Cover Me

When Bill Thompson rode up on his bike into the middle of a hostage situation, he knew he needed to help. A deputy marshal was holding a suspect at gunpoint, who in turn was holding a knife to a woman’s throat. Thompson crept up with a hammer in his hand. “He was sneaking up behind the suspect and was going to conk him on the head,” said Marshal Michelle Long of the Waitsburg, Wash., police. The problem was the situation was just a drill for local emergency workers, and Long didn’t want to see the volunteer “gunman” conked on the head with a hammer. “We were yelling at him to stop. It took us a few times to get through to him this was not real.” Still, Long said such citizen initiative is good. “It’s one of the nice things about living in a small town.” (AP) ...I thought the nice thing about living in a small town is things like that didn’t happen in the first place.