One year ago on May 19, 36-year-old Jason Hamilton opened fire on the Latah County emergency dispatch center and adjoining courthouse. The spree began at 11 p.m. and authorities speculate at least 70 bullets were fired from Hamilton’s hideout, the First Presbyterian Church, before he committed suicide at about 1 a.m. May 20. Officer Lee Newbill was the first city police officer in Moscow’s history to be killed. First Presbyterian Church caretaker Paul Bauer was found dead inside the church when SWAT teams entered early the next morning. The shooting left three dead and three wounded, including UI senior Pete Hussman and Sgt. Brannon Jordan of the Latah County Sheriff’s Department. The following is a recount from some of those who were affected by that night.

The Peacekeeper
Sgt. Rick McNannay was at his desk filling out paperwork at the Whitman County Sheriff’s Office in Colfax when a radio dispatch was sent out alerting all law enforcement agencies in the surrounding areas to stay off the radio unless it was an emergency.
McNannay logged onto Whitcom, Whitman County’s 911 center, to find out there were multiple shootings reported at the Latah County Courthouse. He had spent four years as an officer with the Moscow Police Department.

“At that point, I realized, ‘Holy crap, this looks serious,’” McNannay said. “I know a lot of the officers, and I know my way around pretty well.”
Being a member of the regional SWAT team, McNannay went to a storage facility next to the office and got out the Peacekeeper, a 9,000-pound armored vehicle. Two officers were at the office when the dispatch came in. McNannay started driving toward Moscow while Officer Randy Zehm took his police car.

“Your mind is just racing,” he said. “We’ve been called out to a couple situations ... You’re prepared for the worst and hoping for the best. We didn’t know what exactly was going on at that time.”
McNannay drove the Peacekeeper while the information coming over the radio continued to be sporadic. Police cars from all over the region were in front of the Moscow Police Department when he arrived.

“They called us in for a briefing and kind of explained to us what was going on,” McNannay said. “There had been some reports about some muffled gunshots about an hour before we got there. They had already had some snipers stationed in the area.”
An hour after he arrived, Chaplain Gary Young from the Latah County Sheriff’s Office told McNannay that Newbill had died. He had known Newbill and had seen him the night before the shooting to discuss a case he was working on.

“When he told me Lee had died, it was like somebody had taken out a sledgehammer and hit you with it,” McNannay said. “Everything changed.”
Two negotiators were brought in from Lewiston, he said, and it was his job to take them up to the courthouse to negotiate Hamilton’s surrender in the Peacekeeper. Accompanied by another officer, McNannay said they drove up Sixth Street slowly, turning onto Van Buren and then Fifth Street and into the courthouse parking lot. He said he saw empty gun magazines and cars riddled with bullets.

“It looked like a war zone,” he said. “I saw bullet shells all over the parking lot. It was hard to believe that one person had done that.”
Negotiators used a bullhorn through the Peacekeeper’s bulletproof glass port holes to call for Hamilton’s surrender and to come out from his position in the First Presbyterian Church.

“We wanted him to know we were there,” he said. “You want to give him the opportunity to surrender.”
McNannay said he looked around and couldn’t see people looking through their windows. Police officers had spent several hours watching for movement around the perimeter.

“There wasn’t any sign of anybody anywhere,” he said.
Officers set up a perimeter to keep civilians out and Hamilton in. McNannay said he knew there would be people coming home from the bars.
“It was really kind of ridiculous. It was a Saturday,” he said. “You’d end up with these guys walking right past you — right through you.”
It was lighter out when McNannay entered the courthouse parking lot. Hamilton had not responded to the negotiators, so two entry teams were used to immobilize him from inside the church.
“We had a pretty good-sized entry team that had already entered the area,” he said. “You set out a plan, but you have to be fluid enough to change the plan.”

McNannay drove the Peacekeeper until its front was parallel with the front of the church. The teams entered Van Buren Street by crossing through residences they had accessed from Polk Street.
“Our vehicle was going to provide them with cover,” he said. “I was the one pretty much the most vulnerable. They would most likely know where the driver was positioned and start lobbing round into that area.”

Once the Peacekeeper had escorted the entry teams into the church, McNannay said radio communication went silent. Team members would have to communicate with each other through hand signals. A window had been broken on the second floor facing the courthouse.
He said he waited 15 minutes before the teams found and declared Hamilton dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. They also found Bauer, the church sexton. The team continued its sweep through the building.

“You never just stop at one (suspect),” McNannay said. “You always have to make the assumption that there’s more than one.”
A few team members jumped onto the Peacekeeper, he said, because it has railings built onto it for officers, and rode back to the Moscow Police Department. There, every agency was given a short debriefing and McNannay was told he could return to Colfax.
“It was pretty somber at that point. Of course, Lee’s death was the biggest issue,” he said.

