When I got back to the lobby there was a man with his arm wrapped around my wife’s neck pointing a gun at our four-year-old daughter. We were at the bank that day to talk about mortgages, which is somewhat ironic, since we never should have been thinking about buying a house. Our relationship was already a fixer upper, and a house we could barely afford wasn’t going to make it any better. I had gone to the bathroom because we’d been waiting over an hour for the damn loan officer to see us, my wife and I quietly bickering the entire time. The only one of us behaving well that afternoon was the child in the group. But then, Gabi always was an angel.
I’d heard no unusual commotion while I was gone, but when I came out there was none at all. It was eerily quiet on my way back to the lobby, though I didn’t truly realize it until I saw the gun. If I had suspected anything before being spotted I could have called the cops from my cell phone and maybe nobody would have died that day. As it happened, I stood there, frozen, and the guy, Garrett Dean turned out to be his name, must have known he was pointing his gun at my family by the way I kept glancing back and forth between him and his two immediate hostages. No one in the room was in as much danger as them, and the fact that it mattered was all over my face.
Sweat dripped down my temples as I dared to break eye contact with him. I wanted to find a guard, or a cop, or somebody—any good guy with a gun would do. I’m licensed to carry concealed myself, but I follow the rules. Guns aren’t allowed in banks, so, naturally, this criminal was the only civilian who had one.
There he was, the security guard, on the other end of the room, lying on the floor, along with everyone else. So was his gun, under a chair about ten feet away, next to the vacant wall. I wondered where he learned to do that. I could lie on the floor and throw my gun away, too, and with no training at all. Thanks, buddy.
I looked back at my wife and daughter. Gabi just stood there, eyes on me, frozen like a statue. She wasn’t crying or anything. I hoped to God she would stay that way. My wife didn’t take her eyes off her, but she wasn’t quite as calm. On top of her crying, she was sweating just like me.
In that moment, I knew that if we got through this all our other problems would become trivial. I wouldn’t care anymore about the cigarette burn my brother made on the seat of my car. I wouldn’t even care that it happened because he was fucking my wife in the car at the time. Most of all, I would forgive her for it, like she had been begging me to for the last six months. I could even begin making up for my portion of things. If only we got the chance.
Garrett Dean kept looking back and forth between me and whatever it was he thought he saw over his shoulder. I suspected he’d been planning to retrieve the security guard’s gun, for good measure, the moment I happened along. No one had dared move since, as far as I could tell, and that included Garrett himself. But now his eyes were darting around, and he kept adjusting his grip. His hands must have been getting sweaty, like mine, his gun starting to slip.
I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I kept waiting for Garrett to say something. Make the teller give him all the money, or tell the people to start handing over their jewelry. Just say something. Then, the lobby doors opened.
Here’s what I found out later:
About the time I was walking back from the bathroom, Chuck and Paul Birch were standing outside the bank, getting ready to execute a plan they had meticulously thought out over, say, the last two hours. I don’t know what possessed them to think they could succeed, but I was sure when they walked in that Garrett Dean would have something to say about it.
The two brothers, each wearing a ski mask and holding a snub-nosed revolver, thought it would be just as simple as it was in the bad action movies they grew up on. Later, when Paul Birch, the younger brother, was questioned by police, he confirmed that very thing. “We thought it would be so easy,” he kept saying, over and over.
The difference between the Birch brothers and Garrett Dean was that Garrett wasn’t there for the money. He just happened to run into the bank that afternoon to get away from the police (apparently, he was wanted for armed robbery in another state), and the police had managed to trail him. The Birch brothers must have arrived before they could close in. Otherwise, they never would have gotten inside.
As it worked out, they did get inside, and that’s when things got bad.
For the first time since I’d started sweating, Garrett Dean took his gun off of my daughter. The Birch brothers must not have done a very good job of surveying the room when they walked in because they didn’t seem to realize there was a hostage situation going on until Garrett reeled around and pointed his gun in their direction. More evidence these guys weren’t too bright.
I swear my heart stopped at this point. Obviously, it started again all by itself, but I honestly couldn’t say when. I do remember the Birch brothers whispering to each other for a few moments, as Garrett calmly pointed his gun at them with what seemed like a tremendous amount of patience, for whatever reason.
That’s when I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye.
While the Birch brothers and Garrett were sizing each other up, the security guard was reaching for the backup piece I soon saw at his ankle. Silently, I reprimanded myself for thinking him a coward, at the same time questioning whether now—when there were three of them—was the time to make his move.
The two brothers started shouting back and forth with Garrett, though I hardly remembered a word of it later. What I do remember is that the yelling made me more nervous than ever. Garrett still had his arm around my wife, and he was angry. But mostly I was still worried about Gabi.
Looking back I realize that I was wrong to think it, but at the time it seemed to me that she was becoming restless. She had shifted her gaze from me to the shouting gunmen more than once, and I was afraid she was going to move. Still sweating, I felt a cold shiver run the length of my body at the thought that Gabi was going to give up and come running over to me. I think I started praying. Maybe I was just mumbling to myself that I wished she would stay put.
It didn’t work.
The first gunshot was like nothing I’d heard before, the vast bank lobby giving it a quality I couldn’t have imagined. My eyes had been on Gabi the entire time, to the point that I couldn’t tell who had fired or in which direction, but I flinched so hard my knees almost buckled under me, and my lip started to tremble like a startled child’s. Gabi didn’t move, but then the second shot came and, subconsciously, I knew it was all over.
At that moment, all I could do was focus on my daughter. My angel. My baby girl. My eyes followed her down, down, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My knees finally gave out below me, and I hit the floor, hard, squeezing my eyes shut, causing the tears to gush out and roll down my cheeks. I thought I was dreaming. I had no control over it. I dropped my head into my hands, and saw only Gabi. My good girl, who had stood still through the whole thing, who had done exactly what she had been told without even a whisper, and now my eyes were bawling after following her down.
Then, I felt the tiniest little arms around my neck. Arms I’d felt before. My baby girl’s arms. What I had seen was real. I hadn’t been dreaming. But as is so often the case, what I had imagined was far worse than what actually was. My eyes hadn’t been following my daughter’s body as it slumped lifelessly to the floor. They had been following her as she instinctively ducked for safety, and subsequently missed her as she ran across the floor toward me.
It was over. And in a way, my subconscious had been right.
It had known that Garrett fired the first shot into Chuck Birch’s abdomen, causing him to die a slow, painful death as his brother ran out the door and into police custody. It also knew that the security guard had gotten his Glock 43 out of his ankle holster without being noticed by Garrett Dean. My wife had flinched as well, and after her body lurched forward from the sound of the first shot, exposing Garrett’s torso, the security guard’s bullet entered Garrett’s right armpit while he was still pointing his gun toward the front door. Garrett’s lungs were shredded by the bullet with his name on it, and as he collapsed to the floor, Gabi had come running to me.
I held her in my arms so tight I was afraid I would bruise her, yet, somehow, it felt as though she was the one comforting me. (I was the one crying, I suppose.) After a moment, my wife ran over too, throwing her arms around both of us.
I won’t say we didn’t have our problems after that day, or that we don’t still. They don’t just go away by themselves. But they did suddenly become… manageable.