were out there on the streets and they were working like neighborhoods and stuff like that, the crime would drop. Like, people didn't want to go out and start shit because they knew their chances getting caught by these very aggressive. officers that were out actively targeting, you know, known drug areas or known, you know, like anything, anything they would go after. Guys just didn't want to go out. And the word would spread very quickly on the island, even to the point where people would call the radio station and say, hey, those boys, you know, from VIPD are out, you know,

kicking indoors again or, you know, hitting the turfs again. And the island would dry up very quickly. So when I was seeing these armed, these armed robberies, I was like, all right, this is an opportunity, like, we got to get this under control. The armed robberies were always the same. They would go in, usually fire some shots into the air, like into a restaurant or a bar. They'd rob all the patrons. They'd rob the bar and restaurant. And then sometimes they would carjack a vehicle and they would leave. They were armed with AK-47s and some handguns as well. And then I think there was about six or seven of those that I'd scene usually occurring on Fridays or Saturdays. And I was in my office and the plan was already set

that we were going to go out on a Friday. And the, uh, my guys had been executing search warrants that morning and I got a call from the sergeant and he said, hey, you know, my guys are tired. Like we've been, we've been out since early morning. Do you really need us out on saturated patrol tonight? And I said, no, I don't want your guys out tired. him home, we'll go out tomorrow night and said, now that was on a Friday. And I had intended on going out with him on Friday. And so I said, I'll come out with you on Saturday as well. So I said, I told the serge, send your guys home, let him get some rest. We'll be out on Saturday. When I hung up the phone, the doctor who had who had taught trauma management had just walked

into my office. And she just was in the area and kind of wanted to get me up to speed on the training that had been going on for trauma management. And at that point, there was all but maybe 20 kits, trauma kits that had been handed out out of the over 200 that I had purchased. And I hadn't yet to attend the training. I had been busy with chief stuff and everything else going on. I hadn't attended the training. And so she comes into my office and kind of brief me on where things are.

And she asked, how come you going to attend the training? And I said, I've just been busy with chief shit here, you know? I got I'm like running the apartment here and she says well you should start carrying one and and and she went through basically all the elements of the kit and gave me this crash course on trauma management and I was like all right thank you and as um and the other thing that she wanted to talk about is there was an officer by the name of cassandra disermo and the sermon was like a 23 year old mom had been working in special operations as a volunteer. She was assigned to the patrol division,

but she would just come do overtime and saturated patrol because she wanted to work with serious people. You know, she wanted to work like when, she wanted to learn the street level enforcement stuff. And it was a good opportunity for her to learn. And she had expressed interest in learning more about trauma management. So she had approached the doctor. and the doctor had worked out something where she could come into the ER and learn trauma management,

kind of like shadow her in the ER. And so we talked about that a bit. And then it was probably 6 o'clock at night, and I walked the doctor down to her car, and I got my car, and I drove home. And the following that night, I had this dream that I had been shot and that I was bleeding out. And I woke up from that nightmare. And it was like a typical cop dream where, and this is very common with law enforcement, that you get this dream that you have a gun, but your trigger will not pull or there's something wrong with the gun. It's malfunctions.

It was one of these. I had already been shot in the dream. And I was trying to shoot back at the suspects and my gun wouldn't function. And so I woke up from that dream and didn't really think much about it because, those were not uncommon dreams. And then that night, I went out and I met the team and we briefed. And the sergeant had already made a schedule knowing that I was going to be there. He had scheduled me with an officer by the name of Jones. And Jones had experience outside of VIPD.

I believe he was a police officer in, was it Georgia or maybe it was Florida prior to joining a VIPD. but he grew up in St. Croix and had lived in Virgin Islands most of his life. And Jones was a good experienced guy. But I had said to the sergeant, I said, hey, I was talking to the doctor about Cassandra DeSermo and we think we can get her to work, you know, shadow the doctor. Why don't you put her with me so I can talk to her about this? It was like, the sergeant had already done the schedule, but he wasn't going to argue with me because I was the chief. And so he sets the scheduled paper down on the hood of my car and he starts

reworking it, trying to figure out, all right, if I move this guy here, this guy, and he's basically working it. And I said, you know what, Sarge? Oh, before this, he says, DeSermo, you're with Howl, throw your shit in his car, and DeSermo did. And as he's trying to figure it out, I just, I could see he was struggling with it. Like, you wanted, he wanted, like, you paired people up with appropriate other people. Like you didn't want to put someone that had less experience with someone. You wanted to put someone with less experience with someone that had more experience. And this was throwing off the whole schedule they already had done. And so I said, you know what, Sarge, fuck it. Just leave it the way it was. It's fine. And he's like, he was like relieved.

