Thoughts

Its 1982, October 18th, Saturday night, a date I will always remember and never forget. I’m half way through x-ray school. I am a student. There was a guy who worked on the processor (the equipment that develops x-ray film) at the hospital. He is throwing this big, really cool Halloween party at his house. There were at least a hundred people at his house. It was a big house, it was Halloween and I probably know at least 50% of the people there. There were lots of x-ray techs, students, and various hospital workers among others. It was really great. They had a full bar with a bartender. It had killer music, a full dance floor, and tons of fun. People really went all out. Everyone was in costume. One guy enters the room in a suit carrying a brief case and starts walking up stairs to the bedroom. Everyone was puzzled to what his costume was and in about 5 minutes he comes down dressed as Superman. He came to the party as Clark Kent and ended up as Superman. That is an example of everyone was getting into the party. There was a lot of dancing and joking and fooling around.
I go to the party with my date, Terry. She was dressed as a clown. I was dressed as a sailor. I had borrowed my uncle’s navy sailor suit, authentic. She drove as I was a poor student without money or car. She had a nice red Ford Mustang.
It was about 11pm, we had been at the party for a couple of hours. A female x-ray tech who we work with comes up to us and tells us she can’t find her husband anywhere. She said “I’ve looked all over the place and he is nowhere to be found”. So Terry and I tell her it is no big deal, that we can drive her home and that her husband will turn up soon.
We go to takes her home. Sure, we were intoxicated but we wanted to help her out. We go over to her mustang to get in it. It was a two door with a tiny back seat with virtually no back seat windows. The woman we were taking home was dressed as Scarlet O’Hara. She had a big hoop bottom dress. Her missing husband went as Rhett Butler. I was the gentleman and took to the small backseat of the mustang, letting the two women sit upfront.
So there goes a clown who was driving, scarlet in the passenger seat, and a sailor in the back passenger side seat, down the road to scarlet and Rhett’s house. We pull into her driveway and low and behold, there is her husband standing in the driveway. He is holding a pistol in each hand!! I’m thinking “Oh, boy! This isn’t good”. He was obviously drunk. He saw his wife in the passenger seat. He yells “Get out of the car”. Then BOOM! He fires a shot at the car, it skims off of the front window, breaking it and ricocheting off. HOLY SHIT! This drunk guy with a gun in each hand gives a command and fires his weapon before anyone has a chance to follow the command! Then he yells “I SAID, GET OUT OF THE CAR!” BOOM! He fires a second shot at the car! Again, the drunk bastard gives a command and then fires his weapon before anyone can react to his “request”. This bullet misses the car and hit’s the next door neighbor’s house!
Scarlet O’Hara opens the door and starts getting out. He’s babbling on about how all the guys at the party were messing around with his wife. That’s what all of this was about. He was drinking, guys were asking his wife to dance, she was dancing with them and he became jealous. It turned to rage. His plan was to go home, get his guns and come back to the party.
That’s why he left the party and his wife couldn’t find him. When we pulled in the driveway, he was in the process of getting ready to go back to the party with weapons and take care of those guys who were dancing with his wife. The bastard was going to go shoot people at the party and lucky for them we intercepted him at his driveway. Lucky for them, unlucky for us.
Scarlet gets out and leaves the passenger door open. Rhett leans into that door and slides across the front seat and holds a pistol up to my girlfriend’s temple of her head! The end of the barrel is flushed up against her head. He says, “I don’t know who the hell you are but get off of my property now!”. Terry was frozen motionless. I am in the back seat thinking I am going to see my girlfriends head blown off! At that close range, there would have been brain matter and blood spattered all over the car. I am in the back seat trying to make myself look invisible. For some reason he hasn’t seen me. It was a combination of the position I was in, the style of the car and his drunken haziness in the dark setting. I am convinced that had he seen me I would have been dead. That was his major jealous, drunken complaint was that guys were messing with his wife. He would have assumed I was one of them. Also being dressed as a sailor with their reputation wouldn’t have helped. It is very unnerving to realize how close death’s door was.
I contemplated trying to do something to save her but with him having a gun flushed to the side of her head, I had no safe options. A struggle with him would have resulted in a bullet flying somewhere most probably into terry’s face.
He then backs across the front seat, leaves the vehicle, and shuts the passenger door. He then turns and fires three shots at his wife. He didn’t fire straight at her but down as if to “make her dance” like they did in those old western movies. While this was going on, terry was gunning (pun) in reverse down the driveway.
This was pre-cell phone era, so she drove as fast as she could to a pay phone. I’m sure we sounded like a raving maniacs on the phone. We called the police, told them a man was shooting at his wife and that multiple shots were fired! The police DIDN’T believe us! They said “Well, how come if all these shots are being fired no one else has called in?” Then apparently while we were talking, the police phone lines lit up like Christmas lights. Numerous others were now calling in. The police now realized what we’re babbling about was true. An officer arrived and took our statement and told us to go to the police station the next day to give our testimony.
We drove back to the party and I quickly downed three shots of tequila. I was so freaked out! Completely horrified from the events. Facing the fact that if that asshole had seen me, I would have been dead not to mention nearly seeing my girlfriends head splattered all over a window. It had a pronounced effect on my life.
Well, anyway, back to the story…
Apparently as Terry was backing out of the driveway and I was watching Rhett shoot at Scarlet, Scarlet had run in the back door of her house and straight out the front door. She continued running all the way to the police station which was about 2 miles from her home.
Rhett didn’t give chase but in his drunken state fired two more shots from inside his house. One bullet hit a car that was just happening to be driving by at the time. It put a hole in his passenger side window. The other bullet was haphazardly fired and came in the vicinity of a police officer.
