Good Guy with a Gun #245: Bullhead City, AZ
You can’t prevent it, but you can prepare for it. Pants are optional. | Original incident: July 3, 2024
These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is somewhat updated from the calendar version.
“...anything can happen to anybody at any time regardless if you’re in a good neighborhood, bad neighborhood…”
So said Steve D’Amico, Mayor of Bullhead City, Arizona.
He was watching TV early in the morning, around 4:45 AM (oof — I only watch the back of my eyelids at that time of day) when he heard some rattling around at his back door.
Then he heard yelling.
He thought it was his son playing a prank on him, but when he realized it wasn’t, he grabbed his firearm.
But not pants. He was in his underwear. “You don’t have time to put clothes on when something like that happens,” he said.
He went out the front door and eased his way around the side of his house to the back.
A trespasser had bypassed his locked gate and hopped the fence. “I don’t know if he had a weapon or anything,” he said, “so I held him at gunpoint and told him to get down on the ground and stay on the ground and not move.”
He was a little nervous that there might be an accomplice, but none was found.
“And I held him there till PD came,” he said. They took about five minutes. (Even with rapid response times, they can’t be everywhere at once.)
I would have paid hard coin to see the expressions on the police officers’ faces when they arrived at the mayor’s house and saw him in his underwear while holding a guy at bay.
The intruder was 34-year-old Ezequiel Felix Castellon, who was charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct. (No indecent exposure citation for the mayor.)
The mayor pushed back against people who questioned his actions.
“Some people second guess me and say I should’ve stayed in my house and called the police. But I think I did the right thing. Not only that, had I not caught him, he probably would’ve moved onto another house and there’s no telling what could’ve happened,” he said.
Lessons learned included:
Doors locked — that prevented Castellon from getting in.
Batteries in surveillance cameras — his were all dead.
Handgun available — that kept the trespasser from being more of a hazard.
…though somehow the news articles didn’t specifically recommend that last one.
Even though the mayor said, likely exceeding his best political speech ever:
This is nothing that they would be able to prevent, even if we hired a thousand officers. It’s just one of those things that’s going to happen. You can’t prevent it, but you can prepare for it.
Sources
AZFamily did a great job letting the mayor tell his own story. Most of the quotes here are from them.
Mohave Daily News also did a great job covering this story.
I'd vote for him in the next election if I lived there!