As off-duty Dallas police officer Amber Guyger drove home after a 13-and-a-half-hour shift, she chatted with her partner on the phone. The conversation, combined with her fatigue, may have distracted her as she ascended the ramps in the parking garage adjacent to the South Side Flats apartments. She lost track of the levels and parked on the fourth floor rather than the third, where she lived. She remained oblivious to her mistake as she walked the hallway and came to the door that she thought was her own. The door was ajar. She could hear someone inside.
Instead of calling for backup or using verbal cues, she entered the apartment to confront the presumed intruder. There, in the dimly lighted living room, she encountered the silhouette of a man on the sofa, 26-year-old Botham Jean. She called out, “Let me see your hands!” He responded by yelling “Hey! Hey! Hey!” in what Guyger called an aggressive voice. Guyger fired her service pistol twice. One bullet struck Jean in the chest. In the next moments, she discovered her tragic error. At trial, she testified that she began to realize her mistake when she noticed a round ottoman illuminated only by the television. The furnishings in the room weren’t her own.
During her frantic five-and-a-half-minute 9-1-1 phone call, the gravity of her mistake took hold. She checked the address on the front of the door. “I’m at apartment number 1478,” she said with some incredulity, and then she repeated it with more confidence: “I’m in 1478.” She lived in 1378. “I’m an off-duty officer,” she explained. “I thought I was in my apartment, and I shot a guy thinking that he was … thinking it was my apartment.” She repeated “I thought it was my apartment” approximately 19 times. Amber Guyger—fatigued, distracted, and disoriented—failed to maintain situational awareness as she returned home from work on September 6, 2018, and it resulted in a fatal tragedy.
Firearms instructor Steve Moses says, “Situational awareness means that I have proactively checked in and I am aware of what is taking place in my surroundings, and I’m especially looking for anomalies, whether that’s something happening that shouldn’t be, or something that should be happening that’s not.” Self-defense trainer Claude Werner agrees, stating that situational awareness means answering the question: “What’s wrong in my right world?” Amber Guyger was so unaware of her surroundings and so “checked out” that she didn’t even notice that she had become what’s wrong in someone else’s right world.
Guyger’s case represents an extreme failure in situational awareness. We have explored other cases where the armed defender’s failure to pay attention to their surroundings caused them to stumble into a life-and-death encounter. Most of these encounters occur when an armed defender finds themselves navigating an unfamiliar place or interacting with unfamiliar people. Most individuals who choose to carry a firearm do so because they understand that they could face a deadly threat practically anywhere. For an armed defender, any location could become the scene of an armed conflict. Any place you go could become a battlefield.
Claude Werner, a retired Army captain, says that officers are trained to understand what is called intelligence preparation of the battlefield. “There are points on the ground where the enemy has to make a decision ahead of time,” Claude says. “When you analyze this on a map, it’s called a decision point. In personal self-defense, we have to ask ourselves: ‘How do we force the decision point on the situation where it is to our advantage as opposed to the predator’s?’”
To help answer this question, Claude points to John Boyd’s OODA loop, a decision-making framework that involves Observing, Orienting, Deciding and Acting. In Lesson 9, we will revisit three cases where the armed defender failed to observe a threat, failed to properly orient to a threat, or failed to decide and act on a threat before it devolved into violence. First, we’ll go back to the Clearwater, Florida, parking lot where Markeis McGlockton caught Michael Drejka completely off guard by violently shoving him to the ground. Then we’ll return to Austin, Texas, where Daniel Perry, according to his statements, unwittingly drove his vehicle into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters. We’ll end our exploration in a Louisville, Kentucky, parking garage where a young lawyer, Kristen McMains, triumphantly fought a knife-wielding assailant who meant to kidnap her—and probably worse. We discuss how, with heightened situational awareness, each of these defenders could have more intelligently prepared the battlefield, recognized critical decision points, and potentially avoided the violent encounters altogether.
