Original subtitles

[narrator] When a hostage crisis unfolds,

every tactic, every word a negotiator chooses

could mean the difference between life

and death.

I have to keep him talking

to stop him from killing her.

[gunshots]

[phone ringing]

[phone ringing]

[police radio chatter]

[narrator] While on the phone with 911,

initial caller Jai Hogue has been shot multiple times.

Dispatch issues a priority alert to all officers in the area.

The morning of this event, I was on duty, working a regular patrol shift.

[narrator] As the nearest officer to receive the call,

Matt Oehler heads straight for the scene.

As Jai bleeds from her gunshot wounds,

witnesses call 911.

[Oehler] Dispatch is feeding information

as they're receiving it from the 911 callers.

And there was someone who was down in the street in front of the house.

Someone's shot and there's a shooter that hasn't been apprehended.

[Oehler] So I arrived on scene approximately 8:15 a.m.

and I see a couple of officers crouched by this convenience store

and there's a woman who's in the street, bleeding.

Several apparent gunshot wounds.

[narrator] SWAT are alerted immediately.

[narrator] While police confirm Val Santarromana's position,

[Oehler] We're in this very open area, susceptible to gunfire.

[narrator] paramedics are already at the scene

and need to get to Jai before she bleeds to death.

I draw my pistol and I'm pointing it at the house

and I say, "Hey, I'm going to cover you."

"Can we move her to a safer location?"

I remember paramedics just acted very decisively and very quickly

and they just rushed in and grabbed her.

Now let's get these neighbors out of here.

I pound on the door. A man answers the door

and I'm telling him, "Hey, you've got to go. Someone's been shot."

He exclaims, "I can't believe he did this."

I know he keeps a lot of firearms and he's a veteran.

And his phone starts ringing

and he looks down at his phone and says, "That's him. He's calling me right now."

And I just said, "Give me the phone."

[Oehler] It's very chaotic.

Val's yelling something into the phone.

He says to me, "I'm ready to end it all."

"I have the door rigged. I'm not going out without a fight."

"I'm going to die today. I know you guys are going to kill me."

People had actively heard him boarding up doors and windows,

which, uh, to me and to our SWAT team

would mean that he was barricading the residence.

I'm not in a safe position so I moved back over behind a vehicle,

where I could have a conversation

but I'm behind some relative cover and concealment.

I'm monitoring my radio. I'm listening to the radio traffic.

and it's just hectic.

[narrator] SWAT arrive at the scene

and immediately begin a full lockdown of the surrounding area.

[Gulley] When you look out from the house,

you can see two major roadways that go through there,

so in the event that that person was going to come out and shoot,

we wanted to make sure that there was no vehicles

that were going to be traveling in any of those areas.

[Ball] There's tons of radio traffic,

asking for armored vehicle support,

evacuations of businesses nearby,

evacuations of homes.

This is something different than we get called out normally to.

To see that early in the morning like this is just horrifying.

It's pretty gruesome.

I watched them load her up in the gurney

and I just prayed that she was okay, that she would make it.

[newsreader] A woman shot in Mill Creek.

Neighbors heard the gunfire.

And then we hear, like, nine more. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

So we start ducking in the car, you know, wondering what's going on

and then we see her fall.

[narrator] Matt now knows Val is barricaded in the house.

And according to Jai's initial 911 call,

Val likely has his wife, Jenny, inside also.

[Oehler] I'm looking through the window for any movement.

I see this guy kind of peek out the curtain and then he quickly disappears.

So I'm thinking to myself, if there's anybody else inside that home,

things just got a lot more complicated.

So I asked him, "Is anybody else inside the house with you?"

He handed off the phone and immediately, I hear this woman's voice.

And I ask if she's okay or if she's hurt.

And my heart just sank.

There's a hostage inside this house.

I have to keep him talking

to stop him from killing her.

[newsreader] A woman shot in Mill Creek.

Investigators say

the woman had come to help her friend get out of a violent domestic situation.

Police say she ended up getting shot

by 37-year-old Valentin Dulla Santarromana

once in the head and once in the torso, severing her spine.

Police attempted to contain Santarromana

and realized he was holding his wife hostage in the house.

[narrator] Just days before, after six years of marriage,

Jenny Andrus told husband Val that she wanted a divorce.

[Weigel] Jenny was a professor like I am,

so we had a lot in common in that way,

but I was just really, um, drawn to her.

A great sense of humor.

Her wit, her intelligence.

Val seemed like a fairly normal couple.

He seemed just a regular person

who would sometimes be involved

but more kept to himself.

I think I just didn't know how to recognize red flags and warning signs.

