Hall Street Shoot-out

Therewas nothing remarkable about Johnny Lee Thomas — nothing that would put him on the Dallas Police’s radar, at least.

Until 1969, the 26-year-old lived in relative anonymity with his aunt and half-brother in a small house on North Hall Street between Central and Ross.

On Sept. 27 of that year, he brought home a long-barreled shotgun and sack of shells. Two nights later, he got up from the dinner table, retrieved his gun and told his aunt, “I’m going hunting — all by myself.”

Then he walked out the front door, turned to the house next door to him and shot in the face 16-year-old Aljewel Wesley, who was on the porch playing records with her boyfriend and grandmother.

And thus began the rampage that has been termed “The Hall Street Shoot-out,” which E.R. Walt, a retired Dallas police captain, writes about extensively in his book of the same name.

Thomas shot another unsuspecting neighbor, Frank Henry Buford, who died almost immediately, and he tried to shoot his own halfbrother at point-blank range, but the chamber was empty. He then shot the first three police o cers to arrive on the scene.

One of the wounded o cers managed to call for backup, which resulted in dozens of police o cers throughout Dallas dropping everything to respond. As Walt explains, “a brother was in trouble,” and should the day come when they needed the same assistance, “they wanted their comrades to respond in just such a fashion.”

The first o cer to arrive on the scene shot Thomas squarely in the chest with a Colt .45, but the wound didn’t fell him. Rather, Thomas barricaded himself in the house at 1904 Hall Street and was soon surrounded by more than 100 o cers from all over Dallas and beyond.

“Johnny Thomas was no longer hunting,” Walt writes. “He was now the fox that had been run to ground … and the hounds were gathering.”

Walt participated in the resulting gunbattle, which involved more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition and a bout of tear gas, but his book is far more than a personal perspective of the event, which he considers to be “the biggest gunbattle” in the history of the Dallas Police Department.

“The Hall Street Shoot-out” takes readers through every step of the exchange and even dissects the impact of tactical decisions — or lack thereof, in some cases by explaining the historical context behind some of the regulations, which often placed significant limitations on the acting leadership.

As a result, the battle on Hall Street was nothing short of chaotic.

As more and more o cers arrived, they took cover behind anything they could find, which for some was nothing more than tall grass or bushes.

Every so often, Thomas would fire out of a window or door, and a volley of pistol and shotgun fire would answer. Then he’d go to the other side of the house and do it all over again.

At times, Thomas would run frantically from one side of the house to the next. Other times there would be long stretches of silence, until o cers began to wonder if he’d been hit.

“To the cops assembled there, it was a new and unique experience,” Walt explains. “Not being shot at, as that had happened to most of them It was the sometimes leisurely pace of the fight and the camaraderie involved that was di erent.

“Between bursts of action, there was time to discuss events with the o cers at one’s side and to think and plan for the next bout of action.”

Police attempted to force Thomas out of the house with tear gas. In those days, only a chief could give permission to use the tactic. As a result, “a sergeant was on scene with the gas for many long minutes before a chief o cer could be located to give permission to deploy,” Walt writes.

In the end, the gas didn’t appear to faze Thomas in the least.

One of the greatest errors of the incident, Walt writes, was the “failure to have personnel trained and armed to respond to active shooters and barricaded persons.”

Only half of the 100 or so o cers who responded to the shoot-out came from the Police Department’s tactical units, the beginnings of what we recognize as SWAT teams today. The other half were “young, energetic o cers ready to jump into any action,” Walt writes.

At the time, the term “active shooter” hadn’t been coined yet, Walt says — and he concludes it would be “unfair in the extreme to expect such extraordinary foresight from the administration of the Dallas Police Department when no other major police department had yet realized the need to defend against the emerging threat of mass shootings and barricaded persons.”

However, the o cers did eventually succeed in bringing Thomas down in perhaps the most dramatic scene in the book.

During one round, a blast of buckshot hit Thomas in the side of his head and forearm. Then another hit him in the middle of the back, Walt writes.

Thomas walked back to the bedroom, where he put a Jimi Hendrix album on the record player and turned it up as loud as it would go, until the o cers could hear “Purple Haze” blaring from outside.

A hot grenade had caught the front of the house on fire, Walt says. As o cers watched, tongues of flame began to brighten the house as they crawled up the wallpaper. A cotton mattress, which Thomas had been using as cover, also caught fire.

Inside, Thomas stumbled through the house, paused at the front door to reload his shotgun and then stepped onto the porch, “his dark figure silhouetted by the growing fire behind him.”

All the o cers could hear was the “quiet crackle of the flames and, seeming to come from far away, the driving beat of Jimi Hendrix,” Walt writes.

Someone yelled for Thomas to drop the gun, which snapped him into focus. With what seemed like a smile, he slowly raised his gun; he was answered by a roar of gunshots that “held Johnny Thomas erect in the flurry of bullets for a long moment, the unfired shotgun at his shoulder.”

Finally, he toppled to the floor. Someone yelled that he was still moving, but he wasn’t.

Thomas was dead.

Not including Thomas, the rampage left one dead and six wounded, including four police o cers.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, order a copy of “The Hall Street Shoot-out” on amazon.com