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When Michael Drejka started an argument with Britany Jacobs in the parking lot of a Clearwater, Florida, convenience store, he didn’t know her partner—six-foot-one, 205-pound Markeis McGlockton—was inside the shop. You may remember from previous lessons that Drejka took offense when people parked in handicapped spots without a placard. When he saw Jacobs sitting in her car, parked in the handicapped spot without a tag, he decided to give her a piece of his mind.
When McGlockton exited the store, he saw Drejka standing a few steps back from Jacobs’ driver’s side window. McGlockton walked briskly towards Drejka. Oblivious, Drejka continued to argue with Jacobs until McGlockton reached him and violently shoved him to the ground. Drejka had no awareness of the situation unfolding around him. Stunned and lying prone, Drejka struggled to a sitting position, drew his concealed pistol, and fired a single fatal shot, killing his unarmed attacker. Drejka was tried, convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Don West says, “Drejka was completely caught off guard because his focus was on Britany. He was too late to react when McGlockton got right up on him … he had no opportunity to exercise better judgment and be more proactive in protecting himself.” In a self-defense training context, when somebody has become fixated on an interaction with another, Claude Werner refers to that other party as “the object of their attention.” Don West warns, “You don’t want to get so wrapped up in that moment that you aren’t aware that there may be friends or relatives or interested strangers coming and injecting themselves into this.”
When Drejka spoke to detectives about the shooting, he said, “If he was going to hit me that hard to begin with, a blind side from the get-go, what else should I expect?”
Don speculates that “McGlockton’s clear interest was separating Drejka from Jacobs. Had Drejka seen him coming and simply taken a step or two back or held up his hand—as soon as Drejka showed he was no longer confronting his fiancée , then I think from McGlockton’s eyes, the situation was largely de-escalated.” If Drejka had maintained better situational awareness, he could have interpreted McGlockton’s intentions and oriented himself to the new situation. He might have neutralized the threat before it ever manifested by voluntarily breaking contact with Jacobs, the object of his attention.
To maintain situational awareness during a tense verbal encounter, retired undercover narcotics officer Craig Douglas recommends repositioning your body—so your peripheral vision can see things around and beyond the person you’re engaged with. Steve Moses explains Craig’s concept in the context of the Drejka case: “Imagine Drejka is at the six o’clock position, and Britany is at the twelve o’clock position. If Drejka had moved around to the three o’clock—because the doorway was off to his left— he could have had his eyes on Britany as well as the area where a threat would likely come.”
While it may sound unreasonable to ask citizen defenders to live their lives in a state of combat readiness, maintaining situational awareness simply means making threat level assessments and adjusting your focus accordingly. You don’t have to be on high alert all the time. Claude Werner paraphrases a good training example from his friend and colleague Bill Rogers: “When we’re driving along in our cars, we’re often thinking about other things … and we’re a little distracted … well, when you see a few raindrops on your windshield, and you can tell you’re starting to run into the rainstorm, now it’s time to focus my attention on what’s going on around me.”
To extend the metaphor, Michael Drejka never stopped to notice it had started raining. When McGlockton decided to intervene, Drejka had fixated so munch on Jacobs that he never observed McGlockton coming. He didn’t even get to the first “O” on John Boyds OODA loop.
***
Daniel Perry drove into a group of protest marchers on the streets of Austin, Texas, on July 25, 2020—the summer following the police killing of George Floyd. The off-duty Army sergeant had traveled nearly 70 miles from his post at Fort Hood to moonlight as a rideshare driver. While turning from West 4th Street onto Congress Avenue, Perry found his vehicle surrounded by protesters. Officer Joshua Visi recalled that Perry claimed, “the protesters were attacking his vehicle, they surrounded his vehicle.”
In the midst of this confusion, Garrett Foster, a protestor dressed in tactical gear and legally carrying an AK-47-style rifle, approached Perry’s driver’s side window. “I thought he wanted to talk to me,” Perry explained to detectives. He rolled down his window, presumably to talk to Foster, but feeling threatened, he drew his .357 and fired five shots, striking Foster three times in the torso and once in the arm. “The guy pointed a freaking weapon at me, and I panicked,” Perry said on his 9-1-1 call. During an interview with homicide detective David Fugitt, Perry said, “I believe he was going to aim at me. I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.”