He's like, all right, discern won't get your shit out of the Howells car. Jones, you're with Howell. So we brief and I said, guys, we got to get hold of these robberies. I said, if we get a robbery tonight robbery in progress call i don't care what you're doing we're dropping everything we're heading we're heading to that everybody's like all right we're on board so we go out we start uh we start working um a high drug neighborhood the same one that right schedule was posted and it's it is out of control like there's there's there's probably two dozen people in there and we we had we had one of the canines that hit on a on a car there and the the crowd there is is hot And to tell you, hostile, it is there's like this wooded area that's kind of behind the drug turf, and it's pitch black, right? And as we were pulling our vehicles out, they start throwing bricks at our vehicles. And we have to get out, start chasing people through the bushes and try to get in custody. And like I said, we had seized that one vehicle because the dog had hit on it. And that was being transported up to headquarters where we're going to do an inventory search of it. And I'm walking.

in the midst of all this shit and I'm like serge this is out of control I said it I haven't seen this bad this bad for years and I go you we need to start hitting saturated patrol more often because it had been about a month since Wright had left that we hadn't really done saturated patrol we had been tied up with search warrants and other things but they were they didn't do a lot of saturated patrol and I also think the the part of it was that right was gone now and um right was like 30 days without right was a pretty significant period of time where people would start to get cocky and I think there was a certain element of that as well and the serge agrees yeah we got to hit this harder well we we we cleared that scene we had a vehicle that was um that was impounded because the dog alerted on it and just out of curiosity um i told jones i said let's head up to police headquarters and see what the inventory search recovers We go up there, crack open the car. I don't want to say we got a gun out of that car. We got drugs as well.

And after our curiosity had been satisfied, we get back in our vehicle. And it was a Chiefs vehicle that myself and Jones were in. I was driving. We had from the old police headquarters, the abandoned police headquarters, and we start making our way toward the center of the island, kind of figuring out where our group is and what we're hitting next. And we get almost to the center of the island, and a call comes in 8-6-1 in progress, robbery in progress.

And they said shots have been fired. And it appeared from the radio call alone. It was at a bar that was on the north side of the island, and it sounded like it was going to be the same group of individuals. that had been hitting restaurants in the weeks prior. So we started heading up. In order to get to this, we had a crossover of a mountain. It was a mountain in between us and where that bar was.

The bar restaurant was right along the shoreline. And it was surrounded by some residents, residential areas, but not a lot. And there wasn't a lot of, normally there wouldn't be a lot of vehicle traffic in that area. and there was obviously a lot of pressure to get to that area before they got out. And if they were to be able to make it to the center of the island, they would have blended in with traffic, and chances are we wouldn't be able to apprehend them. And so I took a path that led us up this winding mountainous road.

And then once we got to the crest of the mountain, we'd start heading back down into the valley and then along the shoreline, and we'd be fairly close. And then Jones was working the radio, and he was calling in, you know, I was giving him instructions of where to send the other teams in from. There's really only two places that we had to choke off, the road that I was heading on, and then one on the road. If we could choke off those two roads,

then chances are they wouldn't get back to the center of the island, and we stood a fighting chance. This was the first robbery that they had done that was outside of the center of the island. And by this time, I had read a bunch of reports on the group, or not on the group, but the incidents that I believe were all linked together. And the reason I believe they were linked was because there was common shell casings that were recovered on the scenes. And ballistic comparison, they were able to match shell casings from one scene to another. And like I said, I believe they were involved in like seven robberies. There was one homicide that was involved with the same weapons.

and then there was one a kidnapping. And so this is a pretty bad group. And they had been, like I said, they had been hitting places for the last few weeks. And that that was really our underlying goal for the night. That if these guys, the instruction I gave is if these guys hit a place, we're dropping everything and this is what we're going to. So we're speeding up this road and the giving idea of how the road is. It's like a winding mountainous road.

It's heavily canopied. and almost like tropical vegetation, almost like rainforest in certain parts of it. And we get all the way to almost the crest of the road or the top of the road where we're going to start now working our way down the mountain to the other side, and this vehicle comes flying past us in the opposite direction. And about the same time, Radio Dispatch tells us that they've carjacked a vehicle and they fled the scene. And I turn to Jones, I said no one drives their own car like that. So Joan starts giving instructions the 911 operator that we're going to pursue a vehicle that's heading back down to the south side of the mountain heading toward the center of the island.

