Sean C. Morgan
and Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Nicole Street of Crawfordsville was on her way home from Napa Auto Parts in Brownsville Saturday afternoon when a Sheriff’s patrol car sped by, its lights flashing.
It was Sheriff’s Sgt. Dave Lawler, on his way to a Brownsville address after callers had reported a man was brandishing a shotgun and threatening people about 1:40 p.m.
Street has had her license for only a few months and she enjoys driving.
She needed some gas, so she pulled into the Chevron station at the corner of Highway 228 and Washburn Street.
“I pulled into the Chevron, and I saw him coming from the building,” said Street, 16.
Robert Earl Thompson, 51, a Brownsville resident, was carrying a gun. Behind him, an attendant shut the service station door and locked it. Thompson went to his car, parked in front of Street’s Dodge Neon, and picked up some shells and put them in his pocket.
“He motioned to me to stop,” Street recalled Monday evening. “I thought that there was a holdup in the store, and he was getting his gun to take care of that.”
That’s when Thompson ordered her to roll down the window. She rolled it down a couple of inches and he told her to roll it down all the way or he’d break through the window.
“I realized he was the person causing problems, and I was going to be in some trouble,” Street said. “I rolled down my window. He told me he didn’t want to hurt me, but he needed me. He wouldn’t hurt me unless needed, but he needed me to help him.”
Street, a sophomore at Lebanon High School, was in trouble.
Thompson’s girlfriend, Shirley Coulter, 49, of Brownsville and her two grandchildren, ages 3 and 4, had been in a vehicle with Thompson but escaped into the gas station, locking themselves in the bathroom, before Street arrived, neighbor Donna Gile said she learned from employees.
Mueller said three witnesses locked themselves inside the gas station and reported that Thompson fired a shot in the air when he couldn’t get in the station.
Lawler was now en route to the gas station, in response to those 9-1-1 calls, when Thompson ordered Street to get out of her car.
She told him she didn’t want to.
She said Thompson had his shotgun pointed toward her windshield as he leaned into the car.
He was calm as he told her again, “I don’t want to hurt you. I will, but I don’t want to hurt you,” Street said.
She opened the door and had one foot out when “he grabbed me around the neck with his arm,” Street said. He held her tight in the crook of his left arm, and she could feel the shotgun pressed against her back.
“As we started walking toward the store, I thought he was going to kidnap me,” Street said, but they continued on past his vehicle.
After that point, “I figured I was just going to die,” Street said.
It was 1:50 p.m. when Lawler arrived, as calls poured into the Sheriff’s dispatch station from neighbors and witnesses reporting that the gunman had taken a girl hostage.
Neighbors Gile and Renee Gatchet had come outside when they heard shots and realized that something was happening at the gas station.
Gile, who with her husband Jim own a car wash across the highway from the gas station, said Lawler’s vehicle was facing south on Washburn Street, on the corner of Highway 228, and that Lawler had his rifle out, across the patrol car.
Street said she saw Lawler outside his car.
She recalled Thompson telling the officer, “I’ll shoot her. I want a news crew. I want a helicopter, or I’ll shoot her.”
Still holding onto her, he paced across in front of the store.
She could still feel the gun to her back, she said.
“He shot it, but there was no bullet in the gun. I heard the gun go click,” she said.
Standing in front of the doors, he pumped the weapon and tried to shoot through them and then tried to break out the glass with the gun, Street said.
“He goes, ‘Well, it’s good I’ve got more.'”
Street said Lawler couldn’t get a clear shot through the fuel pumps.
Holding on tight enough that Street couldn’t get loose, Thompson reloaded his weapon, she said. She kept talking to him, asking him what he wanted, and he kept saying he just wanted his daughter, who was in Salem.
“I yelled over to the cop, ‘Just get him a news crew,'” Street said, and Thompson changed his hold on her, grabbing her by the back of her pants and breaking her belt.
Gatchet and Gile said at that point they heard Lawler yelling, “Drop your weapon, sir. Drop your weapons. Nobody has to get hurt here.” They both said they heard the sergeant say it at several points during the standoff.
