142 - Identical Twins Cop & Firefighter: Stuart and Steve Littlefield

Identical twins but one's a firefighter and the other one is a cop and both have 30 year careers in the same city.  That's not a bad premise for a tv show… but it's also the background of the two guests we have on today's show.  Returning guest and friend of the show, retired detective Stuart Littlefield, has brought his brother, retired firefighter Steve Littlefield, to talk about the their two paths in fire and policing.  These two identical twins have a lot to say about the supposed rivalry between the two services and what it's like to know that your brother is in danger, just down the street.

Hey Chaplain Episode 142 Part One

Music is by TrackTribe

Tags:

Police, Fire, Career, Danger, Detective, Family, Fear, House Fire, Humor, Injury, Risk, Rivalry, Shooting, SWAT, Kansas City, Kansas

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Welcome to Hey Chaplin. My name is Jared Altic and I'm a chaplain with the police department. The Hey Chaplin podcast is about talking to police officers who say, Hey Chaplain, I've got a story to tell and some hard-earned wisdom to share. The guests on Hey Chaplain come from across the world, from the LAPD to Scotland Yard, from Thailand to Texas, and sometimes from my hometown of Kansas City. They are sharing their wisdom with you so that you don't have to learn everything the hard way. And as a patrol chaplain, I think that you deserve something positive and encouraging. Hey Chaplain is a free resource for everyone because of those supporters who are quietly helping behind the scenes. If you want to help this show reach more cops, chaplains, and other first responders around the world, please follow the link in the episode description to support the show. Alright, listen to this. Identical twins, but one's a firefighter and the other one is a cop, and both have 30-year careers in the same city. That's not a bad premise for a TV show. But it's also the background of the two guests we have on today's podcast. Returning guest and friend of the show, retired detective Stuart Littlefield, has brought his brother, retired firefighter Steve Littlefield, to talk about their paths in fire and policing. These two identical twins have a lot to say about the supposed rivalry between the two services and what it's like to know that your brother is in danger just down the street. Here are brothers Stuart and Steve Littlefield. Hello, Steve and Stuart. How are you guys today? I'm doing good. Thanks. Hi Jared, how are you? It's good to have you back, Stuart. You've brought a guest with you.

SPEAKER_00 2:00

I did. I brought my twin retired firefighter brother to uh visit with us today.

SPEAKER_02 2:06

That's awesome. So, so Steve, you were a firefighter first, is that correct? Yeah. How did you get in the fire service?

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Funny story, I uh got in the fire service. Um, when I was 21 years old, I was working for a beer company working on their warehouse and I was driving a beer truck. You know, 21-year-old kid, that's kind of what I wanted to do back in the 80s. And uh a few years went by and and uh the job was getting tougher. I was working 12 hours a day, six days a week, and I knew that when I'm 50 years old, this is not what I want to do. Yeah. And just by chance, our mother worked for the uh unified government of KCK, and she was there from she started in 1954, so she'd been there quite a while. And this was at the time that if you want a city job or a government job, you kind of needed to know somebody to get in. You had to pass the test. Sure. You needed to know somebody. And she told us, she goes, if you guys, I'm thinking about retiring, if you guys want a city job, you need to let me know. And I thought about, you know what, I didn't want the police department route. Um, I'm gonna give the fire service a shot.

SPEAKER_02 3:12

And I and did you have any background? Did you have any family that had done fire before? No, no, no. Really? Okay, okay. What did it require when you came on? Uh, what kind of uh training or or when I came on?

SPEAKER_01 3:27

You'd be 21. Um, no felonies, of course. Um, and that was kind of it. You didn't even have to be an MT when I came on. Everything else was on the job? So I went from driving a beer truck to working on a fire truck. How long was your fire career?

SPEAKER_02 3:42

Right at 33 years. How long before you brought your brother into being a first responder?

SPEAKER_01 3:48

I think he kind of he was working another job, and I think he was kind of seeing the the money to be made and the hours were good hours. So why didn't he follow you into fire? That I am not sure. Okay, Stuart.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

Because I wanted to be a hero.