Well, the road is pretty narrow and where the car passes is right on this kind of hairpin turn. And so I had to pull up a little bit more until I could pull into a driveway and then turn around, I start heading back down. When we get to that hairpin turn, they have two choices. You can either turn right and head down the mountain or you could turn left. And there's a pretty long stretch of roadway that they could have head down that way. And they could still get back to the center of the island through that, through that. But I'd turn around fast enough that, and I didn't see any tail lights down that stretch. So I was pretty confident they were going down toward the south side, toward the south side of the island.

and but did not see any tail lights because the road is so winding that you just you know they would have made it around another corner by this point so I come flying around the corner continue to pursue and there's no tail lights in sight even when we get to like an open open stretch still don't see any taillights and I'm like these guys are really flying now in the islands we drive on the opposite side of the road so we're driving on the left hand side of the road and on the right side of me there's there's the hillside for the mountain on the left side there's a ravine and as we continue to pursue i see tail lights glowing in the ravine and i realize they've lost control of their vehicle so i slam on the brakes and i said jones they lost it they're in the ravine and jones leans forward in the seat and he

says where and right at the same that's that time my vehicle comes to a complete stop and i reach for the gear lever to throw it in reverse and i see a flash outside my driver my driver's door and And what we didn't know, as soon as they got out, as soon as they crashed in the ravine, two guys high-tailed it up to the edge of the roadway. And where I stopped was the absolute worst place imaginable because they were lying on the edge of the roadway, feet toward the ravine. And they began firing rounds from that AK-47 into my door. And so the first round comes through the door.

And I see the flash. First round comes to the door. it hits my left forearm and my left forearm explodes. And then that round continues on and strikes Jones in the face just underneath his eye. And then a second round comes and it hits me in the back. And it goes through my door, through my seat, hits me in the back. It continues on. And Jones had like thrown himself back in the seat.

And that one hits him in the jaw. And then an additional five other rounds. rounds come through my door. And the only way I can explain this is it's like everything I'm going to say for the next few minutes happens within a second or two. But there's so much happening at the same time. It's like you're, it's hard to explain other than giving that information now. So there's five of the rounds that start coming through my door. And then they're the second individual. begins firing a Glock as well at us. And when Jones is hit in the face,

he begins to, and when I was hitting the arm, there's like, there's blood, there's tissue, there's pieces of tendon in my arm, there's muscle in my arm, it all basically blows up in my face. And I become blinded. I can't see anything. And at the same time, Jones has hit,

he begins to spray blood. And I can feel that, that warm blood spray across my face and I can taste it in my mouth. And I immediately jam on the gas and the vehicle is unresponsive. So in that initial, those initial rounds of fire, it had taken out a wiring harness in the vehicle and the engine is dead. And I can't see anything and my arm, I know my arm is like very seriously hurt. and I know that I've been shot in the back, but I don't know if my legs are working or not,

other than the fact that I can move my feet enough to hit the gas pedal. I reach up to the, my hand is on the lever, and I feel my way into neutral and take my foot off of the break, and I begin to coast down the hill. Jones, when the first rounds of fire hit him,

he still has the microphone up to his mouth because he's about ready to radio, that we spotted a vehicle in the ravine. And then when he's hit, he screams into the microphone, we're hit, we're hit, we're hit. And the only thing that we know now that was transmitted was the first we're hit. And then everything after that doesn't come through because the microphone fills with blood and it's left inoperable.

And I can feel like blood on my face. I can feel like blood dripping down my back from the gunshot one in my back. My clothes are becoming saturated and my vest is becoming saturated in blood. And my arm is, is like it's, it's, it's, you can tell it's an open wound, although I can't see anything, number one, because it's dark and also because I've got tissue and blood in my face and my eyes. This, the taste of like salty blood in my mouth, I can still taste it to this, to this day.

And the, uh, um, I start to get the car into neutral. When I get the car into neutral, I can hear, to this day, I don't have any memory of the sound of gunfire. I remember seeing those initial flashes from the AK-47. And I can hear, I still to this day can hear the sound of bullets as they pass through the door panel of the car, where they first go through the metal and then through the plastic. I can feel heat as bullets are passing past my face. I can feel like the almost like shock of as they're punching through the door, I can feel that almost like a drum, you know, like that, I don't know if the word's right,

but like that kind of initial shock of them punching through the door. And I have distinct memory of them passing through those layers of the door. All this happens within a couple of seconds. We've then began to coast down the roadway. And I can't see anything. but every time I can feel the car start to come off the roadway, I would just pull it back on with my good arm. And we get to this, we get to the next hairpin turn. And with the one arm and the vehicle not running, I can't turn the wheel anymore.