A swat team was called in. Two dozen S.W.A.T. officers surrounded the house. I guess I had watched too many TV shows but you here of the SWAT teams throwing in tear gas bombs, crashing in through the windows, and a guy on a megaphone yelling “We’ve got the house surrounded. Come out with your hands up or we are storming the place.” But alas that is apparently only in Hollywood. What actually happened was they talk to Rhett on the phone and just waited. He was alone in the house, no hostages or anything. At one point Rhett told the police he was going to lay down and go to sleep. Which he did. Upon waking up and sobered up, Rhett walked outside and surrendered to the police.
Talking about waking up and sobering up, the next morning my head and stomach were in a very bad state. Hung over, I couldn’t believe what had happened the night before. It had to have been a bad dream but I soon found out it was not. This story was the lead story on TV news for 5 consecutive news shows. It was the headlines in the morning newspaper, was on the front page for 3 days. No, not a dream.
Terry and I went to police station and gave statements. We had reporters shoving microphones in our faces. We declined to give a comment for fear that if Rhett was released he would retaliate and harm us. The reporters don’t care about you, they just want a story. However, even though Terry and I had done nothing wrong, they did put our names and addresses in the newspaper for all to see. I personally didn’t like that but nobody asked for my opinion.
For weeks I was battling this psychologically, having trouble sleeping, nightmares. My grades in x-ray school dropped. I didn’t know if it was from this stressful event or the usual reason of just not studying. I vividly remember one night jumping up out of my bed at night and yelling “DON’T SHOOT!!!”. After time, things settled down and returned to normal.
This happened in October 1982 but there wasn’t a trial until summer of 1983. The prosecuting attorney didn’t seem to have much worry, he was assuring us that Rhett would go to jail. Rhett had done the smart thing and hired the best lawyer in the land. He paid him an outlandish amount of money-$5,000. Now remember this was 1982 when nice homes cost $40,000 and new cars were $8,000. Well, let the trial begin…
Rhett was up for 5 counts of attempted murder and numerous misdemeanors. Some of which were for discharging a weapon inside the city limits, disturbing the peace, drunk in public, destruction of property (Terry’s car windshield, neighbor’s house bullet hole, passenger window of car driving by) among others.
The first thing that the defense attorney did was get all of the misdemeanors dropped. The prosecuting attorney agreed, figuring that with 5 attempted murder charges would put Rhett away for years to come.
The trial started, I think it lasted about two days. Each witness was called to testify separately. You could not hear the whole trial. You would take the stand, answer questions and then leave the premises, so you had no idea what other people said. So you are a witness but you are clueless to what went on.
I was called to the stand, I knew exactly what happened and was probably the best witness as I sat in the backseat and seen everything. The defense attorney was brilliant. It didn’t take him to long to make me appear like an idiot. “Mr. McCombs, how far away from you was Rhett when he was firing his gun?” About 10-12 feet, I said. “Well, Mr. McCombs your sworn statement said 6-8 feet away, which is it? 10-12 or 6-8 feet? Was he using his right hand or left hand? Where the guns the same size or different? And on and on it went. Making me appear to be a fool. Then when I tried to interject with things that happened the defense attorney would cut me off in mid-sentence so I could not complete some damaging information against his client. The prosecuting attorney did little to object or to let my side be fully understood when it was his turn to examine me. So off the stand I went and out the back door never really knowing what took place in the courts. The witness weren’t allowed to talk to each other so the only way to get information was through the newspapers just like everyone else.
Well this is how it broke down. 1st count of attempted murder was against his wife, by this time they had made up and reconciled. Scarlet actually went back with the man who had shot at her! Amazing, talk about stupid. I haven’t been back to the area in 20 years, so I wonder how that relationship turned out. So that charge was dropped because a wife doesn’t have to testify against her husband.
The 2nd count was dropped on the guy in the car that just happened to be driving by. That was a random shot and not attempted murder. The 3rd count was also dropped when he discharged his weapon and it went in the general direction of the cop. They said that wasn’t attempted murder. The 4th count was against me. The defense attorney asked me if Rhett had even seen me. I had said thankfully no! As he would have killed me. The defense attorney said if Rhett hadn’t even seen me, then how could he have attempted to murder me. So that count was dropped.
The 5th and final count of attempted murder was against, now ex-girlfriend terry. The reasoning went like this: Rhett had the pistol flushed against her temple and had every opportunity to pull the trigger and kill her but since he didn’t, he wasn’t attempting to kill her. The 5th and final charge was dropped.
CLEARED OF ALL COUNTS! DECLARED INNOCENT! Rhett and his wife walked out of the courthouse arm in arm. No jail time, not even a fine! Mind you that the city of Cleveland in the previous couple of months before had sentenced a man to jail for 30 days because he killed a squirrel!
Here are a few side stories of this main story. With all charges dropped, the only apparent penalty Rhett paid beside the lawyer and court fees was that he wasn’t allowed to fix the big hole in his front house window. It was evidence so he couldn’t repair it. He had to pay the high heating bills from a Cleveland winter with a big hole in the window. Many a times I would drive by and see the hole as his house was on a main street.
Rhett was an ex-Cleveland police officer who had barricaded himself inside another house he used to own in a different city, firing random shots at the neighbors. This caused him to lose his job on the police force and I guess because it was his first time doing that and because he was one of their own he was given a slap on the wrist. However, he was not allowed to acquire, own or shoot another weapon again. Somehow that got left out of this case as he had obviously obtained more guns for this episode.