[narrator] In Utah...
[narrator] ...a wanted felon evades police...
[Gordon speaking]
[Sheldon] I guess if you can imagine just probably
the most extremely dangerous game of hide and seek, right?
He pulls up a gun and says,
"I'm on the run, and I need a place to go."
[narrator] ...and holds a family hostage.
[Tadehara] We also had intel that one of the hostages
looked very similar to the suspect.
[woman on radio]
[police radio chatter]
[man] Come outside!
[narrator] 25 miles north of Salt Lake City, Utah,
sits Clearfield.
[phone ringing]
[operator speaking]
[man speaking]
[operator speaking]
[man speaking]
[operator speaking]
[man speaking]
[narrator] Police already have a warrant out
for Manhard's arrest,
and he is known to be violent.
[Ferreira] There were threats made.
We knew that he was armed with a weapon.
We also knew that this same person was wanted
for multiple aggravated crimes out of another city.
So I grabbed my vest, put it on,
grabbed a bulletproof shield.
[man speaking]
[operator speaking]
[man speaking]
[Ferreira] He's calling the police on his own family.
If this person's scared of them,
it should alert us to take this serious
and to know that there could be real issues here.
[man speaking]
-[operator speaking] -[man speaking]
[operator speaking]
[man speaking]
[operator speaking]
[Ferreira] We did not go lights and sirens.
When someone's armed, we don't necessarily
wanna let them know how far away we are
and when we're gonna be there.
[Ferreira] They had seen the suspect
out in front of the house,
but they couldn't see him anymore.
So they weren't sure where he was at.
[officer on radio]
[Ferreira speaking]
Since I had the shield,
I was the first person in line.
Some of the dangers when approaching
a situation like that, first of all is the unknown.
[Ferreira] You're waiting for that door to bust open.
You don't know if he wants to come out of there
guns blazing.
[Ferreira] Opening that shed door, that's definitely
the most nerve-wracking moment.
If he's in there, I thought, "This is it.
This is where we're gonna...
have a gun fight."
You really don't come down from
that stress of looking for someone
until every inch of that place has been cleared.
[narrator] Officers canvass the neighborhood.
[Wong] We ended up finding a video that showed
the suspect leaving from the house,
uh, getting into a car and driving away.
The vehicle was a silver Hyundai.
[narrator] An emergency call from a neighbor
comes into Clearfield 911.
[operator speaking]
[woman speaking]
[Wong] Early evening, the suspect
was back out at his brother's house.
[woman speaking]
[operator speaking]
[woman speaking]
[narrator] Officers stake out the house.
[Wong] We didn't have any indication that
he was going to come back to the house.
Our arrest team was moved from the area.
[operator speaking]
[woman speaking]
[operator speaking]
[sirens blaring]
[woman speaking]
[operator speaking]
[Wong] It was just the worst timing.
Uh, and we had to respond back to the brother's house
and try to get him in custody
for a third time.
Yet again, we were just moments too late.
[officer speaking]
[Wong] By this time I'm pretty frustrated,
because I wanna try to capture him
as safe as possible without, you know,
any harm coming to his family.
We need this situation to end with him in custody.
We had information that a suspect's vehicle
was blacked out, there was no headlights,
no lights inside the vehicle.
So he was trying to sneak away from us.
And then Officer Adair picked him up
on one of our main roads.
It was good conditions for us
to engage in a vehicle pursuit with the suspect.
[siren wailing]
He's very desperate at this point not to get caught.
There were sparks starting to come out
from the bottom of the suspect's vehicle.
I lose sight of him.
I start trying to coordinate units
to cut off all points of entry and exit
again into our industrial area.
Conduct a systematic search
to try to locate the suspect.
[narrator] A woman alerts an officer
to a car parked in an odd spot.
[woman speaking]
[man speaking]
He went right through there.
[officer speaking]
[Wong] It's important to remember that
we believe that person to be armed.
They've already committed very violent crimes.
And you're asking guys to, and giving them assignments,
to go into areas where, um,
they could be hurt, they could get shot.
[Wong speaking]
Looks like it's crashed out,
and so I start to bring
our containment area in a little bit.
So that way we can get a good search,
clear the vehicle,
and also hopefully get a track with the canines.
[dog whines]
[dog barks]
[operator speaking]
[man speaking]
[operator speaking]
[man speaking]
[operator speaking]
[man speaking]
[woman speaking]
I had no doubt in my mind that it was him.
For a brief, probably, second,
I just sat there and felt
just really overwhelmed with
the fact that this guy's continuing to
commit violent crimes.