And I believe we crash into a guard railing there or maybe we came to a stop right before it. I'm not sure. And Jones is screaming. He's like, he's been screaming since the first guy. gunfire erupts and he comes running over to my side and he says, let me drive. And I said, it's done. The engine's done. And he, uh, I looked at his face and he's pouring and blood out of his face, like literally like dripping off his chin. He is just pouring blood off his face. And I look at my, my arm for the first time after I clear, I get my eyes cleared. I wipe it

with my sleeve. And, um, we are stopped underneath the only street light that is in probably a three or four-mile stretch of roadway. It's the only street light. We're directly underneath it. And I see my arm and I was like, it's going to be amputated is what the thought was. And when the initial gunfire had started, there's like, and it was not a second. It wasn't even half a second. It was just this micro second where I was like, I'm dead. I just fucking died. And I was like, I thought about my son. And, you know, I thought he's home asleep right now. and he's not even going to, he's not going to see his dad again. And then, but it was like this, this flash.

It was like very quick. And then I'm back in the moment. And I'm like, and when I got down in that, under that street light, I was a real. I was like, all right, I'm still here. And I, my door is open because Jones had opened it. And I stepped out of the car not knowing if my legs would work. And then when I felt the ground under my feet, I was like, all right, this is a good sign.

Like I haven't been paralyzed. But I had a bigger problem. And that was the arm, you know, because the arm, I am just pouring blood out of this arm. And I look at, I look at my arm and there's, there's, it's an open wound where the bullet had had passed just above the bone, blowing the arm out above it. there's a big chunk of like recoiled muscle in there and you could see recoiled tendons in there as well and blood is just pouring out of it and I heard the doctor's voice from the day before when she taught me trauma management and I realized that I'm going to have to sacrifice the limb in order to save my life which I was perfectly fine with I was like if that's what's going to take you know

to wake up tomorrow morning then fuck the fuck the arm and so i grabbed that trauma kit that i started carrying just the day before and i tore it open with my teeth and i got a tourniquet out and i slipped it over my arm and uh got it you know six inches above the wound like i had been taught the day before and began tighten it down and realized i couldn't i couldn't get it to tighten down and jones had come over i yelled at jones he came over he he got the initial strap tightened and then I began twisting the, twisting the, the final part to get it tightened down. And I knew that I had, I gotten where I need to be because the, like, the blood went from pouring to just dripping. And Jones grabbed a patrol rifle out of the car.

I heard him lock around into battery. And we're now probably not more than 100 feet away from where we had been shot on this roadway. We're dead in the road. There's no, there's no real traffic. on that road to speak of. There's not a ton of traffic that comes through that anyways. And I, and I, and, and, and, and, but then all of a sudden I heard Jones say heads up and I looked up and I see light from the suspect's direction coming toward us.

And, um, all of a vehicle appears. And I, Jones spots the vehicle just from where he was in the roadway before I am and realizes this is not our suspects. And then when they came up, in a light i could see him too and i was like nope it's tourist it was like they were in a rental vehicle there's elderly man elderly woman and jones yells to him we're police officers we've been shot we need help and the guy accelerates and just blows past both of us and heads down the hill he wanted nothing to do with any of that and i mean to in his defense we we looked really bad i mean

we're we're covered the head to toe and blood we we look we're in bad shape and uh And then the scene kind of goes, goes quiet again. And I realize that we are backlit. We've got the street light in back of us. The suspects are going to see us long before we see them. And I also realize that no one knows we've been shot yet. Like I don't know, Jones had yelled we were hit, but I didn't hear any radio traffic after that. So I don't even know if they've heard that transmission.

And quite frankly, I didn't even know if, Jones had transmitted it. I do now, but so I go and grab that same microphone that Jones had been transmitting from. Actually, I grab a handheld radio that he had transmitted from, and it was on the seat, on the passenger side of the seat, and I pick it up, and I go to raise it up, and it slips right out of my hand because it's so saturated in blood, and I realize that is no longer any good. So there's a base station on the vehicle we're driving and it's still lit up. So I assume it's still working.

And I transmit control. I'm hit. My partner's hit. And I'm bleeding the fuck out. And I tell them we're up the stretch and of, and I give them the location that we are. And then when I let go of the microphone, the radio just explodes with life. Everybody, you know, people are saying, I'm on the way. You know, I'm traveling from here.

