MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (AP) - Patrick Hale was home alone with his young daughter when he started getting calls from friends that two men accused of killing two prison guards were loose in the vicinity of his rural Tennessee home after a shootout with law enforcement.
Hale recalled Friday that he immediately started loading every weapon in his house before spotting the men climbing over a barbed-wire fence about 300 yards behind his property.
“I prayed like I have never prayed before,” he said.
Then he called 911.
Faced with a decision about whether to hole up in his home’s panic room or get into his car and remove himself and his daughter from the area, he chose the car. He was slowly backing out of the driveway when he noticed the men were already near the house, waving their shirts at him.
“At that point, I realized I had two ex-cons, wanted for murder that had just shot at law enforcement and nothing to lose,” he said. “And for some reason they started to surrender and laid down on their stomachs in my concrete driveway.”
The manhunt for Donnie Rowe and Ricky Dubose suddenly focused on Tennessee Thursday evening after authorities said the fugitives invaded a home in Shelbyville and held a man and his wife hostage for several hours before stealing their car.
The couple alerted law enforcement after the men left, which led to a high-speed chase on Interstate 24 with the men firing at sheriff’s deputies until they crashed near Hale’s isolated home.
Hale, a 35-year-old drug company employee, said he never drew the guns he had in the car. He said he assumes the inmates mistook his car for a police cruiser.
“My family means the world to me,” he said. “I was ready to do whatever I could. It was just me and my daughter that day.”
About 20 seconds after lying down on the driveway, the two men got up to get a drink of water from a faucet. But then, much to Hale’s relief, they lay back down.
“I had a truck that was recently filled up with gas and the keys in the front seat with a loaded shotgun that I left in the front of my house,” he said. “Were they going to get to it or not?”
Law enforcement arrived in force within about three minutes of his 911 call.
“I cannot tell you how grateful we were that they had arrived,” he said.
Hale told his story at a press conference at the Rutherford Sheriff’s Office, joined by his wife and daughter, who climbed up into his arms as he addressed the cameras.
He said he hadn’t given any thought to a reward offered by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for the inmates’ capture. A decision about the reward is “under review,” the agency said in a statement, though it also noted that “the bravery of Tennessee civilians contributed to the apprehension of both inmates.”
Hale said he was taken aback by being called “a hero for simply calling 911 and explaining what happened and just backing up.”
“Even though we had guns with us, we never had to use them,” he said. “And that to me is more than a God thing.”
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