I have split my resources now between, uh,
a shooting investigation which is very serious,
and still trying to apprehend our suspect.
My biggest concern is obviously
trying to find a place to search.
I mean, he could be anywhere.
[Gordon] My car's equipped with a radar device,
and it registered a vehicle coming towards my location,
well over 100 miles an hour.
I identify the vehicle as being the one that
Manhard had stolen at gunpoint.
I turn on, you know, emergency lights
and sirens, and I attempt to catch up.
It's apparent and obvious that
he's not gonna slow down, he's not gonna stop.
Any time you engage in a pursuit,
you have that adrenaline dump.
I'm coordinating with the other troopers that are there
uh, on scene to deploy the stops.
So as the car starts to slowly come to a stop,
uh, my mind starts racing.
"Okay, what's, uh, what's gonna happen?
What's our next move gonna be?"
[sirens blaring]
[Gordon] It was just me and Manhard.
We know he has a firearm, we know he's recently used it.
[sirens blaring]
At this point, I believe I had another officer
that was on scene, and since traffic was light enough,
we were also able to run across the freeway.
Those few short minutes
in a stressful situation like this
when you're dealing with an individual
that's, uh, desperate,
it seems like an eternity.
[officer on radio]
[Gordon speaking]
[officer on radio]
On the west side is where it is.
[woman on radio] Copy.
Copy, we're on the way,
command at 1700 House, 200 left.
[officer on radio]
I arrived on scene and it was...
It was a pretty chaotic scene.
I probably had 30 to 40 officers
that were conducting various assignments.
[dog whines]
So I immediately established incident command,
uh, near the last-known location of Manhard.
[Sheldon on radio]
[Sheldon to officers]
[officer speaking]
[Sheldon] My response time after I was notified
that he jumped over the fence,
it was about five to seven minutes.
So I knew that my containment
was going to need to be rather large.
Contained one large square block.
[officer on radio]
[officer 2 speaking]
[Sheldon speaking]
[narrator] With a search area approximate 1.25 square miles,
it is impossible to learn
exactly where the shot came from.
The helicopter arrived. He did a...
The pilot did a very good grid search
for probably 20 to 40 minutes,
and didn't locate any indication
or sign of Manhard in the area.
Now that I know that Manhard can't be located
in the open air by a helicopter,
I'm starting to transition
my thoughts from tools and technology
to a house-to-house.
[narrator] Holly Samuelson is in one of those houses.
I was sitting on the couch watching movies,
and I hear footsteps coming up the stairs,
and in comes this man in a hoodie,
and dripping sweat.
And then he pulls up a gun and says,
"I'm on the run and I need a place to go."
He started to get really kinda twitchy and anxious.
Um, and he had me go get tin foil
for his heroin.
He wanted me to map things out.
Like, who was where.
Presley is my anxious child.
She's in the basement.
He says, "Okay, we don't...
We'll keep her out of this."
And Chris, um...
takes a sleeping pill at night,
and honestly will not hear a thing.
And then I said, "My daughter Piper
and Ethan, her boyfriend,
they are in and out all the time.
So I'm hoping tonight that they won't come home."
[narrator] Outside, officers continue
searching for Manhard.
I guess if you can imagine just probably
the most extremely dangerous game of hide and seek, right?
There's literally thousands and thousands
of hiding places that a person can go.
[officer speaking]
Some of those houses were not even occupied.
They were under construction.
Um, so we had to go into every single structure
that we could to ensure that Manhard was not there.
In the loft, you hear the garage open,
and I heard it,
and my heart just sank.
Because I was like, "Oh, no. Piper is coming home."
I walked in and I looked up,
and I saw her with him at the top of the stairs
in the loft area.
He revealed his gun at that point.
[knocking on door]
[officer speaking]
[woman speaking]
[officer speaking]
My motherly instinct
just kind of took over,
because he was so close to both of us,
and the things that he was saying was just...
really starting to get scary to me.
He stood up to get his tin foil,
and for the only time, the only time,
set the gun down next to me.
I grabbed the gun.
I kicked the back of his knees
to buckle them, and...
my thought was, "I have to injure him,
and then we can run."
-[gunshot] -Shot the gun.
And of course, I... I didn't aim up,
because I wanted to injure him,
so I aimed down and I missed.
[officer speaking]
I knew I had to hold on to this gun for dear life.
And the only way he could get me to release that
was by starting to punch me in the head.
[officer speaking]
I released the gun.
And then he immediately went to shoot me.
And I thought my kids would be without a mom.
I thought I was gonna die.
And there was a click, and nothing happened.
[officer speaking]
[Sheldon] The weight of the world was kinda on my shoulders,
and we still haven't found the problem.
