Published: October 20, 2009 02:19 pm      

Emotions strong 10 years after officer ambush

San Antonio — Atascosa County sheriff's Chief Deputy David Soward can't pass the intersection at Coughran and Corgey without recalling what unfolded at this quiet country crossroads 10 years ago: a bloody ambush on a cool October night that left three officers dead.



Soward responded to the scene outside Pleasanton with six dozen other officers, watching it evolve from a tense standoff into a firefight that ended after another officer and a former Border Patrol agent were wounded and the gunman lay dead by his own hand.



A decade later, he still gets the same eerie feeling when he rolls past the scene "The hair standing up on the back of your neck feeling," he calls it.



And the intersection remains a sleepy corner, where it's easy to assume nothing much happens, where silence is interrupted occasionally by a passing car, cattle mooing or insects buzzing in the grass.



A white cross, emblazoned with three plaques bearing the fallen officers' names Deputies Thomas Monse Jr. and Mark Stephenson and Department of Public Safety Trooper Terry Miller serves as a reminder. A tattered U.S. flag crowns the top of a fence post just behind the cross; plastic orange flowers rest at the base.



After 10 years, it is clear that shooter Jeremiah Engleton, a 21-year-old repairman, did more than take three lives: He changed dozens of them.



Widow Mary Alice Monse said of her husband: "When he was gone, oh my God, it seemed like we were out there in the cold with no protection."



The night of the killings dominated the news long after it was over, with a lengthy trial and retrial of the shooter's accomplice, Kenneth Vodochodsky. And it left nine children without a father or stepfather, three women without spouses, an officer unable to return to patrol and a sheriff left to wonder, why couldn't we save them?



"It just made you feel totally useless, really," Sheriff Tommy Williams said. "You're just wondering, 'Why would somebody do this?'"



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After the shootings, Pleasanton and Atascosa County residents faced intense grief and confusion but also unity. Mourners, many of them strangers to each other, lined the streets during the officers' funeral processions.



Georgia Randles, co-owner of the Stage Stop restaurant, knew the officers from their visits to the Pleasanton eatery. She never forgets Oct. 12.



"In a small community like this, everybody knows everybody," Randles said. "I think it opened everyone's eyes that something like this could happen."



That night in 1999, Engleton phoned in a fake 911 call to the Sheriff's Department, luring the deputies and later the trooper to his mobile home on Corgey Road, where he hid in the brush. Authorities believe that he snapped after bailing out of jail and learning that his wife had left him.



Engleton methodically shot down the three officers as they arrived in succession.



That night, violence against peace officers was on many minds. Ten days earlier, a man had killed Kendall County sheriff's Lt. Larry Kolb at a Boerne-area mobile home park before turning the gun on himself.



At least two of the Atascosa County officers had attended Kolb's funeral, though they never knew him, said his sister, Sherlynn Kelley.



For law enforcement officers, deaths such as Kolb's are always a possibility. Early in Sheriff Williams' tenure, two other Atascosa deputies were killed in separate incidents.



But no one expects a man waiting in the brush with five weapons and 300 rounds of ammunition. No one expects a giant, swooping act of violence in a county with a population smaller than the University of Texas at Austin.



In retrospect, Pleasanton Police Officer Louis Tudyk should have worried when he heard Trooper Miller's first and only transmission from the scene: "Officers down."



Moments later, Miller was dead.



But Tudyk didn't know that yet. In a few minutes, Engleton would shoot both him and Carl Fisher, a former Border Patrol agent who lived up the road and pulled in moments behind the Pleasanton officer. Tudyk didn't know that soon he would exchange a volley of shots with Engleton, using his left hand to fire his pistol because a bullet had blown a hole through his right arm.



Tudyk simply raced to the intersection to help a fellow officer.



Soward maintains that no amount of training could have prepared the officers, noting that only a San Antonio police helicopter with an infrared sensor could locate the well-concealed Engleton.



"The only thing that could have changed anything that night is if (the officers) hadn't made the call," Soward said. "And that's just not an option for us."



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