'Crawl out or you will die,' SWAT officer told wounded Pittsburgh synagogue gunman

Moments after exchanging gunfire with the man who had killed 11 congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue building in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh SWAT Officer Clint Thimons shouted a command at him.

“Crawl out or you will die.”

Thimons testified in federal court Friday that the gunman told police he was injured.

“They were done fighting, and they wanted us to come in and get them,” Thimons said of the gunman, who later identified himself as Robert Bowers.

Thimons said officers refused to do that, fearing Bowers might be luring them into a trap in an attempt to shoot more police.

“If he wanted the incident to end and to survive, he needed to come out to us,” Thimons testified. “I needed him to show himself so we knew he was no longer a threat.”

Thimons, a 14-year SWAT veteran who served as the negotiator with Bowers, worked to build a rapport with him to facilitate his surrender. He asked the suspect his name and date of birth. Bowers provided both as he spent 10 minutes crawling out of the room.

Bowers also told Thimons why he attacked the synagogue.

“He answered immediately that he had enough. They were killing our children, and that all Jews had to die,” Thimons recalled Bowers saying.

Bowers, 50, of Baldwin, is charged with 63 counts, including dozens of hate crimes, in connection with the Oct. 27, 2018, attack at the synagogue that housed the Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha, Dor Hadash and New Light congregations.

The case, which is expected to last more than two months, wrapped up its first week of testimony on Friday afternoon.

Those killed in the attack were Richard Gottfried, 65; Bernice Simon, 84, and her husband, Sylvan, 86; David Rosenthal, 54, and Cecil Rosenthal, 59; Dan Stein, 71; Irving Younger, 69; Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, 66; Joyce Fienberg, 75; Melvin Wax, 87; and Rose Mallinger, 97.

The government is seeking the death penalty against Bowers, who does not deny his actions at the synagogue that day.

Thimons, who spent more than an hour on the witness stand Friday afternoon, testified that he had just rescued Tree of Life Rabbi Jeffrey Myers from an upstairs bathroom in the synagogue when he heard a volley of gunfire.

“Shots fired. Shots fired,” Tactical Commander Stephen Mescan shouted on the police radio at 10:53 a.m.

Mescan, who was leading a SWAT team through the building, was about 25 feet away when Bowers opened fire on an upper floor of the synagogue.

As Thimons heard the gun battle and Mescan’s radio call, he hurriedly moved from his position by an exterior door on the ground floor toward the sounds.

As he moved, Thimons said he saw SWAT medics dragging Pittsburgh police Officer Tim Matson down the stairs. The 6-foot-2, 300-pound man had been shot in the head and torso by Bowers, who was huddled inside a classroom on the upper floor.

Thimons moved past them and arrived in the hallway where the shots had been fired. He took a low position, kneeling on the floor with his patrol rifle pointed to where Bowers had just fired.

The room was dark, and heavy smoke from the gunfire obscured his view.

“Back left corner of that room,” Officer Michael Saldutte reported on the radio. “Yeah, that’s where I saw muzzle flash. It’s a cut out, so he’s got the advantage.”

Thimons said he used the light on his rifle to try to see into the classroom, but it didn’t work. He saw the silhouette of a person standing in the room.

“Then I saw muzzle flash and heard rapid gunfire,” he testified.

Thimons returned fire, sending off a burst of 10 to 15 shots.

Then, Thimons said, he heard a man’s low-toned voice. Bowers, who had been shot, was giving up.

Thimons began to yell commands. It was 11:03 a.m.

Thimons said he ordered Bowers to lift up his jacket as he crawled out and roll on the floor to show he had no explosives on his body. Then he and another officer handcuffed Bowers and moved him into a neighboring classroom where he received medical treatment.

Bowers told Thimons he left the AR-15 rifle he’d used in the room where he’d been shot, and that he had two Glock pistols on his waist and in an ankle holster.

Pittsburgh police Officer Michael Smidga testified earlier Friday that Bowers had used the rifle to shoot Smidga’s partner, Officer Daniel Mead.

Smidga and Mead were the first two officers on the scene that morning.

A former member of the Army 82nd Airborne, Smidga testified that he felt like they were entering a “fatal funnel” — a military term he used to describe the point of highest risk in a combat situation.

When he realized the danger, Smidga tried to slow Mead down. But before he could, he saw Mead’s body language change.

“He was startled. He jumped backwards a little bit,” Smidga testified Friday.

Twice-deployed to Iraq, Smidga heard the first shot and glass breaking.

“A round came flying past my head,” he said.

Glass and shrapnel punctured Smidga’s ear and face as he saw his partner get shot in front of him.

Mead, who had been shot in the hand, screamed in pain as he retreated, while Smidga pressed himself against the synagogue building and sought a position of cover.

“I was hyperventilating,” he told the jury. “I realized I wasn’t breathing, just swearing.”

After getting his breathing under control, Smidga said he made his way to a window. As he pressed his face to it and peered in, Smidga said he saw the gunman slowly come into view: first the barrel of a rifle, then the strap of the rifle, and then the gunman.

Prosecutor Eric Olshan asked who Smidga saw holding the rifle.

“I saw that man over there,” Smidga said as he motioned to Robert Bowers at the defense table.

Through four days of testimony, it was the first time a witness identified Bowers or even acknowledged his presence in the room.

Smidga engaged Bowers on the morning of the attack, firing three rounds at him through the window.

He wasn’t sure if he hit the suspect, but he “knew he was pissed.”

A short time later, SWAT arrived.

Mescan, who spent more than two hours on the witness stand, described the urgent but methodical process his team followed entering the synagogue as it was under attack.

He said their focus was preservation of life — to find any victims who might be alive and hiding.

As they moved through the intricate labyrinth of the building, Mescan radioed to police dispatch what they were seeing.

“We can see three people down to the right,” he said. Then he reported four more deceased victims.

Mescan reported finding a woman who was wounded but alive and needed to be evacuated.

At 10:43 a.m., Mescan reported that two people had been rescued from the basement, but three more deceased victims were found there.

Following Mescan’s direct testimony, for the first time during the trial, Bowers’ defense conducted cross-examination.

Defense attorney Elisa Long asked the SWAT commander about a device he described as a “screaming meanie” that Bowers had in his possession during the shooting. The defense asked if the device was not explosive and merely functioned as an alarm clock, and Mescan answered in the affirmative.

Thimons also was cross-examined. Defense attorney Judy Clarke asked Thimons if he heard Bowers say repeatedly that he carried out the shooting because he’d “had enough” and “they were killing our children” and “all Jews need to die.”

During her opening statement, Clarke indicated that the defense would try to prove to the jury that Bowers’ motivation that day was not to prevent the Jewish congregations from worshiping, but because he was angry at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish refugee resettlement group.

Late Friday afternoon, for the first time in the trial, the government presented evidence of Bowers’ far-right social media presence.

Pamela Browning, a criminal intelligence analyst at the Pennsylvania Criminal Intelligence Center, testified that she began compiling Bowers’ background and online activity less than an hour after he was taken into custody.

She created a document that summarized Bowers’ social media use, most notably on the far-right social media website Gab. She also identified Bowers in the courtroom as the individual in the profile photo of that Gab account.

Browning confirmed several posts that Bowers wrote on Gab, including posts using an antisemitic slur, calling Jews the “children of Satan” and claiming the Jewish refugee resettlement group HIAS is bringing “hostile invaders in to dwell among us.”

The trial is scheduled to resume Monday morning.