OUT OF GAUZE, AND THEY KEPT WORKING
The minutes before help arrives are decided by what you carried and what you practiced before the first shot.
Somewhere on a strip of pavement in St. Clair Township, Ohio, a cop keys his radio and tells dispatch he knows they have a long way to go, but please hurry up. It’s the most honest sentence on the whole recording, and it is the sentence this article is built on. I watched the tape with George Sichler, and it stopped him too.
The detective who walked up to a man with a hidden handgun that morning took a round to the head in a gunfight that lasted seconds. The twist is not the gunfight. The twist is that the men around him, with no medic on scene yet and a shrinking pile of gauze, were the only medicine on that street. One of them said why not out loud while he did it, and my guest has taught that exact moment to cops for years.
THE SETUP
This is bodycam from January 22, 2025, cut together with narration by the channel that posted it. A behavioral health center called 911 about a man who had walked off in a psychotic state. The narration says he had schizophrenia and a history of mental illness. It also says he had a warrant out from a domestic call three weeks earlier, where he allegedly pushed his parents and allegedly pulled a knife.
Six minutes after the 911 call, three St. Clair Township officers found him a mile north with what looked like a handgun. Detective Dakota Wetzel, Detective Chase Askounes and Patrolman Anthony Savina made contact.
I am not going to litigate the shooting. The investigation was still open when this was posted, and I will tell you exactly what the tape says about that at the end.
Sitting across from me for this one is George Sichler, a retired NYPD detective who also taught tactical skills to cops for a long stretch of his career, and now speaks around the country on resilience and mental health for first responders. He is with MIRA Safety these days, and he watches bodycam the way a medic watches hands. He gets the last word in most of the sections below, because he has stood where these men were standing.
Watch everything after the last shot. This tape is a first-aid tape wearing a gunfight’s clothes. The lesson holds if you never press play. The shooting ends fast, and the stretch between the last round and the first stretcher is decided by what people already had in their hands and heads.
WEEKS ON PAPER
The tape opens with a warrant nobody served. Three weeks before this morning, per the narration, the family called 911 after the man allegedly pushed his parents and allegedly brandished a knife. Officers could not make contact, and a prosecutor advised a warrant for later instead of going in.
So the man from the knife call was walking around on paper, and every one of us has a name like that somewhere in our circle.
Then the clock runs fast. Six minutes after the center’s call, a calm voice asks Joey to come here for a minute, and another voice says he is going to run. He does not run. He walks toward Wetzel with the handgun bladed behind his body and ignores every command to show his hands.
A man who will not show you his hands has already told you what is in them.
George put a number on that half-second. Eighty or ninety percent of officer-involved shootings, in the statistic he taught for years, the officer shoots second. “Action beats reaction one hundred percent of the time,” he told me. “Now you’re on a two-way range.”
Who fired first is not settled on this tape. The narration says police reports claimed the suspect fired first, and it reads Wetzel firing three times while the suspect fired at least once as he dove.
What is settled is what happens next. A voice says okay, okay, okay, get us a medic now. That call, in the same breath as officer down, is the moment the scene stops being a gunfight and starts being a trauma scene.
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TWO SEARCHES THAT BOTH FAILED
Two searches run at the same time on this tape, and both of them fail for a while.
The first is for the wound. A cop with his hands on Wetzel says he cannot find it. He is not panicking. He is sweeping, and a head wound under a hat and hair, with blood on everything, hides from him anyway.
The second search is for the gun. A voice says plainly that he does not know where the shooter is at. The man next to him has already said he cannot find the weapon, and the suspect is down and still moving.
Those two searches are the same failure. The scene has more urgency than it has information.
George’s first rule for this stretch is blunt, and it is the rule that makes both searches make sense: “The best tactical medicine is winning the gunfight. You really can’t do tactical medicine until you win the gunfight.” The cop behind the car is not ignoring the wounded. He is doing the thing that has to happen before the wounded can be treated at all.
The solution is not medical. Somebody stops treating and starts running the pavement, a voice calls for another officer to secure the suspect, and later someone says suspect secure. The gun is not even named until well into the video, when a cop says to leave it where it lies because it is a .38 special.
One person on any bad scene has to own the scene and not the wound, or both searches run until the ambulance does the job for you. George calls the moment after the scene is secured a tactical pause: stop the big bleed, get an airway, then break the tunnel vision and look around before you do anything else.
I will say the one thing about the second scene that this article is going to say. Radio traffic reports that a round came through the window of the dentist office across the street and struck a child. The source channel chose not to show that part, and neither will I.
NO COMBAT MEDIC, BUT WHY NOT
By the time Wetzel is on a stretcher and headed for a helicopter, the same cops turn to the second casualty on that pavement. Only one officer was hit. A voice answers who’s shot with just Dakota. The other man being worked is the one who was pointing a derringer at a detective minutes earlier.
Listen to two lines. A cop asking for gauze gets the answer I’m out. Then the man with the chest seal says I’ll be honest, I’m no combat medic, but why not.
That is the whole tape in nine words.
The gauze is gone. The training is thin, by his own account. The ambulance is somewhere on a long road. A cop who has no business being the medic peels a chest seal and puts it on a sucking chest wound anyway, because something beats standing there.
