Iraq vet among 2 who escorted 20-year-old to police after 4-hour standoff
A U.S. soldier stationed locally and a veteran of the Iraq war were the two hostages who disarmed a 20-year-old shooter at a mall in Tacoma, Wash., ending a four-hour standoff in which six people were shot, one critically.
After being held with two other hostages, Joseph Hudson and Jon Black escorted a weeping Dominick Sergio Maldonado outside where he was arrested by police.
Black, 32, based at nearby Fort Lewis, said that at the end, Maldonado was a "scared kid."
"He had tears in his eyes when we were taking the weapons away from him and he was in tears as we were taking him out," Black said.
But Hudson told police that earlier in the ordeal "he was more frightened inside the store than he ever was in Iraq," according to court documents.
The men were taken hostage with two store managers when Maldonado came into the store after firing in the mall corridor.
Black said that at first, when he was face-down on the store's floor, he thought Maldonado would kill him.
The soldier was terrified, he said, as bullets flew over his head and Maldonado described what the ammunition would do to him.
"This guy had already hurt people," Black said. "My first thought is that we were going to die."
But over the next four hours, the hostages said they realized Maldonado was young and scared.
"When I'd look into his eyes, he was just a kid," Black said.
At the beginning of the standoff, when Maldonado demanded the hostages barricade the store entrance with displays, Black and Hudson found a 9-year-old boy hiding beneath a display. Hudson put boxes around the boy, and he stayed hidden for about an hour before being discovered by Maldonado, who released him to police about 45 minutes later.
Hudson told the Seattle paper Maldonado never took his finger off the trigger of one of his two loaded semi-automatic rifles.
But Maldonado's demeanor changed as they talked.
"It changed from being self-conscious, to being worried, and then to being sympathetic to us, and then to being scared," Hudson said. "He actually mentioned to us that he had taken some meth before all of this and then, when that wore off, he realized what he had really done."
Hudson said Maldonado told them he had intended to shoot himself but lost his nerve.
Black said he and the other hostages told Maldonado about their families.
Maldonado, Black said, then "shared everything about himself," telling how he grew up in a bad neighborhood and felt nobody listened to him.
Maldonado grew more nervous toward the end of the standoff, Black said, after the mall lights went out and there was a loud crash outside the store. Black now believes something likely gave way after being damaged by the shooting, but at the time, Maldonado and the hostages thought police were rushing the store.
Maldonado agreed to surrender soon after, taking apart his rifle and sliding it over to Black and Hudson.
"He didn't know what to do," Black said.
Meanwhile, in court yesterday, one of the wounded, Air Force veteran Frank Stiles, told how he was shot in the arm, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported.
"It hurt like the dickens. It made me very angry," said Stiles, 68.
"I wanted to shoot back, and I didn't have anything to shoot back with," he said. "As far as I was concerned, I was hoping the cops were going to take him out."
Stiles' wife huddled up against a nearby kiosk for cover, the Post-Intelligencer reported.
"This guy was emptying three or four clips. I never thought he would end. I was flat on the floor, face on the floor," Stiles said.
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