It was still light out, although the sun would set at about twenty minutes to seven. The forerunners of winter hadn’t hit Denver yet, and it was dry and mild with temperatures in the low sixties. The weekend lay ahead, time off for most of the cops stationed at the Gang Unit substation.
Yoder stood at the passenger side of his rig as he took off his police equipment: his police radio from where it was clipped to his shoulder, his gun belt, the bulletproof vest that was a somewhat bulky—but necessary—part of his uniform, and his blue uniform shirt. Wearing just a black T-shirt and his uniform pants, he put the other items into his bright blue gym bag. He was the only cop in the lot at the moment as he scanned it idly.
He watched as a new white Ford Expedition SUV turned at relatively high speed into the driveway southwest of the Gang Unit building. The driver appeared to be a man, and there was a woman in the passenger seat. The driver didn’t park in one of the slots set aside for the public but instead drifted into the spaces reserved for patrol units and cops’ personal vehicles. It pulled up close to Randy Yoder, whose truck was headed south.
“I was in my driver’s seat at that point, and I got out and walked up to the SUV,” Yoder recalled. “It kind of struck me as odd. The window was cracked just a little bit, like a half-inch. I guess I was kind of expecting him to roll down the window and say, ‘Where can I go?’ But he says, ‘Are you the police?’ ”
Yoder saw an elderly man at the wheel. “I told him, ‘Yeah, I’m the police. What can I help you with?’ And before I could finish [saying that], he flings open the door, kind of bumps into me, and takes off running. And he runs around, and as he’s running, he says, ‘She’s got a gun! She’s got a gun!’ ”
Startled, Yoder looked into the SUV and saw that the woman in the passenger seat did indeed have a gun. She was pointing it at him. He wasn’t going to stick around and ask her why.
Yoder backed up to his pickup truck and frantically started to search for his police-issue weapon and radio. As he did that, he kept his eyes on the woman.
She got out of the Ford Expedition, and Yoder could now see that she was still holding a silver handgun. She began to walk toward him, asking, “Where is he? Where is he?”
Yoder could see the old man trying to hide behind Officer Joey Perez’s vehicle. At the time, Joey Perez (no relation to Teresa Perez) was inside the Gang Unit’s offices.
Yoder found his radio first, but he couldn’t turn it on by just feeling the buttons while his attention was distracted by the woman. Finally he felt a thrill of relief as his hand closed around his service weapon, a .45 caliber Sig Sauer, Model P220. The woman had walked to a point between the white SUV she was riding in and Yoder’s pickup truck.
“I am a police officer,” Yoder shouted at her. “Drop your weapon. Now!”
He yelled it three times, but the woman only stared at him. Then she placed the gun, which appeared to be a 9mm Smith and Wesson, to her head, as their eyes locked.
“Shoot me,” she said. “Shoot me. Well, just go ahead and kill me.”
Never taking the gun from her head, the woman began to move toward Yoder, and he edged away, trying to keep his truck between them. His eyes still fixed on the woman with the gun to her head, Randy Yoder managed to get his police radio turned on. He tried to break into radio traffic. When the air was finally clear, he spoke into it, calling out an emergency warning: “TAC thirty-six. I’ve got a party holding a gun to her head.”
“While I’m talking,” Yoder remembered, “she’s still moving about.”
He was warning his fellow officers inside the building and asking for help at the same time.
“And then,” he said later, “she goes and gets back into her car, into the passenger side, and she’s sitting in there, and she’s yelling and ranting and raving, but I don’t know what she’s saying. Because now I’m focused on this guy. I’m trying to get him; I’m hollering at him. I’m watching her, and I’m hollering at him to come over to me, because I was going to throw him in my truck.”
Randy Yoder figured that if he could get the old man into the open door of the passenger side of his pickup truck, he’d be safe from the woman, who seemed intent on shooting him.
“He doesn’t respond, and I tell him several times…. Well, finally, he does. He comes running as fast as…Well, as fast as an old man can run. There, my door is open.”
The old man was almost safe, but as he ran, the woman spotted him, and jumped out of the white Ford. Yoder shouted to the man to get into his truck, but he couldn’t move fast enough. “She made a beeline toward him,” Yoder said. “I saw her coming around the truck, and I began to back away from her.”