SPEAKER_02 4:08

You wanted to be a hero nobody would like. So you became a cop, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:13

For me, I you know, I uh I was working a warehouse job. I really enjoyed it, but it once again it wasn't something that I knew I wanted to do when I was 50 years old. And um, like he said, our mother was the uh city court administrator, and we'd grown up with cops. We had cops come by our house and visit. I would go by my mom's office. There were we always cops around, and there were um three cops that were married into our family, and so I was very comfortable with law enforcement. And then uh I had three really, really, really good friends uh who were policemen in the uh in the early 90s. Okay, and I looked up to these guys and they said, Man, it's a really good job. You you really need to come. And I I liked those guys so much and I respected them so much that uh they kind of drug me down the law enforcement path.

SPEAKER_02 5:02

So, how far behind were you?

SPEAKER_00 5:04

I came on in '94. When did you come on?

SPEAKER_02 5:06

I came on in April of 1990. Okay. So you were you were four years behind. So you've told me a story before about making people give a second look when you were on the street and they weren't sure who they were seeing. Because you guys are twins. Are you identical twins? Yes, we are. Okay, all right.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

So the I didn't know this. There was a running joke on the fire department. Um, I would show up on a fire scene to block the street or help them out. And apparently the rookies would see me and said, Hey, hey, what's Littlefield doing here? And the old heads would say, Well, he's a cop and a fireman. And I didn't know that for years. I found out years and years later that these new guys couldn't tell us apart and assume that he was not only a firefighter, but a cop on his days off.

SPEAKER_02 5:51

They actually thought we were double dipping. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's funny. So which one of you are older? Five minutes. Okay, Stuart, Stuart, the police officer, is five minutes older than Steve, the firefighter.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Best five minutes of my life.

unknown 6:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 6:06

But you've had, you've got uh, you came into service uh earlier. What was it like to have someone that close to you be on the other side of this rivalry between police and fire?

SPEAKER_01 6:20

You know, at first it really wasn't, I didn't think much about it because until I started seeing him on calls. Because my first four years I never saw him. And then when he came in, I started seeing him on calls, and they're like, hey, there's isn't that your brother over there? I'm like, yeah, you know, like we're twins, you know, it was kind of a rivalry thing, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:40

How much do you think, uh, Steve, how how much do you think there was a rivalry in Kansas City between police and fire? Were they competitive? Were they friendly? What was your perception of it?

SPEAKER_01 6:53

Oh, it was friendly. Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't really wouldn't call it a rivalry. Um, we jacked with people quite a bit. Well, I know you guys tease each other. Well, I mean, I can give you one specific that I'd been on, he wasn't on the job yet. I'd been on about two or three years, and I worked up off Quindera Boulevard, and we ran a call one time, medical call down the street from the firehouse. And of course, when we go on to the scene, we pull up in the rig and there's ambulance with us, and when we get out, we don't shut the fire truck off. Fire truck is sitting there running. Of course, PD showed up because it was a domestic violence call. And um, so we took the patient out, loaded the patient up, and we went back inside to get some gear, and we come back out and the fire truck's gone. Oh no. So the ambulance has already left, and we're standing there. There was only three of us then. We're standing there with our bag and we're looking around, going, what the hell is going on here? Well, we looked down the block and there's two cop cars sitting there. And I won't, my captain and the driver knew what had happened, you know. And so they named that, they called out the two, the one officer by name, kind of cussed him, and we could hear the fire truck circling the block with the siren on. And they even drove by us twice. And of course, we tried to get in the cop car and they're locked.

unknown 8:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

So the police had taken the open fire truck. They took the fire truck for a joyride, and we're just standing there, we couldn't do nothing about it.

SPEAKER_02 8:22

Now, for people who have never been to Kansas City, have no idea really what we're talking about. KCK has a section that's pretty like urban core, part of the larger Kans City Metro. We're we're right across the river from Kansas City, Missouri, the main part of Kansas City people picture when they hear Kansas City. But then we have a suburban area and even a rural area. Where was most of your career in fire service? Oh, urban. Urban. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So so you're running calls down in the inner city. Yeah, inner city. Okay. And Stuart, as a police officer, where was most of your career?

