Grancon High Street shootout

Leeds National Police Department(SCO19 specialist branch)
 Michael TownleyLamar Davis
 Six killedNine injured
 Two civilians were also killed in the initial crossfire.

The **Grancon High Street shootout** was an armed confrontation between three heavily armed and armoured bank robbers and officers of the Leeds National Police Department (LNPD) on Grancon High Street and surrounding streets in Grancon, Granconshire, on 24 May 2014. Six police officers, all three bank robbers, and two civilians were killed, nine police officers and eleven civilians were injured, and numerous vehicles and other property were damaged or destroyed by nearly 3,000 rounds of ammunition which were fired by the robbers and police during the shootout.

At 1942, Franklin Clinton, Michael de Santa, and Trevor Philips entered and robbed the South Grancon Maze Bank branch. Several minutes later they exited the branch and forced a City Transport Leeds bus to a stop by pointing their weapons at the driver, with the intention of using the bus as a roadblock while taking the passengers as hostages. However, police arrived at the scene before this could occur, engaging in a ninety-minute firefight with the suspects.

Officers were later superceded by SCO19 Special Firearms Unit officers who worked quickly and efficiently to draw the shootout to a close. The shootout was officially declared over at 2200 in a police press conference. The lockdown of most of Grancon town centre was cleared at 2300, although High Street and Signal Street remained closed in the affected areas.

## Timeline

### Bus incident

Immediately after exiting the bank branch, the three suspects noticed an approaching City Transport Leeds bus coming down Grancon High Street on a diverted 11 route service. The bus, specifically, was an Alexander Dennis Enviro400-bodied Scania N230UD double-decker vehicle, built in 2010, with a capacity of seventy-six seated passengers. At the time, there were twenty passengers, plus the driver, aboard.

The bus was stopped when de Santa and Clinton threw a waste container into the road, directly in the path of the oncoming bus, before pointing their guns at the driver. The bus came to a halt several yards from the suspects. At this point three passengers escaped the bus through the rear lower deck emergency door, before Philips and Clinton boarded the bus to hold the lower and upper deck passengers at gunpoint respectively.

Meanwhile, de Santa negotiated with the driver, while also holding him at gunpoint. de Santa claimed that he would let the driver and passengers free if the driver handed over control of the bus; in actual fact, they intended to release the driver and hijack the bus themselves, with the passengers held as hostages. At this point, the driver pressed a hidden panic button on the bus which alerted the bus control centre of the incident.

After two minutes the driver agreed to hand over the bus if the passengers were released first. de Santa tried to wrestle control off of the driver, but the driver stood his ground and, with police sirens growing louder, de Santa gave in to his demands. The driver and passengers, much to Clinton and Philips' reluctance, were released from the bus and de Santa took to the controls.

The initial plan was to take the bus to a secure location and hold the passengers hostage. However, with no hostages remaining the police closing in faster than anticipated, de Santa swerved the bus sharply to the right to line it up perpendicular with the direction of the road, creating a roadblock. Seconds later, the bus was remotely disabled by the control centre, thanks to the panic button distress alert released by the driver earlier.

### The shootout

Police arrived on the scene just as the bus was put into position; all three suspects exited the bus and hid behind it. Both sides smashed windows on their respective sides of the bus in order to be able to shoot the other side through aligning windows. After the suspects started shooting at police, the LNPD were authorised to return fire; a Level Five alert was declared.

Two civilians were shot dead and many were injured by gunfire coming from the suspects during this stage; several police officers were injured. Police made a hasty retreat following the civilian fatalities, in order to establish a one-hundred metre evacuation zone on the High Street. When supporting officers arrived, they returned to the front; meanwhile, the supporting officers extended the evacuation zone to five-hundred metres, evacuating and then putting under lockdown the area within. At it's height, the exclusion zone covered two-thirds of Grancon town centre.

After several minutes of shooting from either side of the bus, police arrived from the same side of the bus as the suspects were on, and so the suspects fled into a nearby alleyway. Police blocked both ends of the short alleyway, on Grancon High Street and the parallel Signal Street, and attempted to shoot the suspects; de Santa and Clinton hid behind several industrial waste containers, while Philips hid behind a low wall protruding into the alley from the adjacent buildings.

Throughout the next twenty minutes, five police officers were killed and nine seriously injured in an intense firefight described by witnesses as a 'relentless drone of gunfire'. Aware of the heavy and growing casualties, police withdrew from the ends of the alley out into the open street, where they could still trap the suspects in the alleyway without them being able to shoot them - but also without being to shoot at the suspects themselves.

Police remained in this retreated stage for an hour, with no shots being fired. During this time, police snipers entered positions on High Street rooftops and attempts were made to negotiate using loudspeakers. The suspects did not respond to any offers put forward and eventually began shooting at police officers again at around 2100.

### SCO19 specialist officers arrive

After several minutes of the resumed gunfight - which included the emergency retreat of a police helicopter after it was 'riddled with bullet holes' by the suspects - the ordinary, poorly-armed firearms officers at the scene called for the support of the LNPD's specialist firearms unit, SCO19 - Leeds' version of the infamous American SWAT force.

SCO19 officers were dropped off at the end of Signal Street and High Street at 2125, with thirty of the elite officers rapelling down from military helicopters. These specialist officers carried the latest in anti-terrorist hardware - Benelli M3 Super 90 shotguns, Glock 17 pistols, HK G36 SF carbines, HK G3k assault rifles, MP5 sub-machine guns, and tear gas canister launchers. They also wore gas masks and much tougher body armour than the ordinary officers.

The alleyway was stormed at 2140, and ordinary police largely retreated, allowing SCO19 to take over the situation fully. SCO19 decided to exploit the suspects' weakness - their lack of gas marks - by throwing several tear gas canisters into the alleyway, filling the largely enclosed alley with tear gas.

During a period of seven minutes, an intense firefight took place between the suspects and members of SCO19. During the firefight, one more ordinary police officer was killed by a stray suspect bullet. Philips was immediately killed by a shot to the head; de Santa followed minutes later when he was shot in the leg and torso.

Clinton, unaware of the deaths of de Santa and Philips, continued engaging with SCO19 officers before he himself was incapacitated by blood loss from several shots to the thigh.

## Aftermath

Once it was confirmed that all three suspects were incapacitated, SCO19 officers stormed the middle section of alleyway that had previously been the suspects' stronghold and dragged the three bodies out into the open in the middle of the evacuated High Street. The bodies of de Santa and Philips, who were already dead, were placed into the back of an armoured pick-up truck and secured before the truck was covered with tarpaulin and driven away; attempts were made to resuscitate Clinton in the street.

Paramedics had been placed on standby at the end of the street, and moved in to attempt to save Clinton. He was placed into the back of an ambulance, however he was declared dead on arrival at Grancon General Hospital, before being reunited with de Santa and Philips at the local police forensic autopsy centre.