The last witness to have seen Melissa Price, aka Samuel Allen Danforth, alive was a tranny with an eggplant-colored shag who’d been working the same block when Melissa got into the Dodge sedan. In fact, Melissa Price waved at the tranny with an OK sign that Melissa always gave after catching a trick who was cute or rich. In this case the trick certainly was not rich.
It was later debated whether Timothy Thatcher was overcome by remorse after his tryst with Melissa Danforth, or whether he truly did not know until it was too late that Melissa Price was not a female, but in the end it didn’t matter much. Just before 8 P.M., the landlady of the small apartment building in Thai Town heard terrible screams and glass breaking and heavy objects striking walls in the little two-room apartment. And then a gunshot, followed by another, terrified every tenant in the building, and several calls were made to the police.
Timothy Thatcher did something extraordinary. He dialed his mother in Billings, Montana, on his cell, and when she answered, he said to her through tears, “Mom, I shot somebody! I didn’t mean to do it, but when I found out this person was not a girl, I lost it!”
The Marine talked to his shocked and terrified mother for one minute and fifty seconds, telling her that he was “somewhere in Hollywood,” and ended with, “Tell Dad and Billy and Mary Lou that I love them all.” After that, he ran down the stairs and out to the street.
Six-X-Sixty-six was on the way to code 7 at Sheila and Aaron’s favorite Vietnamese restaurant for tofu bun vegetarian salad and 360 Degree Beef. They were only a few blocks from Thai Town when the code 3 “shots fired” call was given to a unit from Watch 3.
“Let’s jump this one,” Sheila said, and she switched on the light bar long enough to get around boulevard traffic, then stomped on the accelerator. They arrived at the scene before the designated unit, just in time to be almost T-boned by the Dodge sedan driven by the escaping Marine.
“Hang on!” Sheila said to Aaron. “Gotta burn a U-ee!”
The black-and-white Crown Vic made a smoking, tire-scorching U-turn, and the pursuit was on.
An electronic tone sounded, followed by the announcement from a female RTO to all units that always set hearts racing: “Six-X-ray-Sixty-six is in pursuit!”
Timothy Thatcher, who did not know the area, drove in utter panic west on Hollywood Boulevard and then south on Western Avenue where he lightly sideswiped a Ford Explorer in the intersection, breaking his own right headlight, then headed west again on Sunset Boulevard where he encountered lanes clogged by nighttime Hollywood traffic. He made a squealing turn south on Van Ness that nearly lifted two wheels, skidded sideways, righted the car, and sped to Melrose Avenue where he turned west once again, brakes screaming. Unit 6-X-66 was sometimes as close as five car lengths behind, and Aaron broadcast the street names they were passing as well as the license number of the vehicle driven by a “white male.” And as in all LAPD pursuits in the most car-strangled city in North America, there were moments when it was maddeningly slow.
Then they heard someone on the tactical frequency say, “Airship up!”
The Marine blew past Paramount Studios and made a tire-ripping right turn onto Gower Street, where he saw two black-and-whites coming at him from the north. The lead car belonged to the surfer cops, who’d switched on the light bar upon seeing him. That made a northbound Lincoln Navigator in front of Timothy Thatcher slam on the brakes, causing the Marine to crash into the SUV, giving the lone male driver of the Navigator a slight whiplash and all but demolishing the Dodge.
The Marine limped out of the car and ran north on the sidewalk away from Sheila Montez and Aaron Sloane but right at Flotsam and Jetsam and the Watch 3 team, who’d double-parked beside them.
Timothy Thatcher speed-dialed his mother once again, and when the panic-stricken woman answered, he said, “I love you, Mom. I love you!”
The mother of Timothy Thatcher later said that she got hysterical when she heard police officers shouting, “Get down! Down on the street!” And then the cell phone clicked off.
Johnny Lanier and his partner, Harris Triplett, had leaped from their car faster than the surfer cops, and the chunky black cop had a Remington shotgun at port arms as he raced forward. When he got behind Flotsam and Jetsam’s car, Johnny Lanier aimed the shotgun over the roof, while a spotlight from one of the later responders lit the Marine.
Flotsam yelled to Jetsam, “Johnny’s benching up with a tube! Get the fuck outta the kill zone!”
Then Jetsam shouted again to Timothy Thatcher, “Get down on your belly, goddamnit! Get down!”
And only then did all cops present see the M9 pistol that had been tucked inside the Marine’s belt in the small of his back. PFC Timothy Ronald Thatcher swiftly drew that pistol and pointed it in the general direction of Johnny Lanier and his shotgun, only ten feet from the Marine. It was over in an instant: a roar, a flame, a fireball in the darkness, and a massive round of double-aught buckshot crashed into the Marine’s throat and lower face, blasting chunks of bone and flesh all over the sidewalk beside the Hollywood Cemetery.
The senior sergeant Miriam Hermann was the first supervisor to arrive. By then, several other units were on the scene, trying to get traffic moving on the street. Johnny Lanier had returned the shotgun to their shop and was standing quietly with the surfer cops when the sergeant got there.
She had a few words with Sheila Montez and Aaron Sloane and walked over to Johnny Lanier’s young partner to say, “Triplett, you and Lanier go to the station and I’ll be there as soon as I can. You’ve got a long night of report writing ahead of you and lotsa face time with FID. The DA’s rollout guys will be there as well.”
“There was nothing we coulda done, Sergeant!” the rookie said, his voice quivering. “He didn’t give us a choice!”
“I know, son,” Miriam said, patting the young man on the shoulder. “Just get yourselves to the station now.”
The magazine from the pistol was found on the floor of the Dodge, along with a live round that the Marine had ejected from the chamber. Timothy Thatcher apparently had wanted to make sure that no one else would die with him and Melissa Price that night.
It took thirty minutes for the mother of Timothy Thatcher to get through to the watch commander’s office at Hollywood Station.
Sergeant Lee Murillo later said he would never forget that phone call, not as long as he lived.
The woman, becalmed by grief and from fearing the very worst, simply said to him, “Sergeant, I am the mother of Timothy Thatcher, who phoned me to say he’d shot someone tonight. I know that your officers caught up with him.”
Sergeant Murillo was speechless for a moment, then stammered, “Ma’am, I, uh, I really don’t have any details about the… the event. May I please have your number? Someone will call you as soon as we know something. Right now I just don’t… I don’t have -”
Her voice was controlled and implacable when she interrupted him to say, “Please, Sergeant, I must know one thing, and I won’t trouble you further. Did your officers kill my son?”
After notifying the on-call homicide team to get on this suicide-by-cop ASAP, Detective Charlie Gilford grabbed his coat and car keys. If one thing could get the night-watch D2 out of the squad room, it was anything macabre or gory. Charlie Gilford sped directly to the scene of the officer-involved shooting to take a quick cell-phone photo of what was left of PFC Timothy Thatcher, whose face he described as looking like “a beef enchilada with way too much cheese and salsa.”