we pay $30, $40 as we re quacking out the young door, this young black guy comes up behind me and yells. i believe he s referring to me. and i, you know, my heart starts racing. i turn around. he says, sir, i need you to come back inside. i need to search you. turns out his boss is a guy named bill hewitt, i think. so he s calling his bass to back him up. she saw me and he didn t see me put it back on his shelf. i ain t going back in the store. no [ bleep ] way. this guy bill hewitt and the black kid, they jump on me and we re rolling in the gutter. and before i know it, i have one handcuff on my left wrist. patricia looks up. i figured you know, she s going to lay low. there is nothing she can do. we re busted. you wouldn t accept an incomplete job
their chest like this. bandoliers of ammo, obviously. and a radio transmission comes out for the team to deploy tear gas. be advised, we re deploying gas now. one round goes into the side lapd did notire rs we fired the tear gas round. that was to cause them to surrender. then the gunfire erupted. [ sound of gunfire ] it was amazing. it basically scared the hell out of me and i dropped to the ground. i mean, i tried to dig a hole in the cement. the guys that were out in front thought that i was hit. i get up on my knee and put my thumb up saying i m okay. swear to god on my grandchildrens lifves, none of them made any effort to surrender in any way.
big thing of the fact that she sprayed mel s sporting goods with bullets when she could have jumped in the car and gotten away. i don t think that s as definitive as other people do. it s not that simple. but she had changed. on some level, she she thought she was ctania. by this time, this is three or four hou since the altercation at mel s. we knew we couldn t go back to the safe house. we were driving a stolen car. we couldn t keep driving it around so we had to figure out another way. in 1974, i was 18 years old. i was a senior in high school. i had a ford van for sale. around 7:00 thursday night and a door knock on my front door and it was a woman wanting to test drive my van. so i said, sure. i just tossed her the keys. i got into the passenger seat.
armed than we are. the weapons that we re using are m-1 car bynes. an m-1 car bine is capable of firing 900 rounds a minute. they had converted it to fire 1,300 rounds per minute. we were outgunned. they had better weaponry. it was so many rounds going off so fast that it sounded i described it as like hearing a bed sheet tear. buzzzzz! we heard a first barrage of gunfire from the sla house. and we re about a block away. well, there s an alleyway that runs parallel to compton all the way down to 54th. and i grabbed the microphone and i grabbed my cameraman and we start running down the alleyway, unspooling the cable, you know in this bulky mini cam. okay, we re right here on the corner of 54th and compton now.
for those white folks with guns? and they said, yes. she said, they re in my daughter-in-law s house. she said it s five houses from the corner. i was approaching the fourth house, and as i got to the front door i heard a voice, and the voice was that i believed to be of sig q. i was right up against the house. he was ordering people to move the furniture. to barricade the front door. i immediately contacted the team at the rear and i said the fourth house is the suspect s house. that ironed it for us. we knew we were at the right place. so we deployed right away. we would not have done it that way originally, but because they had eluded the fbi earlier in the morning, we decided to go ahead and evacuate houses as we approached them. we were scrambling to evacuate the people that hadn t