[narrator] In Utah,
[officer]
a wanted ex con kidnaps a baby.
[gunshots]
[police radio]
[narrator] He wants to trade the baby's life for his freedom.
We had given him every opportunity to give up the baby
and he wasn't going to have it.
I remember thinking, how am I going to save this baby?
[police radio]
[narrator] On Utah's south western border with Arizona,
lies the city of St. George.
It's surrounded by the Mojave Desert.
[Lefevre] The city sits in a valley
and it's a beautiful area with a lot of red rock, desert landscape,
almost like, uh, what you would envision in a dream.
Something on a wallpaper on a computer. Very stunning.
[narrator] Police from neighboring Washington City
are following a car containing ex-convict Oscar Alcantara.
They have a warrant for his arrest.
[Willinger] The suspect was known to us.
He has had previous convictions for domestic violence
as well as a previous incident of holding a hostage at gunpoint.
[Ence] Law enforcement had come into contact with him
on, like, two or three separate incidences over the past week.
And he had been able to evade us.
Washington City Police Department had received a tip
that he was going to be at this particular apartment complex.
So they were going to try to apprehend him.
[narrator] Officers can see there's a young woman in the car.
She pulled over, 'cause she's like what do you want me to do?
You know, they're telling me to pull over.
She was absolutely hysterical.
She's yelling at the officers that her child is in the car.
[officer]
Alcantara has taken the baby boy out of the car seat
and is holding him on his lap.
[Willinger] I was the afternoon shift, the swing shift
and as we were just starting our day,
the call came out over our radio
that Washington City was in pursuit of a vehicle.
A gentleman had kidnapped a child and stolen the vehicle.
I've never once heard an actual, legitimate kidnapping
be broadcast over the radio,
so this is something that we need to take very serious.
We had a hostage, right?
A child that was kidnapped. It's priority number one.
And so we were going to do what was needed
in order to rescue and save that child.
[officer]
I was kind of brought into negotiations a little bit later on in my career.
Um, I'd spent most of it as an investigator
where, you know, you kind of develop being able to talk to people.
And that's one of the kind of the skill sets that's a requirement
as a negotiator is just being able to communicate right.
I went to my vehicle to join the pursuit
and then dispatch patched through the suspect to my phone.
Immediately, I just put the car back into park and just sat there
in the parking lot of the police department.
There was no way to communicate with him. He was literally just yelling.
You know, it's one of those things.
If I can't say anything, right? We can't get that two way conversation going.
[Ence] Had there not been a baby or somebody kidnapped,
we know who he was, we know where, essentially, he lived.
We would not have pursued.
Um, we would have not risked the lives of citizens and law enforcement
to pursue him.
[Willinger] That child is what changed it all.
We were doing everything we were doing for the child.
[officer]
As the vehicles proceeded on I-15,
the suspect just accelerated at a very, very quick pace.
[Ence] The suspect had been in the system.
It wasn't like he was new to how police respond
and he knew that by holding that baby on his lap,
that that would restrict our abilities to stop him
and he used that, obviously, to his advantage.
There are mechanisms in place to stop pursuits or to end pursuits sooner, right?
You can spike the tires. You can use what's known as a pit maneuver.
But all of those things,
you have to account for the fact that there's an innocent child
and the vehicle could crash.
Ultimately, it all hinged.
He has to stop or slow down drastically.
That was the only way that I could even see a positive outcome.
The suspect is the one in control of the situation, right?
Uh, he holds all of the cards.
[officer]
[Willinger] We lost sight of him.
With him weaving in and out of traffic, we honestly lost sight.
On that particular day, um, I decided to run traffic on, uh, Dixie Drive.
Dixie Drive intersects with I-15.
I told myself, hey, you know, I'll drive to an area close to I-15
just to be in that area.
I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Initially, the whole discussion with the negotiation
was trying to get him to release the baby.
And if he no longer had the baby, then obviously
our response to that type of a call is going to change.
[Trombley] People who will drive like that
will do whatever it takes to try to get away.
Which can be one of the scariest, scariest moments.
When he decided to go to the left
and he crossed three lanes of travel,
the only thing that went through my mind is they're going to collide
and, you know, with that type of speed,
um, he's probably going to kill himself, the kid,
the vehicle that he hits, whoever's driving that.
