The Concealed Handgun Manual by Chris Bird

Author:Chris Bird
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Privateer Publications
Published: 2011-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

When You Can’t See Your Standard Sights

One person who could have benefited from laser sights is Rory Vertigan of Phoenix, mentioned earlier in Chapter 4. In March 1999, the off-duty security manager engaged a Mexican drug trafficker who had just shot and killed a Phoenix police officer.

Vertigan, then twenty-seven, was taking a shortcut through an industrial area on the west side of Phoenix in the late afternoon. He is a big man—six feet five inches tall and just over three hundred pounds—and he was squeezed into a very small Kia Sephia.

The driver’s side window was rolled down to let the smoke escape from the cigarette he was smoking. His Glock 31 containing fourteen rounds of .357 SIG caliber was lying on the passenger seat. He had no spare magazines and no backup gun.

He was about three hundred feet from an intersection, when a white Lincoln Town Car came careering out of the side road, running the stop sign, and burning rubber, as it swung in the same direction Vertigan was traveling. As he approached the intersection, he saw a marked police car, with its bar lights flashing, follow in the same direction as the Lincoln.

The Lincoln stopped in the middle of the street, and Vertigan saw one man run from it toward a nearby building. Another young man got out, but stayed near the driver’s door of the white sedan. He had a .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolver in his hand.

As the squad car approached the Lincoln, the young man raised the revolver and opened fire at the police car as it approached him, then he tracked it, still firing as it passed him.

Vertigan reached for the Glock on the passenger seat of his car. He rolled to a stop about fifty feet behind the Lincoln Town Car. He watched horrified as the young man fired at the police car. His window was down, but he didn’t hear the sound of the shots or the wail of the police siren. He did see the revolver bucking in the man’s hands. He saw the officer slump down in the squad car. The police car slowed, veered off the street to the left, and smashed into a utility pole, snapping it in two.

The shooter, later identified as seventeen-year-old Felipe Petrona-Cabanas, turned towards Vertigan still holding the Smith & Wesson revolver in both hands. He thinks Petrona fired a shot at him.

“I’m not sure if he actually fired a round at me or not, but I know the gun was pointed at me, after he fired on the officer,” Vertigan said.

He passed his Glock from his right hand to his left, so he could shoot out of his window.

“I just saw the gun coming at me, and I thought I had to lay some rounds down, or he was just going to stand there and pluck me off.”

Vertigan pointed his semi-automatic out of the window in Petrona’s direction. He was unable to align the sights on his Glock, because his head was inside the car, his gun was outside, and his target was directly in front of his car.

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