LIHUE — “If she hadn’t been there to talk him down, he could have taken both of them out,” Merri Murphy said Friday, describing how her friend, Vicki Taylor, helped police talk down a man armed with an assault rifle.
The Kauai Police Department issued a press release last week describing the actions of Tyson Relacion and Vernon Basue, two patrol officers who were recognized at last month’s Police Commission meeting and awarded “Officer of the Month” for deescalating the potentially deadly situation.
The Garden Island ran an article based on the press release in Friday’s paper, but according to Murphy, it only told half the story. She was there that day and watched as Taylor stood between police and the armed man until he laid down his weapon.
“They chimed in, but she was running the show,” Murphy said of Taylor. “She pretty much talked him out of it.”
The altercation started in the early morning of July 7, when Murphy heard an explosion from a rental unit on her property.
Murphy said she suspected the sound might be a gunshot but never mentioned it to the 911 operator because it was only a few days after the Fourth of July and figured it could just as easily be fireworks.
Two police officers who arrived a short time later were not aware they were responding to a potentially armed subject, according to Murphy, who said the officers were nearly at the front door of the man’s house before they realized he had a gun.
Taylor came to Kauai from her home on Oahu, where she works for the state Department of Health as a counselor for mentally ill patients, to visit Murphy’s tenant, the man who would end up in an armed standoff with police. His name is intentionally withheld from this article because criminal charges have yet to be filed against him in connection with the incident and he could not be reached for comment.
Taylor said she was standing with Murphy in her garage when they heard the explosion and decided to go check on her friend as the police car pulled into the driveway.
Taylor said she found the man agitated, standing in his room with the door open next to an assault rifle laying on the bed.
Trying her best to keep him calm, she told him police had just arrived and were just coming to talk.
Taylor said the man covered the gun up with a blanket. She walked outside, and seeing the two officers approaching the house, Taylor said put her hands up, motioning for them to “stand down.” Then, glancing back back through the doorway, she saw the rifle had been uncovered.
“I knew they were walking into a dangerous situation,” Taylor said.
She moved to the side of the door, out of the man’s line of site, and held up one hand like a pistol. The police officers got the message, and suddenly, Taylor found herself looking down the barrel of two pistols. Behind her the man walked through the doorway carrying the rifle at his hip.
The officers shouted at him to lay down the weapon. Taylor turned to speak with her friend, standing directly in the line of fire.
“Because I was closer to him I talked softly, and I said, ‘I love you. Put the gun down,’” she said.
She repeated the phrase over and over. Police yelled behind her.
“I was standing in the way,” she said. “They were gonna blow his chest off, and I knew that.”
The armed man didn’t move.
“He just stood there with the gun at his side,” Taylor said. “It felt like an eternity.”
Finally, he gave up the rifle. Police wrestled him to the ground and took him into custody with no further incident. Nobody was hurt, but Taylor said she can only imagine how badly things could have gone.
“If I hadn’t been there… I ran that over a thousand times in my head,” she said. “It would have been a horrible scene for them and him.”
Taylor believes she saved at least two lives that night but said she owes a debt of gratitude to the officers who were able to take her friend into custody without firing a shot, an outcome she learned not to take for granted after police officers on Oahu shot and killed her former client, a mentally ill man who refused to put down a machete.
“They’re heroes in my eyes because they didn’t shoot him and they could’ve,” she said. “I’m so proud of them for hanging in there.”
A KPD spokesperson on Monday said police did not dispute Murphy and Taylor’s version of events.