We couldn't trust that he was going to just let the baby go,
so we can't just willfully stop following him
in hopes that he's going to safely let the child go once we're out of sight,
so our hands were tied.
He didn't think that I was listening to him.
He didn't think that I was taking him seriously.
Which, of course, I was trying to get him to understand that I was.
[gunshots]
[police radio]
And all of a sudden, it was quiet.
And I heard a couple of shots.
And he came in...
He said, that was...
I'm serious. I don't want to shoot the baby.
I see his hand reach out the driver's side window,
and then I look at the end of his hand
as it's starting to, um, reach back towards me, that it's a handgun.
[gunshots]
I'm trying to process everything
and then all of a sudden, there's two shots fired.
[gunshots]
It was at that point
I realized this wasn't going to be a typical negotiation
'cause in his mindset, he was prepared to die.
[police radio]
As Highway 91 continues west, it gets smaller and smaller.
It turns into a rural, two lane old highway
and then it goes right out into the high desert of Mohave County.
He thought once he crossed into Arizona, we were just going to miraculously stop
and not continue on but little did he know, right? He took a child hostage,
kidnapped a child and that changes things
where we are going to ensure that child's safety.
He actually listened.
And that's when you know that your negotiation is going to go somewhere.
He'd made an agreement.
And I was certain, I was probably, if someone had asked me,
I would say 95% certain,
that he had made up his mind that he was going to leave the baby.
[Sgt. Willison] At the end of this pursuit
it was the furthest thing from an ideal scenario.
We are in Mohave County.
Um, several miles into Arizona.
But we are on the one side.
There's traffic coming up the opposing side that we have no control over.
[narrator] Arizona deputies have joined the chase,
unaware that Alcantara has agreed to stop.
We had no way of communicating.
Our radios don't talk to Mohave County.
At one point, a Mohave County sheriff's deputy comes right up on him.
And it's at that moment where I'm thinking, okay, holy cow.
This is going to happen.
He actually is going to leave the child there on the shoulder of the road
and continue on.
Somebody had gotten too close.
And at that point, the phone went dead.
We've given him every opportunity to put the child down,
to just leave the child alone and continue on.
We would leave him alone but that wasn't happening.
Honestly, it was very stressful.
We needed to control the situation.
I hear on the radio
he's running
and I can't do anything about it.
I was so close. It was so close.
And it just got out of my hand.
And I couldn't get it back.
[police radio]
[narrator] Alcantara appears to be heading towards houses
on the edge of the desert.
Would he break into a home? Would he take other people hostage?
Would the situation just grow?
That was something that we couldn't let happen.
We made a plan that we were going to get people in strategic positions
to kind of contain him and the baby.
[police radio]
He went straight out into the open desert.
He never once does not have the child between us and him.
Never. It was a human shield, right?
It was protection for him.
I knew that Officer Thompson was a sniper on our SWAT team
and I asked him to deploy.
So he went and positioned himself on top of a truck
in an attempt to kill the suspect.
To end the situation if it came to that.
But then on the other side, it's like, well, what if he stands up
and he has empty hands.
We're going to go and we're going to arrest him.
[police radio]
When he fired that first shot,
we couldn't see the suspect and the child.
So we had no idea if it was successful.
I'm thinking is the child all right?
Was the shot successful?
Was it a shot that didn't harm the child
and do we have a suspect that was down?
[Willinger] The handgun was pointed directly at us, at the line.
To me, that signaled that we were beginning to push him
to where he was starting to feel our presence
because he had really just been threatening the child
and had shot towards us during the pursuit
but now he was pointing his gun at us.
I saw that need and I said, "All right."
I'll step up, I'll start talking to him.
I mean, I don't have training and experience with crisis negotiations.
Um, so it was a little awkward at first.
You give me a task and I want to complete that task.
And so now my intention is to get him to surrender.
[Willinger] Is he going to shoot one of us?
Is he going to shoot this child?
Those are all things that were going through our minds.
[police radio]
Our visibility was very, very limited.
So the drone was used to give a better overview
of what was actually happening.
[officer]
I just wanted to, like, just grab him and just shake him
and be like, "Dude, just listen to me."
Um, but it was frustrating.