And then we're getting, you know,
just systematically, one by one,
this address is clear, this address is clear.
You start to think,
"Did he break our containment?"
[Piper] When my dad woke up,
and immediately he sees him,
and he sees a gun,
my dad did not speak.
You could just see anger boiling up within him.
And then Ethan showed up.
And I think at this point, um...
Joe was very, very stressed.
[officer speaking]
[Sheldon] They found a bullet hole in a window.
And that bullet hole was the one gunshot
that the officers heard when they responded on scene.
And we were able to confirm that everybody was okay
in that residence, and that Manhard was not inside.
[Chris] Holly had told him that
I had to go to work at 6:00.
And so at, like, 5:50 he was like,
"Oh, it's time for you to go, Dad."
And he kept calling me Dad, like, in a weird way.
[Piper] He was thinking, "Oh, well,
if the cops don't know I'm here,
and the dad doesn't leave for work,
then that's gonna look really suspicious."
He had me sit in the chair right in front of my dad,
and he put a gun to the back of my head.
And was like, "Okay, Dad, you need to go to work."
I could feel the gun touching the back of my head.
And at this point,
I knew my dad had a gun under his bed.
And I saw him looking down at it, and, like,
kind of looking back at me and I was just like...
"It's okay. It's okay. Please don't go..."
Like, I was just trying to, like,
communicate with him, like, any way I could,
"Please don't go for your gun.
If you do, it's gonna end in disaster."
[officer on radio]
[officer 2 speaking]
[Holly] Chris, he just...
[sniffs and sighs]
let down his guard and fight those instincts.
And he just went with the flow, and I think...
that was the hardest thing he's ever done,
is to have to leave his family.
[officer speaking]
[officer on radio]
[Chris] It was horrible.
I watched him standing right there,
holding the gun as I backed out of the driveway.
And literally, as soon as the garage door goes down,
all these cops, like, bombard the car.
I said, "The [bleep] that you're looking for
is in my house."
[officer speaking]
You leave them with this psycho
and you don't know what is gonna happen
or where this is going.
It was the worst thing I could ever imagine.
[Presley] I had woken up around 5:00 in the morning,
and I was in the middle of doing my makeup.
And I got a text from my neighbor across the street
and she just said, "Hey, are you okay?"
And my heart immediately dropped,
'cause I didn't know why I wouldn't be okay.
[officer speaking]
Remember walking quietly up my stairs,
and then I saw a man facing...
his back facing me.
And I saw a gun,
and I just immediately ran down my stairs,
and ran out my window and was dialing 911.
[Sheldon speaking]
[officer speaking]
And these men in army suits, like,
grabbed me, and they just said,
"It's okay. We have your dad.
Your family's gonna be okay."
[Sheldon] As soon as we're notified that
we have a hostage situation,
I contacted our hostage negotiators.
We make sure that the house is contained.
We start to deploy further resources
such as, um, forward observers or snipers.
There's really three questions we ask ourselves
on all hostage situations.
Does the suspect, in fact, have hostages?
Is the individual armed?
Has the individual displayed
behaviors consistent with that of aggravated felonies?
And if you have three yeses,
you have basically met the state statute
for deadly force.
Open authority.
I am a SWAT sniper.
I have never once
in my 10 years of being a law enforcement officer
been granted open authority.
[Sheldon] Once negotiators got on scene,
they were having sporadic text message
and voice conversations
with the Samuelsons inside the house.
We had one incident reported that
somebody poked their head
out the back door of the residence.
So I heavily stacked snipers
on the back side of the residence.
[Tadehara] So, we arrived
in our first hide location
which was a home to the northeast.
From that home, we could see
the back side of the home.
The views into the home were limited
due to the blinds being closed,
and the sun rising from the east
creating a glare on those windows.
We also had intel that one of the hostages
looked very similar to the suspect,
which is problematic from a sniper perspective.
I began just studying the pictures.
Everything from height, weight, eye color,
any sort of scars.
Anything that would differentiate
between Ethan and Joseph.
[woman on radio]
[Sheldon] Conversations obviously evolved
with the negotiators of,
"Hey we wanna make sure that the Samuelsons are okay.
Um, can you bring them to the front door?"
[Holly] As we were going down the stairs
for that walk to the door,
I was expecting guys to jump out, grab...
or, you know, people to come in
and start talking to him.
[officer on radio]
There was no one there. There was no sound.
It was... You could hear a pin drop.
There was no one there.
I didn't have snipers in position
at that time in the front of the house.
[officer on radio]
The air just kind of got taken out of me.