I'm traveling from there. And I was like, that's done. I just dropped the mic at that point. and realized that I don't need to do anything else with that. We got back up coming. And I heard, I heard control say that they had an ambulance in route. And so I was like, all right, that's, that's no longer what we need to concern ourselves with. And then I go back to the thought about the street light that were, we're blacked out.

Or we're lit up. And so I turned to Jones and I said, Jones, we're going to, we're going to shoot out that street light. And then we're going to lay down fire toward the suspect's direction because I'm done getting shot here tonight. And Jones says, all right. And then right then we hear a noise from behind us. And I turn around and I see like on the like there's another hairpin turn, probably 50, 75 feet down the roadway. And on that hairpin turn along the trees, I start to see blue flashing lights. And I realize that's our backup is on the way. And I said, Jones, we're out of here. Let's go. and Jones pulls back from the roadway where he is,

and we start working back toward our unit. And then all of a sudden, a vehicle pulls up with Jason Veroce in it. He was one of my canine guys, solid guy. And Jason runs up to me, and at the same time, a patrol unit pulls up, and a patrol officer starts running toward me. And I'm holding my arm, and Jason looks at it, and his eyes get as big as saucers. And it was Jason and Cassandra de Serbo in that vehicle.

So that 23-year-old single mother, the last minute, was pulled out of my vehicle, would have been sitting where Jones was. And God only knows how it ended. But at that last minute decision, we pulled her out and put Jones in it. And I had a more experienced guy in there with me. and the patrol officer looks at me and he pulls out his firearm and he starts to run up the roadway and I grab him by the back of his vest and I pull him back I said do not go up there without swatter you'll die here tonight and he said okay chief and then at the same time another unit

arrived one of our one of our guys from special operations and Viveros tells me jump in with him he'll take you down to it he'll take you down the hill so jones and i get in that vehicle i'm in the passenger seat jonas seated behind the driver and he's driving like a madman he's like and you know we're going on this one need road with these hairpin turns and uh he's like way too fast and i said to him i said hey i just survive getting shot do not fucking kill me on the way to an ambulance now and he goes no chief i got you i got you and jones um kept saying i think i'm gonna i think i'm want to pass out. And I said, don't let yourself pass out. And he started to throw up and he was throwing up blood. And so you had taken one of the jaw, one underneath the eye. And those were both

two, two, three rounds. I had taken one of my left forearm, ones in my lower back, just to right of my spine. And the one that hit me in the lower back had passed through my, through my body, exited out and continued on and had struck Jones. And then those five of their rounds, they just, I don't know where the hell they went, but they didn't hit us. They made it through the door. They made it into the cabin of the vehicle, but they didn't, they did not hit us. And so we're speeding down the roadway, and Jones kept saying, I think I'm going to pass out. I kept telling them, don't let yourself pass out.

And then the next thing I know, I must have passed out because I felt like the shaking on my shoulder. And I was hearing someone yelling, chief, chief. and I opened my eyes and there was, I'm not even sure to this day who it was. I think it was one of my SWAT guys. And I looked up and I saw an ambulance in front of me and Jones was being loaded onto the ambulance. He was walking on. And they said, can you walk? And I didn't respond right away.

It was like, and then he said, can you walk? And I said, yeah, I can walk. And I got out. And I walked to the ambulance and got on and sat down. And the EMS personnel that was there looked at my heart. arm and then saw the tourniquet and he said we'll just leave that the way it is and then jones says i'm going to throw up again and they gave him something and he began just throwing up just pure blood just pure blood and uh they rushed us to the hospital and on the way i'm not sure who did it but i was told multiple people had texts this

doctor who had who had taught me trauma management and said that two officers have been shot and but didn't tell her who And at the time, she was out to dinner with her husband and said, I need to make a phone call. So she calls to the hospital, the ER, and said, I need to talk to the chief of police. And they said, you can't talk to him. And she said, look, I know two of his police officers have been shot. And if two of his officers have been shot, he's going to be there. So you find him and put him on the phone with me. And the nurse that she was talking to said, no, you don't understand.

He's one of the two officers. And she said, wait, Chief Howells been shot? And they said, yes. And she says, I'm on the way. And so they get us into the hospital and start cutting off our clothes. And a vascular surgeon had come in. And they start prepping us for surgery. And Jones and I are in the same room with a curtain in between us.