Yoder was at the tailgate of his pickup truck when he heard the woman’s pistol go off. “And I hear two pops! I see him go down, and I see her pointing the gun at me. I didn’t know that I had been hit or what had happened. At that point, adrenaline’s kind of running. She doesn’t even skip a beat, though. She’s not lollygagging through here; she’s on the move. She goes right to him, I hear the pops, and she’s standing over him, and she’s just continually [firing]. One. Two. Three.”
Randy Yoder retreated toward a nearby tree to get some cover. As he ran, he felt two shots hit him in the side. At that point, he turned and shot at the woman. He didn’t want her to hurt anyone more than she already had.
Inside the station, Captain Joe Padilla heard the radio call for help and realized that, unbelievably, Randy Yoder was right outside in the parking lot.
Padilla headed for the door. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of another officer’s gun belt lying on a table in the roll-call room and knew that Officer Daniel Perez (Joey’s brother) was still in the office, someplace. Padilla called out a warning to Perez, “Danny! She’s got a gun!” hoping he would hear it, and then Padilla plunged out into the parking lot.
“I saw a woman first, tall, slender, good-looking, in a shooting stance,” Padilla recalled. “And my first thought was that she was a police officer and that she was holding a suspect at gunpoint.”
Padilla was armed with a .45 caliber Glock Model 21 semiautomatic pistol. Its magazine had a capacity of thirteen rounds, and it could have one additional round in the chamber.
It was important later on to know the type of weapon everyone involved in this strange tableau was carrying.
Danny Perez, alerted by his captain, rushed out of the bathroom, where he was changing out of his uniform. He grabbed his fanny pack, which held his handgun, a 9mm Glock Model 17 semiautomatic pistol. This model held seventeen rounds in its magazine and one in the chamber. As Perez exited the police station, he saw Padilla running west toward the parking lot. He also saw a white SUV and caught a glimpse of Randy Yoder standing near the back of his own pickup.
Police officers are trained to size up a situation in as short a time as possible. Before they ever hit the streets for the first time, they are placed in staged situations where they have to decide whether to fire their weapons, bearing in mind that things are not always what they seem to be and that they must avoid hurting innocent bystanders or hostages.
One of the best police training films is titled “Shoot—Don’t Shoot!” Trainees must decide in an instant or so whether to push a button in response to figures popping up in front of them. Often, they shoot, only to realize that they have just fired at an innocent victim or someone with a child in his arms. What might seem so easy to a layman is in reality a maze full of deadly pitfalls.
Pierce Brooks’s book, Officer Down: Code Three, is another invaluable training reSource. But in the end each cop must make his own decision of what to do. And in real life, there may be even less time to decide. In Denver, on this soft October evening, the Gang Unit team walked or rather ran into a shooting gallery in their own parking lot. They had no idea what motivated the beautiful hysterical woman with the gun. They were afraid that Randy Yoder might be fatally shot. From Padilla’s viewpoint, it appeared that the woman—who he now realized was not a poli
ce officer—was about to shoot Yoder.
He didn’t know that Yoder was already wounded. Having taken off his body armor just before he encountered the couple in the white SUV, he wore only a thin black cotton T-shirt over his chest and abdomen, the most vulnerable areas of his body. Shock kept Yoder from realizing that he was bleeding heavily, and he felt little pain…yet.
The woman was still pointing the gun at Yoder. She switched her aim between him and the old man on the ground, whom she continued to shoot. Yoder fired at her in a vain attempt to stop her from shooting the wounded man.
As he tried to dodge the woman’s bullets, Yoder caught a glimpse of a blue uniform and saw it was his captain, Joe Padilla. He was also aware of another officer in the lot, whom he couldn’t see well. It was Danny Perez, who had gotten down on one knee near Randy Yoder’s truck so he could see the figure lying beneath it.
“I saw movement first,” Padilla says, “and I started running that way, and I see a woman come out behind the SUV, and she raises the gun up.”