SPEAKER_00 9:00

Downtown. At the time we had uh Central Patrol, West Patrol, and South Patrol. Uh Central Patrol is now called East Patrol, but that was my entire career. That was in my opinion, if you want to be a cop or you want to be a fireman, you want to work downtown in your life.

SPEAKER_02 9:16

But it's busy.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

Things are happening. Yeah, yeah. And it was exciting down there. So I spent my first four years uh downtown midnights on the midnight shift, which is where I encountered Steve a handful of times.

SPEAKER_02 9:27

And then later in your career, detective, homicide detective, cold case detective, you did all that later in your career. And also a lot of that would have been centered in that part of town.

SPEAKER_00 9:35

It was. I was a 13-year patrolman. I did four years on the streets, and then I got selected to be on the TAC team. And then I did that until 2007 before I took the detective's promotion.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

And at that time on the fire service, we had firefighters, we had drivers, and we had captains. And then you went up into command staff and all that. Um, I took a few drivers tests, and you had to, it was only when if there was an opening who got promoted. Okay. And I studied and I was in the middle of the road to upper on the list. And me and a friend of mine that I worked with, we were always right together because we studied together. Yeah. And I never really studied hard enough to get promoted because my thinking was I had a great group of guys, because we work with the same guys most of the time back, but we didn't get moved around a lot. And I'm like, these guys are great. Why do I want to go anywhere? For a little bit of money. It didn't get promoted wasn't a big deal to me. Yeah. And I spent 13 years with the exact same five guys. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 10:34

Now, in Kansas City, the way our firehouses are numbered, they're they're a number. And if it's it's if it's firehouse five or whatever, then it's called fives. Yes. If it's six, it's sixes. Okay. Where were you? I was at fives. You were at fives. Worked on five stumper for 19 years. Did either of you or have either of you ever second guessed your choice? Steve, did you ever think, man, I should have gone the police route or Stuart? Do you ever think you should have gone the fire route? No, I never did. Okay. You were always you fired, it was that was the right pick.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

And it was, yeah. Stuart.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

So in 1998, they offered uh firefighter jobs to all city employees. The I don't know what the reasoning was. Maybe they just wanted to raise their numbers. I didn't know. But so I had considered becoming a firefighter and transferring over. And I went so far as to fill an application out. That is also the exact time that I was applying to the score unit, which is a tactical team.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

And it's a SWAT team or firefighter.

SPEAKER_00 11:34

Yes. And I don't know if the word got out. I didn't keep it a secret, but I didn't broadcast that I was thinking about applying. But one of the commanders called me right after we had finished the testing process. And he said, I want to let you know you're our guy. We're going to pick you. And so I thought, man, I want to be a fireman, but I want to kick indoors. And so I stayed on the department and I spent nine years on the SWAT team. And really, um, looking back, I did the right thing. I had a wonderful career. I enjoyed almost every minute of it with a few tragedies sprinkled in there. But uh I and I would have been happy on the fire department, but man, I can't imagine not doing 31 years as a cop. It was it meant that so that meant so much to me.

SPEAKER_02 12:14

Yeah. Steve, to the best of your knowledge, what is the most dangerous thing your brother has done as a police officer?

SPEAKER_01 12:24

Probably the bomb squad. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 12:27

Just in my view. Okay. Like generally dangerous or a specific incident?

SPEAKER_01 12:32

Generally dangerous. Because the lot of the bombs, bomb calls, it depends on where they were at. A lot of them were we didn't have much in the inner city as far as bomb stuff. Okay. Most of that was mid midtown or south.

SPEAKER_02 12:43

Occasionally you see a like unexploded ordnance or something like that that they'd have to go deal with. But okay. Okay, but generally dangerous. Do you know of a specific incident that you would consider like, boy, I'm glad my brother is okay after being at a particular scene or anything like that?

