RIP Louisiana DUSM

Yesterday, outside Baton Rouge, a Deputy United States Marshal (DUSM) was shot and killed.  I will speak for 15 minutes on my experiences on the USMS Fugitive Task Force, what kinds of men and women make it up, and what a loss this is.

-LEO

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Good afternoon. It's Leo, and today the subject is heavy. A deputy marshal was killed yesterday in Louisiana outside Baton Rouge. And I just want to go into a little bit about my experiences with the Marshal Service. I was not a deputy marshal. I was a special deputy U.S. Marshal. I was a task force officer, a city police officer that was assigned to the Marshal Service for a few years. So I didn't go to the full training academy, but you do, once you're assigned there, they start cycling you through various trainings like HERFA high-risk fugitive apprehension, and you just regularly rigorously train with the group and with larger groups. You go to, you know, division headquarters and do various training things with sim munitions and live fire and excellent unit. When I left, they gave me a hatchet, and my boss said, You are a hunter of men, and a hunter needs his tools. And it's inscribed with U.S. Marshal Service, with the years that I was there. I also bought a Glock 22 or 23, I think it was a 22 for the 225th anniversary with the insignia. And I told them when I left, you guys ruined law enforcement for me because Fugitive Task Force is the best job in law enforcement, and nothing will ever compare. And I mean that. When I went to the initial information meeting with ATF, that was the first step for me to get hired as an ATF agent. The special agent in charge in Atlanta said something that kind of struck me. I was on the regional fugitive task force at the time, Surtiff, the Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force, Surtif for short. And a lot of agencies are pretty prideful. You know, it would have been easy for him to say, you know, excuse me, we're ATF, we go after the worst of the worst, blah, blah. And he kind of did. He said, if you guys are looking for a cushy fed job where you sit behind a desk, this ain't it. We go after gang members, we go after murders. And then he said, the only higher risk jobs in law enforcement are being a patrol cop because you don't know what you got, and being on a U.S. Marshall Regional Fugitive Task Force. So lots of credit to that special agent in charge for not letting his ego get in the way of the truth. I don't know if this was a task force shooting or uh or not. There are deputy marshals that go out on fugitives that it's not a task force warrant. It's a deputy marshal warrant. It's usually a federal warrant. Whereas the task forces tend to be largely comprised of task force officers like I was. My task force had 14. Two were deputy marshals. One ran it. The other one cycled through it on a rotating basis. And the other 12 of us were task force officers from various local agencies, all the way from probation, parole to city cops, dirt road deputies, everything else. And we all worked together. So a normal day on the task force was, I mean, it's it's just not anybody else's normal. It was catching murderers. That was it. Find the most violent warrants you could find and find these people. Generally, warrants would come from homicide units, and they would say, hey, we've we've tried to catch this guy. He knows he's wanted. That's totally normal. He knows he's wanted. He knows he's got murder warrants. Swatts done search warrants on three places where he hangs out: his house, his mama's house, his girlfriend's house, and we ain't got him, and he threw his phone away. That's the normal warrant you get. Catching murderers is totally normal. Hence it being such a great job because you are catching really bad people. There's no BS. You can, at least for me, I could largely pick and choose my warrants unless it was a sudden violent crime. And that's the other kind of work we got is somebody shot a cop. Somebody shot up a police car. Somebody did a mass shooting. Somebody killed four people in Miami. This was a case that I got. I got to call it like 7 a.m. Hey, this guy did a quadruple in Miami. He killed his wife and his three stepkids and then fled. So that's the other thing that they get. That is normal. That's a normal call for them to get on a Saturday when they're at their kids' ballgame. Hey, we got a quadruple. It's time to work. I need you on surveillance five minutes ago. We think he's at this house. And it's hard to prioritize your personal life over that because four, four fucking people are dead. And it's huge. So the norm is just like I said, it's not anybody else's norm. It's not SWAT's norm. Most SWAT teams, a lot of them are not full-time. You don't do it every day. A lot of the full-time teams, they're not operational every day. They are largely training. I'm not diminishing what SWAT teams do. I'm just saying full-time teams train a lot. Part-time teams, part-time teams train and then have ops around their normal police job. I was on a SWAT team. I can speak to that. On a part-time team, one of my good friends is on a full-time team. This is this is how it is. I'm not guessing. Even highly operational full-time teams, the U.S. Marshall Regional Fugitive Task Forces tend to be more operational. There's daily work of catching murderers. Without the tools, without flashbangs, we couldn't use flashbangs. SOG Special Operation Group, they can throw bangs. We never used them once in when I was spending years on the task force. We did it all ourselves. But we were doing it, I mean, we had Rams and Hooligan tools to owe. We had stuff to open doors. We had pole cams and pole mirrors. But a lot of the special weapons, we had the special tactics, but we didn't have the special weapons that SWAT teams had. And that's what these guys and gals are doing every single day. It's murders.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

It's mostly murders, multiple murders. Fugitive task forces lose people. A deputy marshal was murdered yesterday. They haven't said who it is. He probably had a family.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