McNannay returned the Peacekeeper and drove home where his wife was waiting for him. A former Whitcom dispatcher and supervisor, she had been able to keep track of the standoff and knew he was OK, he said.

The Luschnigs
Lance and Cecelia Luschnig have lived in Moscow for 32 years. Cecelia taught classical studies at the University of Idaho for 28 years. Lance used to be a freelance writer and photographer. The couple was present at the Kent State Massacre and they saw the student riots in Athens in 1991. Their home on the corner of Fifth and Adams streets put them next to the courthouse the night of Hamilton’s shooting spree.
They were in bed when Cecelia woke up to the sounds of gunshots. The only sounds they expected to hear that Saturday night were the drunken rantings of local college students returning to their apartments. Lance was sitting on the edge of the bed. He told Cecelia it was gunshots and that he noticed different weapons being used.

“Boys think they can recognize weapons and girls don’t,” Cecelia said.
Lance said he went into his living room to look out the window facing Fifth Street. Lance saw two police officers casually walking up the street. He said he went back to the bedroom to tell his wife, but when he returned to the window he could see one of the officers face down on the ground, the other was gone. Lance called 911.

“It was very hard to get 911,” he said. “I said someone was down.”
That officer was Lee Newbill. A half-hour passed before Lance saw a red truck come up the street. More officers came out and picked up Newbill. As the truck was leaving, Lance said he saw another officer jump out of the bed of the truck and begin trekking up the road. Gun shots continued and Lance said the next time he looked out the window, he could see the new officer staggering from left to right briefly before slumping down on the sidewalk, turning his head to speak into the radio on his shoulder.

This time the police responded immediately, Lance said, pulling Officer Brannon Jordan out of the street to safety.
Cecelia remembered the police later surveyed their street in the daylight. Picking up a police jacket from the ground.
“The officer said, ‘This must be Brannon’s,’” Cecelia said.

Around 3 a.m., hours since the last shots were heard coming from inside the First Presbyterian Church, Lance called 911 to report a suspicious person. In the shadows, Lance saw what looked to be a man lurking in the bushes. The operator took a moment and then assured Lance that it was an officer seeking cover as the standoff continued.

“He was taking a leak, by the way,” Lance said, smiling. “We didn’t see anyone who wasn’t shot until the morning.”
Lance and Cecelia said they spent the rest of the night in Lance’s basement office. They drank pinot noir and called friends in Europe.
“We had a couple bottles of good wine down there, which no crisis should be without,” he said. “That’s another thing you do while under siege — drink good wine and call your friends and tell them you’re being shot at.”

At dawn, Cecelia stepped outside the back to feed her squirrels, and Lance took turns with other eye-witnesses speaking by phone to KXLY reporter Eric Loney, who was blocked off from the courthouse on Main Street with other journalists. Lance reported seeing an armored SWAT car up the hill and the sounds of loudspeakers and voices blaring, “Come out. Put your hands in the air.”

Police would later survey their home for bullet holes. They received a gold emblem for their cooperation, with Cecelia bringing investigating officers coffee and Lance going to the police station to speak with an investigator about what he had seen the night before — a “very intelligent fellow,” he said. Lance was interviewed by The Lewiston Tribune but was declined when he offered to speak with The New York Times.
“Piss on the Times,” he said.

The Gottschalks
Brian Gottschalk woke up on May 19 thinking it was too early for fireworks. He realized it was gunshots, but he did not know how close it was from his home on Polk and Fifth streets. His wife, Donna, woke up and they turned on their police scanner. The dispatcher was reporting multiple shooters, Brian said. It made sense because of the different weapons Hamilton had used that night. They said they picked up their two sons, Brysen, 8, and Trevin, 6, and brought them into the basement to sleep on the couch. The children didn’t wake up until the next morning.
The Gottschalks went to the dining room window. A police car was parked on their street, and officers got out and quickly disappeared behind the house adjacent to theirs. Behind a white shed, there was a gravel road that would lead them onto Van Buren, where Hamilton was focusing his fire on dispatchers within the Latah County Sheriff’s Office.

Donna got on the phone and called her daughters, Brianna and Daniella, who were 17 and 21 at the time. They both live with their parents and were out enjoying the night.

Daniella had gotten off work at Sangria, a restaurant in the mall parking lot, at 11 p.m. Her best friend and co-worker Amber Wilson was with her. Daniella checked in with her mother to tell her she was coming home to change out of her work clothes.
“‘Don’t come home and change. There are shooters everywhere,’” Daniella remembered her mother saying. “She was freaking out.”
The police scanner had just reported an officer had been shot and was pinned down.