Gile said Thompson yelled back, “You drop your (expetive) gun.”
With the gun pointed at Street, he told her to get on the ground.
As she dropped to the ground, “he had the gun to my head,” Street said.
Lawler got a clear shot with his AR-15 patrol rifle and took it, hitting Thompson, who fell to the ground on the west edge of the station’s front door, Mueller and witnesses said.
Street said when Thompson dropped to the ground, with a wound to his right side, she could see he was still breathing.
Gatchet, a graduate student in education, who lives across Washburn Street from the gas station, said she and her neighbor were watching when Thompson went down, Street was “standing there, kind of like she was dazed.”
“I started waving my arms and yelled at her to ‘Come here, come here,'” Gatchet said.
“She started running and another shot rang out. We yelled at her to get down and she got down in the middle of the street.”
The second shot was Lawler’s rifle, after Thompson again tried to point his shotgun and fire at the sergeant, Mueller said.
Gatchet’s neighbor pulled Street behind a large oak tree and Gatchet made it over to her she said.
“She was very scared,” Gatchet said. “She said ‘he’s going to kill me.’ I said, ‘No, he’s not. You’re safe now.'”
“I thought I was going to die,” Street said Monday. “I kept waiting for the bullet to come into me. It was terrifying, and I thought I was going to die.”
She knew from the start that that one or both of them would be shot, she said.
“I figured if I kept talking to him, it would keep his mind off shooting me.”
Gatchet said she took Street into her neighbor’s home and the neighbors called Street’s parents, Len and Michelle Street, and helped her calm down and get a drink. They also called a crisis response volunteer, who arrived shortly after.
Mueller said Lawler, a 10-year veteran of the Linn County Sheriff’s Office, was uninjured.
Detectives from the Marion County Sheriff’s Office and Oregon State Police are investigating the incident, he said.
It was the first shooting by a deputy since Cpl. Mark Harmon and Deputy Micah Smith shot and killed 38-year-old Jeffrey Eggiman of Silverton, who had abducted his girlfriend’s 11-year-old son and taken him to a logging road near Camp Tadmore, north of Sweet Home.
Street said, with certainty, that Lawler “saved my life, and without him, I’d be dead.”
“I know the gas attendants were very sorry they locked the doors when they came back out after me,” she said. “But I’m glad they did.”
She said if they hadn’t locked the doors, she is certain that Thompson would have made it inside and the situation would have been much worse.
The experience made her think about her relationships with others, she said.
“It’s made me open my eyes,” Street said. “I’ve gotten into a lot of fights with friends,” the kind where “you don’t want to see them again.”
She’s learned it’s not a good idea to hold grudges, Street said.
“You don’t know what your last words to them might be. I never said goodbye to Dad. It’s really opened my eyes to how quickly you can lose someone.”
After a weekend of media interviews and thank-you’s, including “a beautiful card” that Gatchet said Nicole brought her on Monday, NBC came to town at 3 a.m. Thursday to interview the Streets at the Pioneer Villa banquet room, Len Street said.
Nicole Street said she feels OK talking about the experience.
“I think the only thing that creeps me out is I still have the feeling of the gun in my back. I can hear his voice. I can picture it, but that’ll pass.
“I think what scares me the most is thinking of what could’ve happened if those girls hadn’t locked the door (to the station).”
Michelle Street said she’s thankful for the “entire Linn County Sheriff’s Office.”
“Deputy Lawler saved her life, but they were all amazing.”
There were 30 or 40 of them in plain clothes and uniform on the scene, Len Street said.
They didn’t want Nicole Street driving, her mother said, so one of the deputies drove her car home for her while another followed to give him a ride.
“I’m very proud of her,” Len Street said. While she was scared, she kept her head.
Street said he’s trying to look at the positives.
“My daughter came home alive.”
And the employees in the store were locked in and safe, he added.
“I’m very grateful for what Deputy Lawler did,” Nicole Street said. “I’m sorry he had to shoot someone to save me, but I’m glad he saved me.
“I just want to say thank you to everyone that was there for me.”