And we're talking back and forth to each other. and and then I was like at one point I was like we need to get back out there like I don't I don't trust anybody to do this without us you know we need to get back out there and Jones is like that ain't happening chief and and the they said they came in they said we're going to we're going to prep you for surgery and the one one of the doctors had said I said I want you to try to move your hand for me and I said it doesn't work anymore I didn't I had I had I had to no control of my digits, had no control of my wrist. And they said, it looks like you've lost everything above the bone. And I said, okay. And I said, you're going to amputate it? And they said, we're going to try not to, but I don't know right now. And I said, okay. And, and then a while later, things kind of calmed down. I guess they were prepping for surgery or whatever. And I closed my eyes. And when I opened them, while my eyes were closed, I felt like a warm hand in my forehead. and it was a doctor she'd come in and she's she's all dressed like she's out to dinner with her

husband or whatever you know and she's like i'm going to help anyway i can even though she wasn't a surgeon you know i was like well that's a hell of a nice thing she did you know and so uh so then um they uh they bring me into surgery and they knock me out and when i wake up um the first thing i do is I reached with my good hand over to my other hand to see if I still feel an arm there. And I felt like gauze. And I was like, all right, they saved the arm, obviously, because I wouldn't, you know, I could feel, I could feel that I had something there. And, and then the surgeon came in and he says, as I suspected, you lost everything above the bone.

They said, if that round had been just even a couple of millimeters lower, it would have taken the whole arm with it. He says, I don't know what you got hit with, but it was, it was something. and serious. And I said, what is the future for the arm? And he says, he says, you're going to need to find someone that is an expert in tendon and muscle transfer surgeries. And you're going to have a very long road ahead of you, Chris. And I was like, all right, you know, at least I'm here, you know. And then Jones had a fracture jaw and then he had a round that had a 223 round that had, or 7.62 round, the same two rounds that hit me hit him, which helped.

him out because it slowed it down a bit. And then it had lodged up against a major artery like in his head. And they said that if it even nicked that artery, he had a blood out, there would have been no saving him. He never would have made it off the scene. And so Jones and I spent a few days in the hospital and they got us ambulatory and the same doctor friend of mine, she had found me a tendon muscle transfer surgery that was close to where my parents were. and they said he specializes in everything below the elbow which is like what i needed so they got it they got me amulatory they moved me up stateside and then became the process of like getting things working again so they did they did i think total i had 14 surgeries the first one was the

the first of them were like debriefment surgeries where they were just cutting out material that was dead material they had in in the virgin islands they had sewed up anything good, bad, and indifferent in my arm. And they were a bit mortified when they saw it when I got stateside. Like, holy shit, how long has it been since this happened? And they immediately put me into like an emergency surgery the day I walked into the hospital and began that process because they were worried about me turning septic and dying. And then they eventually they got the wound healthy enough where they could do ten and

a muscle transfer surgery. And I want to say that was a 12-hour surgery. and then I went through months of rehab where I had to learn how to use the hand again and the wrist. So the limitations of it now are pretty well defined. Like if I move fingers in this hand, it's all or nothing. I can't move individual digits. And if I close the hand, I can no longer move the wrist. Even when it's open, there's pretty limited control of it.

and so I went through all the surgeries and I went through the rehab and then the process of learning to use it went long before long after rehab and there was like a there was like a push to by me to want to get back to the Virgin Islands because I knew the clock was ticking like they were going to replace me and and they're going to undo everything that I had done but the writing was on the wall pretty early that there was going to be no return to VIPD. And the, I like, after the shooting and the months that followed, I just hemorrhaged weight. I was like, I lost just a ton of weight. And I started to, I started to, when I was still in the hospital, I decided that I wanted

to do a triathlon. And the Virgin Islands host Iron Man St. Croix. every year and have been going on for years and the year before Lance Armstrong had come down and that was right before his world fell apart on him and I because I was chief of police at the time I met with Lance and his people and you know I don't I don't know what happened you know while he was doping and stuff like that but he was a hell of a nice guy to me and you know I I learned about his when he did the open interview and all that stuff happened while I was in the hospital or shortly thereafter and I was like,

ah, that's a real shit. That sucks because I, you know, I wouldn't say he was a hero of mine, but I, I, you know, to beat cancer and then seven time tour to France winter,

I thought he's a pretty solid guy and I still do to this day, you know? I mean, but I was, I had friends that had done triathlons and the Virgin Islands. And when I went, when I got healthy enough, I went back and I watched one triathlon.