SPEAKER_01 13:00

Uh we had a call one time, a barricaded suspect. They had chased him. He was a he was a homicide suspect. They had chased him, Casey Mo. And of course, as everybody knows you come to KCK, you're probably not gonna leave. I mean, they're just PD's pretty good over good over here about stuff not getting away. You know, if you come here, chances are you ain't leaving. At least not in a good way. And uh they tracked into a house off of 11th in Richmond, and um he was they were going in the house, and I remember he was there, and they had make entry into the house, and so we got called for another standby because we run a lot of them with them, you know, when they ever had Barry K suspect. And of course we knew all the officers because we worked downtown with them, you know. And uh they let us actually get in the van the where they were recording all the radio traffic and we're able to listen to everything that's going on. And I'm thinking, you know, hey, what's I'm kind of thinking, where's he at? What's going on, you know? I had no idea. Yeah. Because we're just in the other end of it.

SPEAKER_02 14:02

It almost was worse, not knowing.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

Yeah, yeah, because we were once again, we're three blocks down the road. Yeah. In a at a staging area.

SPEAKER_02 14:09

I'm gonna let you audit your brother, Stuart. Uh, what was the most dangerous thing you've ever been in? Well, first of all, generally speaking, so I guess we have two categories. Uh, generally speaking, was bomb squad the most dangerous generally?

SPEAKER_00 14:22

No, because we took so many precautions. Okay. Um, you know, um It sure sounds dangerous. Of course it does, you know. But uh, I mean, you know, we have robots and and uh and we would send those it it and the bomb squad has potential to be dangerous, um, you know, if you're over in Afghanistan. Uh but but uh we were it was it was probably one of the safer things I did. Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 14:47

But what about specific incidents? Uh did you have like that story of the barricade or others that you know what was the specifically the most danger you were in as a police officer?

SPEAKER_00 14:58

You know, random shots fired. Uh I can tell you that uh more than three or four occasions, you know, people shot at me from a distance. I remember my very, very first uh 4th of July as a rookie. Uh and it and if you know anything about the Fourth of July, you go call to call to call to call to call. I was working midnights by probably three in the morning. We had we had handled all the major calls, and now we're just going with the fireworks calls. And I got called up to the north end, north of Quindero, to an old apartment complex that's way down in a hole. And this woman found a bicycle in her yard and she wanted the police to recover it.

SPEAKER_02 15:33

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

So rookie patrolman Littlefield is doing a prop report on his bicycle. Two years later, veteran Stuart Littlefield would have said, Lady, leave the bike, it'll be gone in the morning. So, but I didn't know any better. So I have my clipboard at I'm doing a prop report. And off in the distance, I heard pop, pop, pop. And if you're downtown and you hear that, you play the is it fireworks or is it gunfire game, and you go by the cadence. And about the time I realized that the cadence were gunshots, I heard right over my head within inches. And so I think three shots went off and three zips went over my head. And I screamed at her, get in your house. And I jumped in my car and drove away. And I got to the end of the street and I realized I'd left my clipboard. Oh, and it was one of those big aluminum clipboards with all my reports in it. I think I paid 20 bucks for it. So I went up to this fire station, I called for help. I told them, hey, I somebody shot at me, but I got to get my clipboard. The entire shift showed up, and we rolled back down the street like the Sugarland Express with our lights on, and cars fanned out, and I jumped out and I got my clipboard and I drove away. Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 16:37

Awesome. Now let me do the reverse. To the best of your knowledge, Stuart, uh, what was the most dangerous circumstance that your brother Steve was in?

SPEAKER_00 16:47

I can't tell you what year this was. Uh my mom got a call in the middle of the night that he had fallen through a roof. And so uh apparently he'd been up on the roof of a house and the roof collapsed and hit the main floor and went all the way to the basement. So we went to the hospital, KU Medical Center, and I remember fireman lining the hallway. Uh and he turned out he was okay. Um, and uh, you know, I love my brother. We don't have that twin bond, we know what's going on, but he told me that story uh later, and uh and he can tell you the story himself, but his eyes were as big around as they could get, and he told me, he said, I thought I was dead.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

Okay, what happened, Steve? I was out of the academy about two months, one to two months out of the academy, brand new on the job. And I I first started off when you first come on the fire department, they move you around the city, give a different feel for what's going on because the north is different than the south. Sure, midtown's different, west is different, it's all different.

