25 Mar 99

This just in from a friend on the West Coast:

Klamath Falls, OR, (population 40,000):

Christine Tisdel was sitting at the dining room table in her Spring Lake Road home reading a magazine when she heard the squeal of tires on the road outside.

A black Jeep Cherokee skidded to a stop in the middle of the road. Its driver’s-side door was open, and a man carrying an autoloading rifle (brand unknown) jumped out and headed for Tisdel’s front door. She didn’t wait for him to get there but instead ran out of the house via another door and started running north on Spring Lake Road.

“He started chasing me and I heard him holler at me,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Stop or I’m going to kill you.’ “I didn’t look back. I just kept running.”

Then she heard the gun go off. But, she said, she wasn’t hit, and she didn’t stop.

The man who was chasing her, Walter Lee Henderson, 45, of Roseburg, OR, had just led police on high-speed chase through Klamath Falls. Minutes before he arrived at Spring Lake Road, a passenger in the stolen Jeep he was driving either jumped, fell or was pushed out of the moving vehicle onto Highway 39 and then hit by the vehicle’s tires. She later died at a local hospital.

Henderson then drove the Jeep across the fields along the Diversion Canal and ended up on Spring Lake Road.

Police arrived shortly thereafter and captured Henderson without incident. Tisdel was unhurt.

LESSONS:

>It’s always a “come-as-you-are” war. Violent threats to your life never happens when you are “ready.”

>”Chance favors the prepared mind.” Even though Tisdel was unarmed, she did what she could, immediately.

> “Who hesitates is lost (dead).”

>Extending the distance is nearly always tactically sound.

>It’s really hard to hit someone who is running like hell!

/John