For several hours the partners took turns staring through the small mirrored window. It was late, past midnight, when a young man entered the store, strolled up to the counter and asked for cigarettes. When clerk behind the counter turned around, he was staring into the barrel of a 9-shot RG .22 revolver. He knew the drill; he opened the cash register and began pulling out the bills. Behind the mirror, no more than six feet from where the hi-jacker was standing, Mitch Hazelbaker reached for one of the two 870 Remington shotguns leaning against the wall and picked up the wrong one. When his partner leaned over to see what was happening, Hazelbaker whispered, “Get back, Dan. There’s not enough room.” “Then give me my damn shotgun back,” Johnson hissed. Ignoring his partner’s plea, Mitch raised Johnson’s shotgun to the window and saw to his horror that three young girls had entered the store and were standing directly behind the robber. He moved left then right, trying to get a clear shot but there was none to be had without endangering the children. At the counter the hi-jacker pointed to a second cash register and said, “That one too.” “There’s no money in there,” the cashier insisted. “There had better be something in there,” the man threatened, “or you be a dead mother-fucker.” The frightened clerk reached out to open the second register, standing at arm’s length to stay out of what he knew would soon be the line of fire. Without willing it, his eyes flicked to the mirror on the wall. The keyed up hi-jacker snapped immediately on the cashier’s subconscious tell. He whirled, pointed his revolver at the window and thumb-cocked the hammer. Seeing the gun, the girls shrank back from the man, and gave Hazelbaker a small opening. He pulled the trigger. The nine pellets of buckshot bowed out and then shattered the mirror and traveled just six feet before striking the man above his right nipple as a solid slug of lead, still encased in the plastic wad. He was slammed to the floor so violently that his feet flew into the air and the cocked revolver made a lazy arc toward the ceiling before coming to rest between his legs. The three girls, terrified but unhurt, stood there screaming.
Preface
In the decades immediately following World War II, the rapidly growing city of Dallas on the black land prairies of North Texas was inundated by an ongoing surge of vicious armed robberies. Targeting mostly small grocery, liquor and convenience stores, the criminals were becoming increasingly violent, leaving behind a string of injured and dead victims. The undermanned Dallas Police Department was hard pressed to stem the violence and the city’s citizens were becoming upset, angry and scared. H. C. Holloway was a newly promoted police lieutenant assigned to command a patrol watch covering the Southeast sector of the city where the problem was the most virulent, accounting for more armed robberies in a given year than the rest of the city combined. A decade of experience investigating robberies and murders in the Homicide and Robbery Division under the tutelage of the legendary Captain Will Fritz had given Holloway a unique insight into the mind of those criminals he called “hi-jackers.” His witness during those years to countless acts of senseless violence committed by sadistic thugs who seemed to derive more pleasure in maiming and killing their helpless victims than from any money the crime produced generated in him a smoldering hatred for all those criminals who presumed to make their living by taking another’s property at the point of a gun. When an attempt to arrest a vicious career hi-jacker named Robert Hugh Barber Jr. erupted into a violent gun battle that left a fellow officer dead and Holloway and another detective seriously wounded, that smoldering hatred erupted into a burning desire for revenge. It was not a feeling he took any pains to hide and even fifty years after the fact, almost every officer who worked for him would without prompting make the statement, “Holloway hated hi-jackers.” Whether he was simply looking to protect the citizens who depended upon him for safety or seeking revenge against all hi-jackers for the actions of Robert Barber, it was Holloway who first experimented with the tactic of placing officers in hiding in places that had been robbed in the past and were likely to be robbed again. He armed them with pump shotguns loaded with buckshot, ordered them to never give a hi-jacker the first shot and told them there would be hell to pay if they let one escape. The officers he hand-picked for the assignments believed him and they did as they were told with resounding success. In short order, Holloway’s experiment was expanded and the “shotgun squads” he developed began to turn the tables on the city’s armed robbers, ensuring that would-be hi-jackers experienced the same dry-mouthed fear of sudden death that they had so long inflicted on innocent civilians. Over the next two decades, while the often imitated program served to keep citizens safe and hi-jackers in fear for their lives, the official name of the unit that performed this dangerous and challenging task changed from Shotgun Squad to Special Enforcement to Tactical Section.
Whatever official title the department chose to bestow on them was unimportant because, from start to finish, by police officers and civilians alike, they were proudly known as “Holloway’s Raiders.” This is their story.
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