Padilla ran to the southwest of the Gang Bureau office until he was “roughly parallel” with the woman with the gun. He saw her raise her gun again and begin shooting. At the same time, he saw Randy Yoder ducking and bobbing near his truck. Then the red-haired officer disappeared.
With a sinking heart, Padilla feared that Yoder had been fatally shot. He sighed as he recalled his split-second decision to fire at the woman.
“And because her hands went like this [he gestured at a diagram showing where all the personnel and vehicles were]…I fired at her. I thought Randy was hit because I never saw him [pop up] again. And she ran around by this black truck, which was Randy’s truck. And I ran up to the front of the car. I think it was a little further back, but I had a view of his door—open—on the black truck. I’m hearing gunshots, and I’m crouched down like that. I don’t know where Randy’s at. I’m thinking she’s shooting at Randy over here [pointing to chart], so I fired again at her underneath the door as she’s down. And I believe I hit her because after I fired [that shot] her body just slumped.”
Any cop will tell you that the officer who has to shoot a human being is injured just as badly as the target, injured in the heart and soul and conscience, even though he had no choice. Joe Padilla was no different. He was heartsick at having to shoot the woman and dreaded moving around the black truck and probably finding that one of his men was dead, too.
As Padilla moved around Yoder’s truck, he saw the woman, who seemed to be unconscious or dead, and for the first time realized that there was another person lying on the ground. It was an elderly man, who lay on his back and appeared to be mortally wounded. Padilla had had no idea that a second civilian was involved in the parking lot shoot-out.
The gun was no longer in the woman’s hand, and Captain Padilla called out, “Cease fire!”
Brothers Joey and Daniel Perez were both there during the barrage of gunfire.
Daniel watched the action from his viewpoint of the underside of Yoder’s truck, a large diesel jacked up high off the road. He described seeing the woman’s legs “from the midthigh down” and assumed she was shooting straight down into the elderly man’s body. He then fired three or four shots at the part of the woman he could see from his kneeling position.
Joey Perez, who was working plainclothes inside the Gang Unit, had rushed to the parking lot to provide Randy Yoder with backup. He heard Yoder shouting at someone but in his line of sight, he couldn’t see who it was. He then heard a number of gunshots. He crouched and moved around to the back of Yoder’s truck.
It was dead quiet now. The acrid smell of gunpowder still drifted in the air. The Perez brothers and Captain Joe Padilla stood near Randy Yoder’s truck. Padilla leaned over the still figure of the woman and now saw a handgun underneath the old man’s leg. If the bleeding woman should suddenly regain consciousness, she could reach it, so he kicked it away, then carefully picked it up and put it on the floorboard of Yoder’s truck.
Randy Yoder had been hit twice in the abdomen a few inches beneath his heart and lungs, but he wasn’t dead. Padilla already had fire department paramedics on the way.
The most dreaded call police can hear went out over the radios of patrol units in the area. “Officer down…officer down.”
The first uniformed officers to reach the scene on Colorado Boulevard expected the worst; they saw a motionless man and woman and an officer on the ground.
Randy Yoder had been incredibly lucky as he stood in the middle of what was a virtual shooting gallery trying to save the life of the old man, who scuttled for safety in vain. Yoder was bleeding profusely from what proved to be two grazing rather than penetrating wounds.
Paramedics from the Denver Fire Department inserted breathing tubes into the unconscious man and woman and attempted to force oxygen into their lungs, knowing as they did so that it was probably no use.
Then the female shooter, the elderly man, and Randy Yoder were rushed to the Denver Health Medical Center’s emergency room. Yoder was admitted in fair condition. Dr. Katie Bates wiped away the blood on his belly and found that his wounds were painful but not critical, though a few centimeters either way and it would have been a different story. He was treated and observed for several hours then was released.
Dr. Andy Knaut checked the shooter and her victim. At eighteen minutes after six he pronounced the elderly man dead. A minute later, he pronounced the woman dead.
The case was assigned to homicide detectives Dave Neil and Dale Wallis. Along with many officers and crime scene experts from the Denver Police Department, they arrived at the Gang Unit.