[narrator] But behind the scenes,

Jenny lived in terror of her abusive husband.

Any time we see the word hostage,

it changes our mindset

because somebody's life is on the line.

I had negotiated many, many times before on critical incidents

but never to this level.

[narrator] Officers believe Val is holding Jenny in the basement.

I could hear her crying in the background

and then he says, very callously, "She's fine."

Time is not on our side any more. Now she's bleeding.

At the forefront of my thought process

is preventing him from shooting her again.

I have to keep him talking to stop him from killing her.

He's already told me he wants to go out shooting.

[narrator] Matt needs to build rapport and trust in any way possible.

He looks to find common ground with Val.

I said, "Val, are you a veteran?"

And he said, "Yes."

[narrator] News reaches friends of the family.

When I find out that he's shot our friend and has Jenny hostage,

I am shocked but not surprised

given how things had been escalating.

In the summer of 2015, I started learning more about their relationship

and just how troubled and problematic it was.

He was extremely jealous, sending bizarre texts,

acting extremely erratic.

He was using physical intimidation,

threatening suicide.

He was getting more and more unhinged.

[narrator] Police receive a call from a friend of the couple

alerting them to a text message

he's just received from Val.

[narrator] It's now clear to Matt that Val isn't making idle threats.

Jenny's life is entirely in his hands.

Okay.

[Ball] We move SWAT officers in positions at all four corners of the house,

so that we kind of own the entire property.

Our theory is, nothing comes in and nothing comes out

without our intervening.

[Oehler] I see someone pull up in an unmarked police vehicle

and he's wearing a tactical vest that says negotiator.

So he directs me over to a van and gets me inside the van

with the rest of the negotiation team.

One of the members of the team told me,

"Hey, we're going to keep you on the phone talking to him."

We're going to keep you as the initial,

because you already have a rapport with him.

[narrator] Then negotiators are informed

that Val and Jenny have three young children.

Police protocol is to contact close family of Val and Jenny

to ascertain their location.

My concern heightened substantially

when I realized that he had kids.

And so there was this huge, frantic effort

to confirm where the kids were.

[newsreader] Holding his wife hostage,

the alleged shooter barricaded himself inside the home.

More than 50 officers surrounded the area.

[narrator] Sergent Matt Oehler is negotiating with a man holding his wife at gunpoint.

Now he must confirm that the couple's children

are not being held hostage as well.

And there was this palpable sense of relief amongst all of us

once we knew that there were no kids in the home.

[narrator] Establishing empathy is a proven tactic in negotiations.

The closer Val feels to Matt, the more likely he is to listen to him.

If I could keep him talking,

especially something maybe he cares about

or something he's passionate about,

that's going to buy us time.

Everybody has dogs. Everybody loves dogs.

Throughout the entire conversation,

he is this emotional roller coaster.

There's this whole background that I'm unaware of,

um, that obviously led him to make these horrible choices that he's made.

We need to keep Val talking. We need to keep him engaged,

but we also want to ensure that Jenny's able to talk.

She's bleeding, she's in pain and she's terrified.

I can hear the fear in her voice.

But then he takes the phone away

and then he says something to the effect of,

"Well, send a paramedic inside."

And I tell him that's not possible. That's not going to happen.

This is easily the most difficult conversation that I've had

in my 18 years of service.

The SWAT team are trying to execute a plan

to get inside and rescue that hostage,

but we weren't there yet.

[narrator] Holding his wife, Jenny, at gunpoint in the family home,

Val Santarromana has told police he is willing to release her.

He's vocalized that he's going to release her

but he hasn't done it yet.

She still wasn't safe.

[male newsreader] More than 50 officers including a SWAT team

surrounded a home near 3300 South and 700 East.

[female newsreader] Roads closed and for neighbors,

They came in, they evacuated us

saying that they had to bring in SWAT teams because of the severity.

[female newsreader] For hours, negotiators worked with the suspects.

He's already shown through his actions,

that he can't be trusted.

I just felt this sense of despair and this sinking feeling

that this isn't over yet and we've still got to get her out.

[narrator] SWAT officers are positioned around the house.

If Matt cannot get the hostage out soon,

SWAT will have no choice but to move in.

And Jenny could be killed in the crossfire.

[Oehler] I wanted to keep him distracted.

But I still have this sense of this is totally out of my control.

[narrator] Val and Matt have now been talking for nearly two hours.

So we set up a plan to try to get a throw phone in the house.

The throw phone allows us to control the flow of information back and forth.

It's pretty robust.

Like, it can be thrown through windows. It can be dropped down stairs.

This phone is hard wired from the phone itself,

all the way back to the negotiators and the command post.