And it felt like the longer we kind of were in a stalemate,
the greater the chance the child was going to be harmed.
[Willinger] The plan was put into place
to get Officer Lefevre into position,
our second sniper on scene, there, to end it.
To end the chaos.
[Lefevre] Some of the things that you have to consider
when you're a sniper on the SWAT team
is that you're going to have to make lethal choices.
and you're going to have to take someone's life to save someone's life.
And that's something that I realized a long time ago.
Something that I was willing to do.
In the sniper realm, this is a really difficult shot to make,
because the ultimate liability is killing an innocent subject,
especially unintentionally,
and I remember feeling that way.
Thinking, okay. You've only got one shot at this.
I remember seeing Mr. Alcantara.
I remember seeing this innocent baby.
And all I could see were their heads, essentially.
And I remember thinking, wow, this is someone's child just like I have a child.
How am I going to save this baby?
I needed Officer Lefevre to be able to move in as undetected as possible.
And Officer Ott was encouraged to just engage in conversation to buy that distraction.
I understand that we're trying to get a sniper into position,
but it's my job to get him to surrender before we even have to take a shot.
In that moment, it was like, yes, yes, this is it.
He's going to either let the baby go,
or he's going to put the baby down and walk up to me.
It just kept prolonging, prolonging, prolonging.
[Lefevre] There's always the possibility of a peaceful outcome
and generally, that's what happens.
They see that they've put themselves in a corner that they can't get out of
and for the most part, people do give up.
And during that time, I was thinking,
well, we're running out of time
but how much time do we give him to give up?
I remember looking through the scope.
Um, you could see, you know, the anxiety on his face
and it looked and appeared as though he was never going to give up.
And I had made a decision that if I got into a position where I could take a shot,
I was going to take that shot.
[Ott] Seth is a very good friend of mine.
I know that that's what he has to do.
And honestly, I don't wish that upon anybody.
I wanted to do everything I could
to prevent Seth from being put into that incident
where he has to live with that the rest of his life.
And then knowing that the baby also needed to be saved as well.
So I was very vested in trying to get him to surrender.
There were very many times I thought that okay, now I have a shot.
But the human body moves all the time.
And then it wasn't the time because then it would have shot the baby.
And that was a very difficult feeling for me.
And I kind of wondered, am I ever going to be able to do this?
Um, am I going to be able to make sure that this baby goes home to its mother.
Mr. Alcantara stopped moving.
It was just a split second, but it was enough for me to be able to take that shot.
Even though it was inches away from the baby's head.
What I remember seeing was Mr. Alcantara and the baby
just, uh, falling backwards in a violent manner.
And I couldn't see anything else.
[Willinger] It was an experience that I'll never forget,
because I didn't know if that child was safe
and ultimately, what we were doing, we were doing for the child.
[Lefevre] When I fired the shot, I was very confident
all the way up until when the rescue team went to go pick up the baby.
I immediately felt nauseated and horrified
thinking, you know, did I just shoot that baby?
[Willinger] When I scooped the child up from underneath the suspect,
it was just total validation.
That everything we had done worked and that he was safe.
From the time that the suspect took the child
till law enforcement picked the child up after the suspect was killed,
was one hour and 17 minutes,
which was an eternity for that mother.
I can only imagine what she must have been feeling.
[narrator] Oscar Alcantara had a lengthy and violent criminal history
including a previous conviction for kidnapping.
An investigation clears Officer Lefevre of any wrongdoing
for firing the fatal shot.
[Lefevre] I remember going home,
using tweezers and just pulling out cactus quills
out of my body in the shower,
and it seemed like at that moment, I was able just to kind of relax
and to be able to think about the magnitude of the situation.
Thinking, wow, I just took a life
but also, I took a life but I saved a life by doing that.
And, um, that responsibility sometimes falls heavy on your shoulders.
It felt like I had just failed my mission.
I wasn't able to get Oscar to surrender.
And I was really invested in this, almost too much.
And so it was hard. Very hard.
[narrator] Officer Ott had the opportunity
to meet the baby whose life he helped save.
I remember just giving him stickers, giving him coloring books.
Letting him play with my police dog.
Like, just trying to bring joy to this kid
and then also being able to see that he's not harmed,
so it was really good
and kind of actually brought some closure to everything that had happened.