“Everything seemed to go real slow,” Neill said. “Only by the grace of God was I able to survive.”
He was angry for months after the incident, wondering why he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In this coverage of the hostage situation at a Takoma Park Capital One bank that resulted in the hostage taker’s death, Lt. Tyrone Collington can be seen on the left in a trench coat and tan ballcap.
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“I thought, ‘Why me? Why did I get chosen?’ I was minding my own business trying to do the right thing,” Neill said.
The only people he could talk with about it were his attorney and a psychologist from the department’s employee-assistance program. With everyone else, he just tried to mask the trauma.
“People ask how you’re doing, and you tell them you’re doing fine — but you’re not,” Neill said.
Neill, 59, retired several years ago after 30 years with the department. He now works for D.C. Protective Services, which provides security for city facilities. He said he doesn’t like to talk about the shooting out of respect for the man he killed.
“I empathize with his family. He was a father, a brother, a son,” Neill said. “It’s sad all the way around. It’s tough.”
“I came back to work quickly, which was good,” said Neill, who was not permitted to carry a gun for a year. “The worst thing you can do is sit at home and do nothing.”
It had such a profound effect on his life that he became president of the D.C. police union so he could speak out for officers who found themselves in similar situations.
“You know what they’re going through. You know they’re being isolated,” Neill said. “They’ll say it’s just part of the job, but you know they don’t mean that. You say a little prayer and hope they’ll be okay.”
Someone he knew
Steve Hudson joined the Prince William County police force in 1982. He had been with the police department for seven years — and on the county’s SWAT team for five — before he saw a police officer fire at a suspect.
It wasn’t until years later, Jan. 14, 1996, that Hudson learned how difficult it is. In his case, he killed someone he knew.
It was shortly after 6 p.m. when a 911 call came from a home in Triangle, a house that was familiar to Hudson because it belonged to a friend who was a sheriff’s deputy. Hudson decided to hurry to the scene.
Upon Hudson’s arrival, Jimmy Lloyd, 32, stumbled out of the house, and Hudson recognized him as his friend’s son. He saw that Lloyd was carrying a handgun and an extra magazine of ammunition.
Lloyd fired two shots into the pavement and then walked slowly toward Hudson.
Hudson, now an assistant chief in charge of criminal investigations, keeps a yellowed piece of paper in one of his files. It contains notes of what went through his mind that night, thoughts he wrote down days later because he wanted to show how much of his classroom training and job experience figured into those critical moments.
But Hudson doesn’t need to refer to the paper, as he recounts his reflections as if the shooting happened yesterday: 15 things he thought of in less than 80 seconds.
He didn’t want to negotiate too long with an irrational shooter, because he didn’t want to put other officers at risk. He measured the distance at about 25 yards, a shot he could easily take. He drew an imaginary line in the road — a point at which Hudson’s supervisor would have been dangerously exposed to a shooter. That would be as far as he would let Lloyd go.
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