George’s line on that helicopter, fifteen to thirty minutes out, is the one I want you to carry: “TCCC [Tactical Combat Casualty Care] is not the best medicine. It’s the best medicine right now, where we are.” In New York, he said, you can swing a dead cat and hit a level one trauma center. On this road there was no such thing, and what the men had in their pouches was the whole hospital.
The episode leaves you to reach the conclusion on your own, and the page gets to say it once. The men on that scene were ready for the gunfight and not for the minutes after it, and they did those minutes anyway with whatever was in their pockets.
They ran out of gauze on the man who had just shot their partner in the head, and they kept working him anyway.
I do not have many clips where the man doing the medicine has more reason to walk away than to kneel down. This is that clip, and nobody on it walks away.
George has a story for that kneel. Late in his career, at an instructor class, a junior officer asked him whether he would pay to attend a live-tissue lab. Of course he would. “He said, you get it every single day in New York City, by practicing on the people that sometimes we write off.” That flipped his mindset on the spot, and he taught it from then on. His words on this tape: “Kudos to these guys that did not provide street justice here. They provided him care to the best of their ability. The guy says, I’m no combat medic, but. Dives back in.”
Look at the hands in this stretch of tape. Gloves going on late, a shirt cut off, a man asking for a second set because his are already gone. None of that is technique. All of it is somebody deciding to act with what is there.
The moment will come for you with nothing in your hands and a long way to help. Why not is the only right answer, and you can only say it if you put your hands on something before the day it mattered.
“TCCC is not the best medicine. It’s the best medicine right now, where we are.” ~ George Sichler
THE LONG WAY TO THE HOSPITAL
With the wounded gone, the tape turns into cops checking on cops. One asks another whether he is having any thoughts he should not be having, and says he asks because he knows how it is. That is a man clearing a second casualty before it becomes one.
George speaks on exactly this to police departments now, and he did not soften it: “Does anybody here in their right mind think that officer is OK? He just saw his friend possibly killed. Other officers are coming up to him and saying, are you good? And he says yes. That’s the response we always get, because we don’t want our feelings to be perceived as weakness. That’s the culture in a uniform.”
At 14:15 Detective Askounes says thank God they waited until they were across from the We the People building. The narration identifies that building as an active preschool and daycare next to the dentist. That is the whole backdrop problem in one breath, from a man who lived it minutes earlier.
A window is not a wall, and the fight outside does not know where your chair is.
The officer who never fired is sent to go sit alone for a minute, someone is sent to get Wetzel’s fiancée, and then the narration lands the outcome.
Detective Wetzel was flown to Pittsburgh, per the narration at 18:22, with a gunshot wound to the head. He lost part of his skull to the swelling and, months later, left the hospital functioning at a high level. He was married that July.
The child struck at the dentist office, R.M., age four, did not survive. The man with the derringer also died of his wounds.
The legal side is not finished. The narration says the investigation went to the Ohio State Highway Patrol over a conflict of interest, with findings expected in the coming months. The chief’s statement is that officers nationwide are trained to use deadly force when a suspect pulls a gun. No criminal or civil case had developed as of posting, and pending means pending.
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STREET TAKEAWAYS: WHAT TO DO WITH THIS
1. Find the wound before you treat the wound. On this tape a cop who was doing the sweep right still could not find a head wound for minutes. Practice the sweep on a living person before you need it on a bleeding one. (Two searches that both failed.)
2. The kit you can reach in ten seconds is the only kit you own. The men on that pavement ran out of gauze. Whatever you own that is sitting in a closet is worth exactly nothing on the day. (No combat medic, but why not.)
3. Somebody has to run the scene, not the wound. Both searches on this tape, for the wound and for the gun, got solved when one voice stopped treating and started running the pavement. (Two searches that both failed.)
4. Stop saying I’m not a medic as a reason to stand still. This is the one hard no in the set. The man on the tape said he was no combat medic and did it anyway. The class costs you an evening. (No combat medic, but why not.)
5. Gunfire outside means down and behind mass, not up and toward the glass. A window is not a wall. The fight outside does not know where your chair is, and you pick the chair. (The long way to the hospital.)
6. Check the man whose friend just went down. The cops on this tape did it for each other on the pavement, out loud, before anybody left the scene. Do the same for the people you would bleed for, and do not take the first yes for an answer; George says that yes is the culture talking. (The long way to the hospital.)
7. Show up to a bad scene with your hands up, not your mouth open. George’s ranger-medic rule: one person runs the casualty, and the second person stands where the lead can see him with empty hands raised, ready for a command. Stay with me and what do you need feel like help. They are noise. (No combat medic, but why not.)
CLOSE
George said it best at the end of the hour: “We spent an hour dissecting this incident that happened in less than five seconds.” The gunfight on this tape was over in seconds. Everything after it was decided by what those men had in their hands and heads before the first shot, and one of them said why not with almost nothing left. If this made you get up and move a tourniquet from the closet to the truck, good. If it made you sign up for a class you have been putting off, better.
My thanks to George Sichler, NYPD Detective [RET], for the hour. You can find him at GeorgeSichler.com.
Bodycam source footage: Officer Shot in the Head Refuses to Give Up
See it before you live it.
Godspeed ,
Chris Heaven, Founder
Survival Dispatch TV
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