They did a lots of smaller ones during the course of the year. There's the Virgin Islands triathlon. Federation there that I became friendly with the people that ran that. And I had, because I worked with them on the permitting for, as I was, when I was chief, I worked on the permitting for them for the Ironman triathlon. I knew a lot of those people. And I went in and I said, hey, you know, this is, this is not long. This is probably a month and a half after I got shot. I said, I want to do Iron Man this year. And the reactions, were like, they were mixed. Like some people said, you need to set more realistic goals. You know,

this is a 70-mile race. And, you know, even if you would basically have, I think it was six and a half months to train for it, that said even if you hadn't been shot, this would be like a big, a big ask of your body to get in that sort of conditioning for it. But having been shot and you still don't have function in your arm, you know, or very limited function in your arm and strength and your body has just been decimated by weight loss and everything else, probably not realistic. And then I had a friend of mine who, I'll say his name, Mike,

we worked together back when I worked for Caribbean Sea Ventures back when I was just out of high school. And he owned a boat there and was still there and doing charters, but he had done Iron Man and he had done the triathlons for a number of years. years and he was uh he also he also did a race called the st croix 50 which is a 50 mile running race and uh i had said to him you know i'm thinking about doing that and he was really my motivation he's like fuck yeah you can do it absolutely you can do it and you know i would uh so one day i started

i started on a treadmill and i started walking and a lot of it was honestly had i not been shot i don't think I would have ever gotten in that sort of condition, uh, conditioning, but I was like, I was pissed off. I was really mad about number one. I had not just that I had been shot, but how things were dealt with afterwards. I was not happy about it. And within the police department. And, um, I started walking on tread on treadmills and then walking became running. And then I got back in a pool because I had done some swimming races, open ocean races prior to the shooting. And I, so I was, I was a good swimmer. But then the first time I swam after the shooting, I was like, I'll never swim again. It was like really defeating. It was like nothing felt right. Everything was

like there's no rhythm to it anymore. Like I couldn't, I couldn't control my wrist like I normally would or my hand. It was even the arm itself, just nothing felt right. And to describe the injury, It was after tenet of muscle transfer surgery, it was like reprogramming my arm. Like movements that you just normally take for granted with your hand, you have to learn everything all over again. And even when you learn it to the best of your ability, it's still not right. And I got out of the pool the first time after having swam, and it was like really defeating. And I was like, there's no way I'm going to be able to do this. And then I went home and I was like feeling defeated.

And like an hour later, I was like, no, I've got to figure this out. and I went back to the pool and I swam again and it was maybe a little bit better. And I said, I'm just going to keep doing it and doing it and do it until it becomes natural. There's a new normal. And then slowly runs got longer. I started on the bike, the Triathlon Federation. I bought a bike and they changed my braking and shifting levers. So I was now breaking and shifting with my strong hand instead of my weak hand.

and my first ride was seven miles. For the triathlon, I have to do 56. And I started, I entered my first triathlon, just a short race one. And it was really short. And I crossed the finish line and threw up all over my shoes. And there were a lot of training days that I threw up afterwards. But I just kept with it. And then the day came of Iron Man St. Croix.

And I was like, I remember calling the public information officer for VIPD. at like I was early in the morning probably like 4.30 in the morning and I didn't really talk to anybody over there very much at all after the shooting and she was accustomed to morning phone calls from me like if I'd call her from a scene of a homicide and tell her hey I'm not seeing a homicide and I need to brief you on this so I called her and I said hey I just want to let you know I'm I'm doing Iron Man St. Croix this morning and she's like okay and then I said that's all I wanted and I hung up the phone. And I went there and I did the race and I got made it to the finish line.

And it wasn't pretty, but I got there. I did the 70 mile race. And then the following year, I returned and I did it again. And I took a full hour off my first first year. That's awesome. So and then and so that's kind of the story. What happened to the shooters? Did you ever follow up?

So they were. So they were. apprehended by my special operations guys. I won't get into who they were connected to or who they were family to. One of the low-lying fruit and the thing went to a trial and he was convicted. But the actual guys that shot us were arrested and then the cases were later dismissed on them and they walked. That sucks. Yeah, it does.

Do you still think about how it ended? Yeah. I'm sure you still think about the shooting, but how, you know, it's kind of like a full circle moment because you went in to go after the corruption and in the end, the corruption won in that scenario. Right. And I mean, I've, for a number of years afterwards, I thought about it all the time. And it was frustrating because I still had informants providing me information.

and they were providing me good leads on the shooting. And like one of them said to me, they said it wasn't a hit that got you. That's not the reason you got, you got shot that night. But there was an active hit on you and these guys were doing robberies. And it's entirely plausible that they said, here's an opportunity we take out the chief. and we fill the contract for the hit too. They couldn't confirm that, but that was their suspicion, because there was an active hit on me,

and they saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. And then I know that that following morning, when VIPD was doing what they were doing, there was information received that the primary guy who had shot us was bragging on a drug turf that he had just shot the Jamaican and Howell, because they hadn't known that that Wright had resigned yet. And because we worked together so often, they just assumed that it was right in the car with me when it wasn't.

