Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [40]
When we spoke, it was clear that Cirillo did not consider himself a legend. He declined to say how many shoot-outs he’d been in, though double-digit numbers have been printed elsewhere. “I hate to mention the number,” he said. “People start thinking there must be something wrong with you.” Actually, he said, he thought of himself as kind of cowardly. “I never even gave blood at the department,” he confessed. “I didn’t want them sticking needles in me.”
When he joined the NYPD in 1954, Cirillo hoped to never have to shoot anyone. And he succeeded for over a decade, working as a firearms instructor. He fired his gun thousands of times, but never at a real person. Then in the late 1960s, a rash of violent corner-store robberies rocked the city. Police found one store owner shot execution style in his establishment. He had a concentration-camp number tattooed on his arm. “This poor bastard comes over here to get killed, right?” Cirillo says, still disgusted after all these years.
Under pressure to do something, police commissioner Howard Leary started up a new special unit: the Stakeout Squad. The department asked Cirillo and the other instructors to volunteer. Given the risks, almost all of them, including Cirillo, declined. But after some goading from his partner, who insisted that the assignment would be prestigious, warm, and dry, Cirillo signed on.
Two hours into his first stakeout, he realized he’d made a mistake. He and his partner were standing vigil over a large dairy store in Queens that had been held up by the same robbers several times. The officers settled in on top of the manager’s booth, and camouflaged their position with ads and coupons. Sure enough, four men walked in, looking nervous. Cirillo could just tell they were going to hold up the place. He knew he would have to do something. But the realization came with a shock of fear. “I felt like I was becoming unglued, like my arms were going to fall off, like I was going to slip down like a river of water,” he told me. “I knew I was a good shot, but I didn’t know what would happen if someone was shooting back at me.” Cirillo also felt, at the same time, ashamed of his own reaction. So when three of the robbers took out guns and held them to the heads of the cashier and manager, he forced himself to pop up above the wall of coupons.
As he stood, the crotch piece on his bulletproof vest fell off, clattering to the floor. The robbers turned around and pointed their guns at him. What happened next was nothing short of a miracle, Cirillo said. His training took over. His pistol sights came into focus, nice and steady, just like at the shooting range. He found he could count the serrations on his front sight. Everything began to move in slow motion. But as he took aim, he saw one of the robbers wave something light in color. His conscious mind responded this way: “I’m saying to myself, ‘Oh, is he giving up? Is that a handkerchief?’” Suddenly, he heard a shot and saw a flash of fire spark out from his own gun barrel. “My subconscious was saving my ass.” He felt the revolver buck in his hand several times. And his conscious mind said, “Who the hell is shooting my gun?”
When the smoke cleared, he found that three of the men had run off. (Two were arrested soon afterward, seeking medical attention for bullet wounds.) The fourth lay behind the cashier, dying from Cirillo’s gunshot. What he had thought might have been a white flag of surrender was actually a nickel-plated revolver, now cradled in the robber’s hands. The man had managed to fire one bullet,