“You knew there was a cop down,” Donna said. “It was chaos. Everyone wanted to know what was going on. It was crazy.”
Brian sat under the dining room window with a loaded 12-gauge shotgun leaning beside the wall, looking for a gunman who might try to escape. It was made scarier, he said, because there was more traffic on his street than usual.
“The shooting stops, and then there’s a guy walking down the street,” he said.

The Gottschalks had their scanner keeping them updated on the fray outside. Donna said she thought “the scanner almost made it worse.” Brian said that was one of the few times when he was glad they “had the stupid thing.”
Daniella spent the night at Wilson’s mother’s house. Donna called her to tell her to come home at 3 a.m., but when Daniella tried to get through, SWAT had already set up its exterior perimeter. She said she tried alternate ways of getting onto Polk Street, but she had to turn back. She didn’t get home until 9 a.m., she said, missing Brian’s interview with KREM 2 News.

“I think I was the first sucker who walked out as they were walking by,” Brian said.

The Vigilante
The “Die Hard” movie series stars Bruce Willis as John McClain, a tough cop who sustains injury after injury while finding himself having to save the world from people like German mercenaries. This is the film Pete Husmann was watching when he heard the real sounds of bullets flying only blocks away from his apartment on Third and Blaine streets.

Husmann became concerned when he noticed the sound was of a large caliber rifle. He had received his first gun, a .22-caliber rifle, when he was 9. He grew up hunting with his dad, a former police officer and now a major in the Air Force.

In his home were six guns in various locations. Not knowing where the shooter was and not trusting the response time of the Moscow police, Husmann threw on his flannel jacket. He stuffed a .45-caliber into the pocket of his jacket. It was already loaded, he said — loaded and “ready to be used.”

With the gun in his pocket, he jumped on his bike and headed east down Third Street.
Husmann ran cross-country and swam in high school. He was used to testing his endurance, but he decided against taking the uphill terrain and turned south on Hayes Street until he got to Sixth Street. He continued east past Lincoln, Monroe and Howard streets until he reached the corner of Sixth and Van Buren.

The then 20-year-old mechanical engineering student did not know the courthouse was nearby. He thought the shots might have been coming from Moscow High School. The back of the courthouse was on his left and perhaps the only thing concealing Husmann from Hamilton, who had been pacing around the parking lot before he arrived. Hamilton had sought higher ground in the First Presbyterian Church across from the courthouse.
“They said, ‘Don’t go that way. He’s right around the corner,’” Husmann said.

He didn’t see Hamilton at his sniping position in the church. He turned the corner, heading east on Van Buren along the right side of the courthouse. Husmann ditched his bike and ran up against the concrete wall that set the perimeter for the courthouse parking lot. It was also the highest structure hiding him from Hamilton, who remained concealed. He said he could see cars riddled with bullets, some blaring their car alarms.
He could see Moscow High School from his hiding spot, not suspecting that Hamilton was a building away. After two minutes, he decided to turn around and find a better view of the high school. While the shots continued, there were no sirens in the distance. Stepping away from the wall, Husmann exposed his back to Hamilton. Hamilton fired.

Husmann kept running. A bullet had passed through him. His right lung collapsed immediately. Husmann collapsed on his back in the street. He said he felt an invisible “sledgehammer” coming down on his chest over and over.
Bullets ricocheted off the asphalt around Husmann, making his ears ring. He could hear the metal pop of shots hitting the cars around him and the occasional cracked window. He could not believe he was still being shot at.
“He already hit me,” Husmann said. “Isn’t he happy?”

The firing stopped momentarily and then started again. Husmann said he worried he would be shot in the head and that would be the end. Then he saw the flash of the muzzle coming from a corner window on the second story of the church.
A second bullet hit him in the right leg a centimeter from the ephemeral artery. He said he tried to hold his leg tight to constrict the blood flow. A Christian, Husmann said he started to pray. Then a third shot ripped through his right shoulder, and a fourth scraped across his neck and trachea.
“Here I come, God,” he said, and then closed his eyes.

The shooting stopped and he got to his feet, losing his jacket and gun in the process. The shooting started again just as Husmann made it to the upper parking level of the courthouse and crouched behind a storage trailer.
A police officer approached Husmann, who asked for medical assistance. The officer told him the area was too “hot” for an ambulance. Paramedics had to pick Husmann up and take him to the ambulance parked out of Hamilton’s range of fire.

Doctors found the first bullet had collapsed his right lung, hit his diaphragm and liver. Husmann had two surgeries, the first to repair damage to his chest, leg and neck, and the second on his shoulder. Staples had to be placed in his chest, leg and shoulder. He lost a third of his deltoid muscle.
It would be a week before Husmann was released from the hospital. The hospital returned his shirt and pants, torn and covered in his own dried blood. He left in a hospital gown.

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