"Oh, I missed it."
I missed my opportunity.
I missed our opportunity to end this situation.
I need to rectify that immediately.
Um, so that's what we did.
[Tadehara] Over the radio we were told to move.
We'd already pre-planned our route.
[officer on radio]
[Tadehara] I took my rifle, radio and a camera,
and we ran from that home.
We made our way through the neighborhood,
uh, and through some backyards.
And the first viable hide
that we came to was in the backyard
of a home across the street from our target home.
And then we fell back to a position of concealment
by a window well,
and I took up my position behind the rifle.
Um, so, we start to work with negotiators,
uh, and we tell them
we want that exact thing to happen again.
[Tadehara speaking]
[vibrating]
[officer on radio]
The door hinged right opens in.
It had a wreath on it.
And I thought to myself, "Well, that's about head height."
So I centered my crosshair on that wreath
and waited for the door to open.
[officer speaking]
[Tadehara] And then, it seemed like minutes,
but only a few seconds,
I started to see
Holly, Piper and Ethan.
They're standing at the threshold of the door.
And Joseph, he was up against the wall,
hiding behind the door.
I... I see his head
slowly begin to peek around the door.
At that point, I knew
the hostages were not being released.
They weren't making any effort
to cross the threshold.
They were frozen in fear.
At that point, I made the decision to fire.
[gunshot]
[officer on radio]
So I send the shot down range...
and I could see it impacted.
[officers speaking]
But then the door closed.
[officer speaking]
There was a good few minutes where...
I didn't know. I didn't know if I had...
sent those hostages to their death.
When snipers miss,
hostages die
and officers die.
There's this anticipation of the door opening.
There's the anxiety of the shot being fired
and it being communicated,
and then on the radio you have nothing but dead silence.
[Tadehara] The rush of emotions that I felt
was unlike anything I'd experienced in my life.
All at once, I was...
I was happy
that I had taken the shot.
I... I felt guilty because I know what I meant.
I was excited. The adrenaline was coursing through my veins.
I was worried, I was terrified
that I had injured one of those hostages
or they had gotten hurt because I did something.
[officer speaking]
[unintelligible shouting]
No, I'm good.
[sobbing]
[Holly] It didn't even cross my mind that
what would happen would happen.
And when the door opens,
it was just... boom!
[gunshot]
The loudest noise I've ever heard.
And Joe turned and fell.
[Piper] His body had kind of spun,
and because of that he pushed my front door closed
when it was open.
I screamed and just...
I was just in shock, and it was...
something I can't even explain in words,
to witness, um...
The aftermath of what happens
when someone's shot. Um...
It... [sighs] it was traumatic.
[officer speaking]
-Okay? -I'm...
It was just the jacket of the round.
It was just the shrapnel.
It hit me hard. It was like a...
Harder than I would have expected. It was like, just...
It was... I don't how to describe it, but...
it hit me really hard and I blacked out.
[Holly] When I realized...
[sighs]
that we were free,
the SWAT guys just...
held us up.
And just, like, embraced us
and just, like, took care of us.
[Holly sobs]
[narrator] Manhard is airlifted to the hospital
where he later dies of his injuries.
[Tadehara] We've trained hostage shots
thousands of times.
[stutters]
But what they don't train you for
is after you pull the trigger.
But it was...
I know it was the right thing to do.
Piper and I, they put us in a police car
and escorted us to the station.
And...
that was such a surreal feeling.
We just sat in that car and just...
didn't speak at all.
We just looked around,
and it was the most beautiful day.
They pulled up in a car, and everybody got out
and I just went over and hugged Holly.
It was awesome.
I have no doubt in my mind that...
Excuse me.
That my entire career, all 16 years,
prepared me for that one day.
[Tadehara] Joseph Manhard made a lot of mistakes in his life.
Lived a hard life.
Committed multiple felonies, struggled with substances.
I don't think he's an evil person.
I don't hate him. I hate what he did.
I hate what he made me do.
He crossed from this world to the next
because I sent him there.
It's not something I take lightly.
[narrator] The family has since become
close friends with the officers
who helped save their lives that day.
I... it was really important for me
to meet our sniper.
I wanted to do something special,
so they knew how much we all appreciated
everything they did for us.
And so we had a little gathering
in our cul-de-sac.
And he's just a hero to us.
We love him like family now.
And it's awesome
to have that relationship with these guys.
They got us through the worst night of our lives.
It feels like we were supposed to meet.
[sighs] I'm not a very religious person.
I don't know what I think about fate and all that.
But I'm glad that I was able...
to keep them from harm.
But it just, it feels...
It feels right.