It was Jones. And Jones is to kind of recap with Jones. He ended up being flown up to believe it was John Hopkins. I could be wrong about that. And they did surgery on him, but he fared much better than I did. And the bullet that was lodged up against the artery, they said, we will never touch that.

So that is just, that is off limits. If we try to get that, then we risk, you know, nicking that artery. And then it would be game over. Even on an operating table, we wouldn't be able to stop you from dying. So bleeding out. But he fared much better than I did. But, yeah, it is, it was the source of frustration for a very long time. And I felt like,

I felt like I've seen the Virgin Islands Police Department and the prosecutor's office rally when it comes to cases involving police officers. I've seen that before. But there wasn't in this case. The case basically sat almost dormant. And there were good leads that could have been followed up on that weren't followed up on. And there's a lot of frustration that comes from that. And I mean, I don't know where the guys are that shot us.

For a while, I kind of kept track of that. I don't anymore. I'm sure, like all career criminals and guys that are very violent, and they've had violent lives. They usually, you know, life catches up to them. They usually die of violent death as well. And if someone were to tell me that's what happened to them. I wouldn't be at all surprised.

but I'm probably more bitter with the way my own department handled it than I am anything else. Did you ever reconnect with Wright? Oh yeah, Wright and I talk all the time. Yeah, yeah. Was he there for you when after the shooting? He didn't fly up. Diaz flew up. But he and I spoke all the time.

And we still do to this day. He went on and became a police chief in Florida. and he recently retired from that. And he's living in between Florida and Jamaica. Now he has a house in Jamaica. Do you ever think about what would have happened if you didn't take the job and maybe you picked up law enforcement somewhere else?

Well, I had an opportunity to do that. Long before the shooting, I could have gone and worked as a special agent for Naval Criminal Investigative Service. And there's part of me that thinks about that now and again. But I've gotten to the point of my life. I don't think about those things anymore. I do feel like, although the shooting was a horrible event,

it was, and the recovery from it was absolutely miserable. It's brought me to where I am now, and I'm pretty happy. Do you feel at peace now? Yeah, yeah, I do, for sure. I still, and as far as the Virgin Islands goes, I still love that place, but after the cases were dismissed, against the people that shot us, that was like, that was an endgame for me. I had no intentions of going back there.

And there's part of me that wants to. I mean, I know people that would send me a plane ticket right now if I wanted to go. And I still love the Virgin Islands, but I also know that it's not my place anymore. Do you think you are one of like the most active chiefs in any police department? I don't know about any police department, but certainly there. I mean, because you don't really hear about chiefs though on the road, I mean, the U.S., you know. No, but, you know, the difference, there were days when we were doing saturated patrol, if I sent the guys out on their own, they may get one or two arrest. If I go out and work with them, there were days that we walked away with 15 arrests and a bunch of guns that night.

That's crazy. And they were highly motivated when I was out working with them. And that's really what I did best. Like, I was never a guy to be behind a desk. And that was part of the reason I resisted the idea of becoming a chief in the, and the, and the, and the, and the, first place. I liked working in the street. I liked the surveillance in DEA. I like doing the undercover shit. I like working in informants. And I was, I was probably myself as a, as a much better investigator than I was a chief. But when I was put in that position, I'm also not one of those guys that

is going to sit back and just let the status quo go. I saw things that I could fix. And I, I couldn't leave him. I couldn't just let it go. And I, I would, to this day, if you you were to throw me in a chief position, I would do the same thing. I wouldn't do a goddamn thing differently. I'd be out there on the street with my guys kicking indoors, throwing people on the ground, going after the worst of the worst. That is what I do best. So I have no regret about that. Well, Chris, I appreciate you coming back for a part two. This was awesome. Three and a half hours. Minus our bathroom breaks. But this was really good and entertaining. And I'm sure the audience is going to love it. Yeah. I appreciate you having me back. I think it's a, I think it's a story.

that needs to be told. And we'll have your contact info in the description. Yeah, I appreciate that. And I do want to say, you know, there is, despite of all these problems that I've described with VIPD, there is still inside the Virgin Islands Police Department and there's still those that have been through it and worked and retired that are wonderful, amazing people, some of the best. And unfortunately, the problems in there, the corruption and other things, it is very much

much the minority. It's not the majority. And I do wish the best for them. And I enjoyed working with them. And like I said, I