EDITORIAL: No one was killed

Heavily armed bad guys are holed up in a building. Vehicles full of SWAT team members arrive. Officers in body armor and helmets carrying an array of specialized weapons assault the building, destroy the door with a battering ram or explosives, toss grenades and charge into rooms with automatic rifles and machine pistols blazing. In minutes, the bad guys are neutralized, which often means dead. Some of the brave officers may be wounded or killed.

That’s not reality. That’s the TV and movie version of a situation similar to what played out in Fredonia on May 8, 9 and 10.

The Fredonia situation had the ingredients of a made-for-TV standoff, but it wasn’t treated like that by Ozaukee County Sheriff Christy Knowles, who directed a force of her team members, with backup from multiple police agencies. It ended with no one killed or injured and a bad guy in custody.

It took 38 hours to get to that successful conclusion. 

You can almost hear the Monday morning quarterbacks. “With all that fire power, it took a day and half to put an end to a menace to society? What took you so long?”

It turned out that more than police firepower, which included semi-automatic and automatic firearms, an armored vehicle and snipers with long-range, high-velocity rifles, patience was an effective weapon.

Police knew the shooter was alone in the house in a Fredonia residential neighborhood, firing random shots from the second floor. Demands that he surrender were met with threats that he would shoot to kill anyone trying to enter the house.

As Knowles explained, “We had 360-degree coverage on that home. The suspect was not leaving. As long as he remained in his home, we were confident the community was safe.”

Negotiation attempts, including a message from the man’s family broadcast over a PA system, failed to dislodge him, as did the aggressive tactics of breeching the house with a battering ram and an armored vehicle and employing stun grenades and tear gas.

In the end, it was a piece of fire fighting equipment, an unmanned fire hose that sent high-pressure blasts of water through openings in the house, that literally flushed the man out with hands raised.

Later, Knowles could say the goal of the law enforcement siege, besides putting an end to a deadly threat, had been met: “No one was killed.”

That good outcome is a credit to the Sheriff’s Office, but it doesn’t diminish the trauma one man with guns was able inflict on a small Ozaukee County village.

The gunshots and super-amplified music that came from the house on Fox Glen Road at around 8:30 on a Thursday night was so disturbing that 911 calls from residents overwhelmed the county communication center. 

The massive police response turned the neighborhood into a huge, cacophonous crime scene. Sirens shrieked, some intentionally loud to disorient the shooter. Communication attempts from police to the suspect blared through loud speakers. Grenade concussions boomed. Beyond the disruption of a normally quiet neighborhood, fear and anxiety surely affected the lives of families in range of the tumult. Deputies instructed nearby residents to shelter in their basements or leave their homes with a police escort.

Drones provided glimpses of the shooter’s weapons. “There was a lot of firepower in that house,” Knowles said.

A petition for a restraining order against the suspect, filed by the father of the man’s former fiance in November 2024, alleged that he kept AK-47 and AR-15 type assault weapons in an upstairs bedroom.

Since Congress made the tragically consequential mistake of refusing to reauthorize the life-saving ban on this type of rifle when it expired in 2004, police have increasingly had to confront evildoers armed with killing power designed for battlefields. 

These semi-automatic rifles with high-capacity magazines are not just legal; they’re easy to buy at numerous retail outlets. They have proved to be the weapons of choice for mass murders in the U.S.

An unfortunate decision just announced by the U.S. Justice Department will make them even more lethal by legalizing a device called the forced-reset trigger. The accessory, which dramatically speeds the firing rate, had been ruled illegal as a machine gun conversion device by the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives. Now, close cousins of machine guns are legal.

The weaponry easily available to people bent on mayhem raises the danger level of every police encounter with suspected lawbreakers. This puts a premium on the tactical training that local law enforcement agencies are sometimes forced to put into use.

That training was evident in the successful siege of the Fredonia shooter’s house, and that included the decision that put an end to the standoff. 

“Let’s use water,” team members suggested to the sheriff. “We’ve seen this in our training.”

It worked—along with patience.