We don't have to rely on a battery

and we don't have to rely on cell signals or anything like that.

This is pretty risky for us, right?

'Cause not knowing if there really were booby traps or hand grenades.

We either breach the window next to the door

or we put it through the pet door on the side door

and that seemed like the better option because it's less aggressive.

I've got one of the guys in front of me that has the shield.

There's another operator that's providing protective cover.

What I was set up to do was take a team through the front door

if something happened that required the emergency entry.

So gunshots, you know, information that she was being harmed

or anything like that.

I want all of his focus to be on me,

not on the SWAT team that's approaching.

[narrator] Matt's using a negotiator tactic called refocusing.

He's trying to move Val's escalating thought patterns onto another subject.

[Gulley] We have to go through the small, wood gate.

It's a screen door that has the doggy door.

But once we open that screen door up, it's a full, solid, hard door,

so there's not another doggy door within that to throw the phone through.

[narrator] Val has barricaded the door shut.

But phone contact may be the only thing keeping Jenny alive.

SWAT have no choice but to force the door open.

We have to breach the door.

So I start ramming, uh, that south door.

The door flexed.

As I'm hitting it, I'm hitting it with everything I have

and I'm letting the rest of the team know that it's barricaded.

But as I'm starting to ram the door and trying to knock it in,

[gunshots]

the suspect starts shooting at us and shooting at the door.

Just one after another. Just multiple rounds.

[Gulley] And this changes our tactic.

We need to get inside to save Jen.

[phone ringing]

[Ball] If we hear something

that indicates the subject may be harming the hostages,

then we will make that emergency entry into the crisis site.

So behind me is our breacher

and he's got an explosive breach to put on the front door.

He's agitated, he's screaming.

The rest of the team, at this point,

starts going toward the front of the house.

I'm approaching and I'm like, what is that? What is that smell?

I know what that smell is.

And it's flowing.

Um, and if I can smell it out here,

um, there's a lot of gas in this building.

If we blow the door, um, we have a likelihood of, like, leveling the house

and killing everybody.

[narrator] With Val opening fire

and the gas leak threatening a major situation,

SWAT have no choice but to enter the building without explosive charges.

They start screaming for the ram to come up to the front door

and I still had the ram in my hand.

[Ball] If those booby traps really are there and they go,

we all have the potential of getting killed.

But we're not stopping. We have to get through the front door.

I hit it as hard as I could

and it opened up right off the first hit.

There's no explosion that goes off.

But you could still smell the gas

and it was really, really strong inside the residence.

That front door is barricaded from the inside and I still hear gunshots,

so we're trying to push and fight through.

[narrator] Having heard the front door open,

Val starts shooting blindly up through the floorboards.

Him shooting off his gun inside there, at any point that place could explode.

He's using the natural gas as a weapon.

[Gulley] I ran over to the bomb truck.

Yelled at the guys to give me a pair of pliers.

We knew we needed to get that gas off

and we were going to do anything we could to get it off.

We have to start clearing room by room until we locate them.

[Gulley] There were a couple of dogs that were inside there,

but I think they were just scared.

They didn't pose any type of threat to us.

I see a meat cleaver on the back of the couch

and the meat cleaver is covered in blood.

It's hardwood floors in there.

We start hearing more gunshots go off.

You could feel the gunshots hitting the floor.

And I'm just waiting any minute

for one of those bullets to go through my foot.

[gunshots]

There's a brief pause from when those shots are hitting the ground

and I remember there's two more shots that are fired.

The only difference is that this time,

the shot didn't hit the ground where we were walking.

The shot stayed, you know, down in the basement.

And so my thought process is that he's either trying to hurt himself,

or kill her as well.

[Ball] My fear is that it's the worst

and that he's most likely killed Jenny.

Well, here I am, sitting in a van,

totally protected,

and at the same time, I'm feeling completely helpless

for this hostage,

who up until that point,

I felt like we had kept her alive.

[narrator] Val Santarromana

has been holding wife Jenny hostage at gunpoint in their own home.

Now, after three hours, SWAT has stormed the building and Val has started shooting.

He'd set us up to fail.

His intention was really to kill us all that day.

[narrator] Val hasn't disconnected his phone call with Matt.

The sound of the raid is being transmitted straight to the negotiating van.

Jenny has been shot several times at close range.

She is rushed straight into surgery.

My name is Jenny Andrus.

In 2015, I lived with my family in Salt Lake City.

My career was going great.

My kids were growing up great.

The only real problem in my life

was that my home life was a nightmare.

Val, my husband, was charming outside of the house.

Everybody loved him.

But at home, my husband had become increasingly violent

and abusive over the five years leading up to 2015.