People were leaving the nearby IMAX theater, kids were playing football in the park, and nearby residents were standing in their yards, wondering what had happened as they listened to sirens, watched whirling blue lights atop cruisers, and saw a score of police vehicles pulled up close to the parking lot where the shooting had taken place.
Detectives swarmed over the lot, whose surface was sprinkled with dull brown oak leaves and fresh blood, some of it in pools, some of it a path of dots, as if someone actively bleeding had run between the SUV and Randy Yoder’s truck. Its doors open, the SUV was parked headed north. Yoder’s truck, also with its doors open, was headed in the opposite direction. They were four to five feet apart.
The investigators marked the myriad spots where evidence lay: bullet casings, fragments and expended rounds, a cell phone, a man’s Burberry wool cap, and sunglasses. Every bullet or casing was noted with a yellow billboard-shaped marker with a number. There were almost two dozen on the ground near Yoder’s truck, and five under the tree between Justyn Rosen’s SUV and a green metal picnic table.
One of the most interesting items lying on the asphalt driveway was a small tape recorder with the tape inside intact.
The detectives took scores of photographs and diagrammed and measured the area. Practically in City Park, it was also close to homes. The crowd on the other side of the yellow crime-scene tape grew, their voices hushed and curious.
Identification of the two deceased people came as a shock to many Denverites. Justyn Rosen, 79, long familiar because of his automobile dealerships and as a benefactor of numerous charities, seemed to be the last person who would die in a shoot-out.
The woman, whose lovely face later appeared in The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News and on the eleven o’clock television news was familiar to only a few. She was Teresa Perez.
The members of the Gang Unit had no idea what led up to the bloodbath in their parking lot, but they soon learned about the end of the affair between Rosen and Perez and then what detectives found when they traced their lives back to their childhoods.
The tape in the recorder unveiled much of the story of the relationship between the old man and the beautiful younger woman. It was a soundtrack for the last reel of a true-life Fatal Attraction. Of course Justyn Rosen in no way resembled Michael Douglas, but Teresa was as attractive and obsessed as Glenn Close wa
s in that memorable—and frightening—movie.
Teresa apparently felt the need to let the world know why she was choosing what she believed was her only way out of a tangled and tragic life. That tape, combined with interviews detectives and reporters had with people in Rosen’s and Perez’s lives, explained many of the whys of the carnage outside the Gang Unit.
After brooding and sobbing all day on October 2—her daughter Lori’s twentieth birthday—Teresa grew more upset. She hid from process servers who knocked on her door to deliver the restraining order to keep her away from Justyn. She called Bob Costello and asked him if God would forgive her if she committed suicide. She had threatened to kill herself before, so alarm bells didn’t sound as loudly as they would have for the average woman. Costello assured her that God would forgive her, and he asked Teresa to call him back later so they could discuss the matter. That approach usually worked to calm her down, and it would give her time to think.
But she had thought about her life for a long time, and she had apparently found only hopeless dead ends. One warning sign that indicated her desperation was that she gave her precious dog, a little Yorkie named Shelby, to her daughter, Lori, for her twentieth birthday.
Teresa Perez had made up her mind. She was not going to be ignored. The next day, she also called her foster mother in a hysterical rage. “He scammed me all along, didn’t he?” Teresa demanded to know. “I could’ve gone on with my life and done other things. But I sat here and waited for six years!”
She seemed to be out of control, heartbroken and angry that the man she truly appeared to love—despite his age and infirmity—was using legal means to get rid of her.
Perhaps both Teresa Perez and Justyn Rosen were thinking about their religious beliefs during the final few days. She wanted to be sure she would go to heaven if she killed herself, and Justyn, a devout Jew, might have been adhering to his religion. Yom Kippur, the highest Holy Day of the Jewish religion, would be on Sunday, October 5. It is the Day of Atonement, on which Jews make amends for their sins of the year just past with fasting and prayer. By Sunday, Justyn would need to demonstrate his repentance and try to make up for his sins. If he wanted to change the judgment written in the book in which God inscribes all names, he needed to accomplish it the next twenty-four hours. The fasting would begin before sunset on Saturday night and continue for twenty-five hours until after dark on Yom Kippur with many of Denver’s devout Jews praying for hours in their synagogues.