And the people they're going after don't think about that. They're putting their freedom when they did something horrible. They're still willing to kill and do horrible things to secure their freedom. And on all my social media crap, my background is a U.S. Marshall star with the black morning band across it for Pat Carruthers. And I'll tell you about that a little bit. Hopefully I don't break up trying to do it. But if I do, I don't really care. He was a deputy chief. He's a real marshal. He wasn't a TFO like me. And was the epitome of leadership. I was on leave the day he was killed. They were going after a guy who had shot up a police car in South Carolina, knew they were going after him. They thought he might be holed up in this trailer in Long County, Georgia, out in the country. These jokers hide anywhere, man. They'll be in the inner city all the way to way out in the country like this, to living in homeless camps. This guy was in a trailer in the country. They weren't sure he was there. Not going to go into the details of it, even though I those were my friends, those are my friends that were there. And they've told me all the details, but I don't see what that does for anybody. But I'll tell you from my perspective, I was on leave. I was in the hiring process, as I said, with ATF, and I had a physical fitness test in Atlanta that day. And our admin is still a retired chief with the Marshal Service. Great man. And he called me first thing in the morning.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

And just said, Pat's been killed. And it's hard to wrap my head around it.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

Wanted to know what happened to the other guy. He said, We shot him a lot. As far as I know, he's still alive. He did end up dying. But the guy was hiding in a room with a gun waiting to die. And I was on the way to my PT test. Pat was based out of Macon. He's the deputy chief of Certif. Everybody in Atlanta knew him. So I got to my PT test to run my little mile and a half. And told the guys, told the agents that were there. I was crying. And still showed up to do it. There's nothing I could do. I was four hours away. There's no point in driving to the scene. He's deceased. I don't, I don't know what I could have done. But I told them I wasn't. There's no point in just acting like I'm just crying for nothing. And I was sure they knew him.

SPEAKER_01 10:53

I said, Chief Carlos got killed this morning.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

And they broke up and started calling the other guys over, the other agents that were there to do the test. One of them was like, we know this guy.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

And I was like, yeah, we all know.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

Um did my PT test and went home and met his wife and four kids who play ball for the Naval Academy and are what you'd expect out of somebody like that.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

Just badasses. It's just tragic when something like this happens.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

Pat was he was the guy that when we were doing a hit, when we were going out on murders, if he was in town, there's no reason a deputy chief, a high-ranking marshal, would need to be in the stack. He would fill in where he was needed. He wouldn't take over. He would let us run our case. He would be the voice of reason. If three people were yelling at the same time, drop the gun, put your hands up, get on the ground, confusing commands. I remember him saying, one voice. Reasonable, concise thing to say. We all understood. He didn't take over. He didn't yell at anybody.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

He didn't make it worse. He fixed it. With two words. And that was common. He would listen to his guys.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

I mean, I was like, I don't know how many levels below this guy. I had a team leader. He had a boss who was the marshal that ran the task force. I was on the city team. His boss, who's the team leader, was a task force officer. Great dude. His boss was the marshal, Stewart, that ran the task force. Then his boss was Pat, deputy chief. And then his boss was the chief over the whole sort of. So Pat would come out. He could have done several things. Most people, I think, in that position would not come out on a hit. They definitely would not be in the stack, in the house, on somebody that shot at police, doing the same exact job as the guys, being a grunt when it's needed. Most wouldn't even be there. Or if they are, they would either be on the outskirts, not filling in when it's needed, or they would be taking over and possibly making things worse. I'm not talking about the Marshall Service leadership or any crap like that. I'm just saying in general, when higher ranking leadership, upper management shows up, and you're in law enforcement, it doesn't tend to make things easier on the investigator. They often do stuff that makes it worse. He never did. He came to training with us. When we were out for 12 hours on a range in the South Georgia heat, he was out there shooting. When we were doing a shoot house and sim munitions, and they got three guys hiding in there with SIM guns that are doing their best to kill us, not really making it winnable, making it a fight. He would go in with us, take the paint, do the after action, take the criticism.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

And that was Pat.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

And then he would go home to his beautiful family and be an outstanding dad, the kind of dad that produces a Naval Academy football player or two, a wife that adores him, all this stuff. These are the kinds of men and women you get on these task forces because slums and bums and lazy shit don't do it. First off, they don't get selected. Second off, once they find out what they do, they don't seek that. They don't want to be in at 5 a.m. on surveillance. They don't want to go out to a rap show on a Saturday night and try to get this gangster rapper that did a triple last weekend offstage in front of his security team. They don't want to deal with that. That shit's hard to do safely. It's in the military. You can't go in guns blazing. There's no suppressing fire.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

But these are the men and women that do it every day. It's a terrible loss.

SPEAKER_00 15:26

Again, I don't know his family situation, but we all got family. And most guys, almost everybody on that task force with me had wives or ex-wives and kids.

SPEAKER_01 15:37

And some people lost somebody.

SPEAKER_00 15:41

And I'm really sorry to them. I know they won't hear this, but I salute the people that do it every day. They know the danger. They understand it. Most have been around gunfire. Most cops I know have not. You haven't been on the receiving end of gunfire, maybe once or twice. These guys on that task force, you know you're going to get shot at sometimes. You know you're going to be in foot chases while wearing rifle plates. It's a rigorous job, but you believe in it. So rest in peace to that deputy marshal. Thank you to everybody that's doing that job. I'm not. I don't know if I would at my age, but it doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

It's not about me. That's it.