We explored the extraordinary legal consequences of Perry’s decision to use deadly force in Lesson 3, and we revisited the case in Lesson 4 and Lesson 5 to help illustrate the elements of imminence, severity, and intent. For Lesson 9, we will rewind to the moments before Perry’s encounter with Foster, and we will explore how better situational awareness could have avoided the deadly clash altogether.
An important aspect of Perry’s legal defense was that Perry unexpectedly found himself surrounded by the protesters. A KXAN report describing Perry’s interrogation interview states, “Perry told the detective he got a text from a woman he met while working for Uber earlier that day. He said he got distracted while texting her because she asked for money to go on a date with him. Perry said he looked up, and he was in the crowd of protesters on Congress Street in Downtown Austin.” If Perry’s claim is true, then it means he paid so little attention to his driving that he accidentally turned into a crowd of people.
“Typically, you’re not going to be driving and all of a sudden a crowd of 20 people just magically emerges,” Steve Moses suggests. “You probably had plenty of signs that something was going on. Rather than drive towards that, the best thing would be to exit that area immediately.” If Perry didn’t know what was going on, as a concealed carrier—and as a trained Army sergeant—he should have known. To defuse this expectation, at trial, Perry’s defense counsel leaned on the testimony of Detective Fugitt, who never believed Perry should have faced charges for the shooting. According to reporting by KVUE, Fugitt “showed the route Perry’s car took, clarifying why he made the turn onto Congress Street, saying he was in a ‘turn-only lane.’” Moreover, Fugitt believed that “protesters intentionally jumped in front of Daniel Perry’s car to stop him.”
If correct, Detective Fugitt’s testimony suggests that Perry found himself in peril, not through inattention, but because of a combination of strict adherence to traffic laws and a proactive decision by the crowd to trap his vehicle. Based on the evidence, it’s unlikely that Perry was completely oblivious to the protesters. A more probable scenario is that Perry observed the marchers late, and he failed to re-orient and recconcile his current plan (to turn onto Congress Avenue) to what he saw. With better situational awareness, he could have planned in advance not to risk a confrontation in the crosswalk of a busy city street. Even without training, it doesn’t take much common sense to recognize the danger presented by a crowd of protesters, and when in a vehicle, it doesn’t take much effort to speed away before things get out of hand.
***
Kristen McMains was trapped in her car in a parking garage in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, with a depraved criminal, 27-year-old John Ganobcik, who had just stabbed at her with a rusty knife. “He would have kidnapped me, killed me,” McMains later told reporters, “and I don’t want to think about what would happen in the meantime.” So she fought back. At first, she couldn’t reach her .32 Beretta Tomcat that she kept in her purse, so she fought with her hands, a violent melee in which she ripped off all ten fingernails. When she finally managed to grip her pistol, it wouldn’t fire, but she kept pulling the trigger until shots rang out. She struck the predator in the neck and the buttocks—non-fatal wounds that nonetheless caused the attacker to flee.
The encounter with Ganobcik began well before he forced McMains into the passenger seat of her own car. As McMains left her office at the downtown lawfirm where she worked, she noticed Ganobcik on the skywalk connecting her building to the parking garage across the street. She became suspicious that he was following her. Nonetheless, she crossed the skywalk and entered the elevator of the parking garage. When Ganobcik joined her in the elevator and didn’t push a button, McMains knew she was in trouble. She said, “I had the instinctive feeling I was going to die tonight—unless I did something.” She needed to act. She had reached a decision point.
McMains chose to ride the elevator to her floor. She exited the elevator and ran to her car. Ganobcik followed and caught up with her. “I got body tackled,” she told reporters. “The strongest hit I’ve ever felt in my entire life—and felt an impact at my abdomen with the knife. He started demanding that I get in the passenger seat.” In another account, she said, “He immediately yelled at me with profanities to give him my money. Before I could respond, he placed his hand over my mouth, muffling me so I couldn’t scream.”