In that summer, things were pretty terrible.

I had told Val that I wanted a divorce.

He lost his mind.

He pulled three guns out of some hidden compartment in my basement.

A shotgun, another gun that I didn't see, it was in a case,

and a handgun.

I knew immediately what he was going to do.

'Cause it was clear that he was going to try to kill me,

I went and got a protective order.

On August 22nd, I went home to feed the dogs.

They had been staying at the house.

I'd been accompanied by a friend

so that if my ex-husband was in the house,

they would be able to call for help.

In the bedroom, on the floor, all of my clothes were in a pile.

And I realized that he must be in the house and I turned like this

and the gun was in my face.

I turned to run

and before I could run, he pistol whipped me twice.

Uh, I fell to the ground,

I thought, Jenny, if you pass out, you will die.

I wanted to live so much in that moment.

I was not going to die.

I stood up and ran

and as I ran, he went through the kitchen and grabbed the meat cleaver.

I opened the door about this far and screamed.

That's when he shot me in the leg the first time.

He shot me in my left leg right here.

He shot me from, like, the kitchen door.

He came through with the meat cleaver.

I thought, please not the sharp edge.

Please the flat edge.

And just as he got to my face, he turned it to the flat edge.

That's the scar here.

As my friend heard my screams,

they got out of the car and started walking toward me.

And he started shooting them.

[shooting and squealing]

[newsreader] The mom of two was shot as many as 15 times.

She was hit in the head and both lungs.

She remains in critical condition with severe injuries

including a severed spine that will leave her paralyzed.

[Jenny] I screamed and shoved the door shut

and he shot me in the other leg.

[gunshot]

And he said, "Stand up and go to the basement."

So I stood at the top of the stairs and I waited

and he said, "I'll push you down and you'll die,"

"or you'll walk down and you die,"

"but you're dying today."

He pushes me into a pile of rags that are in this corner

and then he pulled me up

and put a gun to my head

and forced me to give him oral sex.

Then he comes over to this nozzle, which operates the gas line

and starts to turn it on.

He said that he wanted to explode the house.

And that would be the easiest way for us both to die at the same time.

At any point, he could have pulled the trigger.

He didn't, because he wanted to torture me.

The police negotiation did give time for a SWAT team to get here.

I knew that when SWAT came in, it was going to be now or never for him.

I remember hearing the door pushed open with a big crack

and thinking, thank God.

And at that point, Val ran up the stairs to confront SWAT

and I heard two gunshots at least.

[gunshots]

SWAT didn't fire a shot.

He came running back down the stairs

and then he started shooting at the gas lines.

He was trying to explode gas lines.

I got on the ground and covered my head with my hands.

They got to the top of the stairs, I guess, and I heard Jai come out

and Val was maybe three feet behind me.

He stood up and shot at me.

Um, I don't know how many rounds.

[gunshot]

The bullet entered here and came out here. There's the scar.

In that instant, I thought, this is your last chance.

You have to run.

So I stood up and I ran.

I'd been shot four times by then.

The stairs were all covered in goo and slippery stuff.

Laundry detergent, dish detergent, everything,

so that they would be, like, booby trapped.

So I remember slipping and slipping and slipping but just making it up.

So there were two men standing there and one man standing here.

I remember just thinking, finally I'm safe.

They said, "Do you need a gurney," and I said, "No."

"He's behind me, run!"

So they, like, grouped around me and ran me out of the house.

I never loved seeing somebody more in my life.

[Jenny] I woke up a day later in the hospital.

The first thing they said to me is, "You lost your eye."

I was shot in my right ankle, my left calf,

my right temple and my left arm.

And this is where the luck comes in.

The bullet went into my temple and out my forehead instead of into the back of my head.

And that saved my life.

It took an eye, but it saved my life.

It was just, it went through my sinus instead of into my brain.

Just, like, a millimeter's worth of luck.

Just go over there, behind the step.

That police negotiator, to my mind, kept me safe.

Every time Val was on the phone,

it elongated it for long enough

for the SWAT team to get there, create a plan, um, and breach.

And he kept Val talking for three hours. That is impressive.

I don't know if he knows he did it.

But he also helped to save my life.

If the police negotiator were here right now in front of me,

I would give him a hug

whether he wanted it or not.

And I would say, "Thank you so much. You saved my life."

So once I moved back into my house, I was like, oh, this is my house.

It's not his house.

It's always been my house

and I'm not going to let him take it away from me.

It's eight years this year that it happened

and we've come out of that beautifully.

My kids are super awesome, very happy

and that's the end of my story.

It's not, actually, 'cause I got to live,

because Val thought he was going to kill me that day and he was wrong.