To Protect and Serve: The siege on 12th street: Part II | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    This is the second article in our series To serve and protect: The siege on 12th Street. In the first article we posted the audio recording of the communications center of the Washington Police Department on the morning of June 15 when Gary Gautier called seeking "help in getting into rehab..." Rather than sending immediate help the WPD response became frustrating to Mr. Gautier, leading him to begin threatening to shoot policemen who might respond. A six-hour seize ensued, ending only when he finally agreed to allow those he trusted to take him to Beaufort Medical Center. No one was hurt, except his uncle, Carter Leary who was arrested by force by the Beaufort Sheriff's Department's "SWAT team."

    In this piece we share with you the police radio traffic during the siege. We should warn you that it is tedious work. But we think it important that the public have access to this information. We thank Chief Mick Reed for his assistance in making it available for the public to hear. We commend the Chief for displaying what we judged to be a sincere attempt to be transparent; knowing full well that "Monday morning quarterbacks" would second guess him and his department's actions that day.

    The recordings are edited. We compressed over six hours into a little more than two hours by deleting the gaps of silence. And we alert you to the fact that these communications depict only a small portion of the communications that day. Every time you hear "10-21" know that this is an attempt to "go private" using cell phones or telephones.

    For those who are following this story in detail you already know that "a media outlet" (as the other media refers to the Beaufort Observer without citing attribution for the material they were using) received answers to a series of questions we submitted to the Beaufort County Sheriff's Office (SO) regarding their participation in the incident. We will post that communication in the next article in this series but as you listen to these recordings of the radio traffic that day note that you do NOT hear anything about the SO's arrest of Carter Leary, the "suspect's" uncle who was assisting the negotiations with Gary Gautier. The significance of that fact will become clear in the next article.

    For those who are not inclined to listen to all of the recordings we will offer the following observations we have derived after listening to these recordings numerous times and discussing them with an expert in such operations.

    Gary Gautier called asking for help. He knew he needed help. He had been on pain pills as a result of a broken leg. He also knew he had, as he described it himself, "a drinking problem." It was only after he realized that he was not getting what he felt was the help he needed did he begin to threaten to shoot officials, "commit suicide by cop" or fire into the ground/air. He had told the dispatcher in his initial calls that he had his doors and windows rigged with explosives, yet as evidenced in these recordings, the police on the scene knew that was not necessarily true because he used the doors on several occasions.

    We will also remind you, as we did in the first article, that Gary Gautier mis-identified himself. He told the dispatcher in his first calls that his name was Carter Leary (Leary is his uncle who lives two doors down the street). But as you listen to the radio traffic you discern that the WPD officers close to the houses knew both Gautier and Leary, apparently from previous contacts. But it is not clear that the Sheriff's officers knew this fact.

    Our expert is a former FBI instructor who has taught siege procedures and has been the lead negotiator in some of the most notorious sieges across the world in recent years. He tells us, after listening to the phone recordings (first article) and the police radio traffic that it appears from this evidence that the Washington Police Department handled the situation "remarkably well" except for the arrest of Mr. Leary (which was affected by the SO, not the WPD). "They followed classic procedure of using time to achieve a resolution while exhibiting restraint of force and developing the suspect's trust or using resources he trusted." We'll have more of his analysis later, but that is one of the things you will want to listen for in the recordings below.