“It was truly a triumph for that young lady,” Claude Werner says, “and she could have made it even more of a triumph if she had just turned around and went back to her building.” Whereas Michael Drejka found himself completely blindsided by Markeis McGlockton, Kristen McMains became suspicious of John Ganobcik as he kept pace with her along the skywalk. Surveillance video showed the man stalking her through the busy food court adjacent to the skywalk moments earlier. Unlike Drejka, McMains maintained good situational awareness. As Claude says, she recognized that “he was wrong in her right world.” Unfortunately, McMains failed to act until it was too late.
If McMains had considered the civilian equivalent of intelligence preparation of the battlefield, she might not have proceeded to the elevator. Claude says, “In Kristen McMains’ case, forcing the decision point on the skywalk as opposed to at her car changes the whole dynamic because, if it’s on the skywalk, people can see it. In the garage, not so much. There she’s decisively engaged and has to fight the engagement to a conclusion by herself.” Claude’s criticism is by no means an indictment of her triumphant defense, but he stresses that much of personal protection involves “knowing where the boundaries are, where you have to make a decision, and thinking about, ‘if this person crosses the boundary, then at that point they’ve helped me make the decision about which of my options I should pursue.’”
As of this writing, you can search the Internet and find surveillance video of Ganobcik following McMains on the elevator. You may recognize a moment when she could have stepped off the elevator before the doors closed: a brief but crucial decision point—one that she had likely already anticipated but failed to act upon. McMains had observed and oriented herself to the threat, but she failed to decide and act before the threat became severe and imminent. Self-defense instructor Tatiana Whitlock says, “McMains had a gut feeling that did not feel right. She knew something was wrong. If you have an opportunity to leave, we strongly recommend you leave. If someone walks into an elevator, you also have an opportunity to get out. Even if that’s not your floor, they don’t know that.”
***
As students of self-defense, we have the luxury of time and hindsight as third-party observers, so it sometimes feels unfair to render judgment on armed defenders who found themselves in harrowing life and death situations. But trial juries also have the luxury of time and hindsight, and our society asks them to render judgment in courtrooms across the country. One goal of the Armed Defender’s Dilemma is to learn from other people’s mistakes so we can avoid legal judgment ourselves.
We can always escape judgment in a self-defense shooting if we find a way to avoid the use of deadly force altogether, and that often begins with maintaining situational awareness—paying attention to our surroundings and knowing when to go on high alert. We can practice this skill without going to the range. As Bill Rogers points out, we practice maintaining situational awareness each time we drive in difficult conditions. Personally, I avoid a particular dangerous intersection each day on my commute to my office because drivers there tend to get angry and irrational. Claude told me that is an example of intelligence preparation of the battlefield.
You don’t have to be an Army officer to practice intelligence preparation of the battlefield. Although John Boyd developed the OODA loop while serving as an Air Force colonel, his adaptive decision-making process has been adopted for many civilian applications. You can apply it by parking under a light if you know you’ll be returning to your car after dark. You can practice it by leaving a bar when a drunken patron gets out of hand. When you observe a suspicious person loitering at a gas station, you can reorient and decide to fill up somewhere else. Don West says, “As we begin to appreciate the importance of situational awareness, you can discipline yourself to think about it and put it in your daily routine. Make it part of your life, and pretty soon, you’ll get better at it, and it will pay off when you really need it.”
If Amber Guyger had been paying more attention, she would have recognized she had come home to the wrong floor before she entered her neighbor’s apartment. Had Daniel Perry practiced situational awareness, he wouldn’t have inadvertently driven into a crowd of protesters. Michael Drejka wouldn’t have been blindsided by Markeis McGlockton if he hadn’t fixated so completely on his petty grievance with Britany Jacobs. And Kristen McMains wouldn’t have had to fight for her life if she had trusted her instinct and went back to her office to avoid the creep on the skywalk. In each of those hypothetical alternate scenarios, the defender’s would never know how close they actually came to peril. Steve Moses says, “One of the things that a lot of us don’t realize is that we’ve probably had more saves because of situational awareness than we are aware of.”
