Recordings of law enforcement radio traffic from April 29 provide a minute-by-minute glimpse of the violent chaos and rescue attempts that unfolded during the Charlotte shooting that killed three members of a U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force and a Charlotte-Mecklenburg officer.
Two hours of police dispatches describe when the shootout in east Charlotte started, how officers responded, their frantic calls to close miles of roads to rush the wounded to local hospitals and a surprise about who was in the house.
Ultimately, eight officers were shot, and four — Joshua Eyer, William “Alden” Elliot, Sam Poloche and Thomas M. Weeks, Jr. — were killed.
The gunfire started when officers tried to serve an arrest warrant on Terry Clark Hughes, Jr., who was wanted for possession of a weapon as a felon. Hughes was also killed in the firefight, the Charlotte Observer reports.
The radio traffic was obtained from www.openmhz.com, a site that allows users to listen to police and fire dispatches. The calls draw a timeline of the events that day, starting just before 1:33 p.m. Unless otherwise identified, the officers speaking on radios were at or near the house where the shooting occurred.