SPEAKER_02 17:50

So suburban, rural, yes, everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 17:52

Everything I was working out of number nine's fire station, Leventon Central, and we got a call for a house fire. And right down two blocks down the street off South Bethany, and and uh no, I take it back. I I was stationed there, but I was detailed out to Armadale. So I'm down at third in Kansas in Armadale, and we got a call, so we were the second rig up there, but this house is rolling, you know. It was an arson fire. And um, of course, getting it knocked down, of course. I'm brand new, I'm staying with my captain, and and I'm like a duck calling him around. And um we got it knocked down outside, but it was up burned up into the attic, so we got up on the roof to help ventilate the structure. So we're up there with an and my captain and a driver from another rig and me were up there, and my captain had told me to go down and take a break. We'd been up there, we'd been at the house at the scene for probably 35-40 minutes by now. So I climbed down and went down to my rig to swap my air bottle back out, and our battalion our our operation chief came and saw, and he knew I was new. He ripped my butt for not being up there with my captain. So I tried to tell him I came down to to relax and take a break, and he goes, I don't care to get back up there. So I put a new air bottle in and I went back up the ladder on the roof, and I knew as soon as it got back up on the roof, and I went to walk around the chimney where the other two guys were, and that's where it collapsed.

SPEAKER_02 19:17

Is there any part of that where if you had been more experienced or followed a different procedure, it would have happened differently, or was it truly just a random Just random. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

We had no idea how much underneath it had burned about where we were at, and the we didn't realize how bad the chimney was leaning, and then the chimney collapsed, and that's what created the hole in me and me and the driver uh at the time from another big Tony Mott's. That's when we rolled it down to the You rolled that all the way to the basement. Yeah. Wow. But the crazy thing is it so it and of course I went down and then he came down on top of me kinda, and I'm bent over. And of course the fire was about 90% out. It was just a lot of smoke and a lot of heat. Yeah. But he landed on top of me and then we got covered with a lot of the debris. And like bricks and yeah, everything. And um when they say scared to death, I literally was scared to death. I thought I was done. And uh, but the crazy thing is it got super quiet. I heard no more noise, and then ten seconds later, all I heard was a lot of yelling and chainsaws and moving stuff to get us out, and it it seemed like it seemed like it took about um five to ten minutes, but it was probably two or three minutes before they got to us. Yeah. Got to us pretty quick and then. It's a long time to be pinned. It wasn't a house. Yeah.

unknown 20:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Well, we weren't really under any we but just did all the stuff that was on us. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:49

But but I was all bent over, you know, and I'm brand new and i i is that uh your most dangerous circumstance, or were there others your brother doesn't know about? I had another one where I jacked in my knee up where I I just fell through a I thought I was backing into a at a house fire, I thought I was backing into a bedroom and it was an open door going down the basement, and I fell through a set of stairs again. Yeah. That wouldn't it was smoky and that, but that would just I buckled my knee and stuff, but yeah. Okay. I was able to get myself out of that one.

SPEAKER_02 21:20

Yeah. What about your family? So they've got a firefighter and a cop, and increasingly you had more family involved and being first responders. But uh, how do you think like your mother, uh, bless her heart? How how did she do having one son's a firefighter, another one becoming a police officer? Did you tell her stuff or did you just kind of okay? We didn't talk about stuff.

SPEAKER_01 21:47

We have to if it made the news, we'd probably talk about it because she'd bring it up. Right. And we run a lot of stuff that made the news, but as far as she knew, you guys were both back doing reports and everything's fine. We went back and forth, ran calls now, was it? Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:03

And and we have a little brother that uh was a former Secret Service agent. So and he's living up in Seattle now. Uh he's with the Coast Guard. But so we've always been around law enforcement. And my mom didn't get too uh too concerned. I think she grew up with cops. We've been around them our whole lives. So, you know, but there's just certain things you don't talk to your mom about.

SPEAKER_02 22:22

What about the rest of your family?

SPEAKER_00 22:24

I I know they're proud of us. They don't, you know, this is the great thing about being in a family of first responders is you don't get grilled like you do with with uh, you know, when I'm with people that aren't cops, they ask the either the normal cop questions, you know, you ever shoot anybody, you ever been shot? You know, it gets old. And and you know, um they we get the jokes, um, you know, the the ribbing, which is all good natured in, you know, um for years, you know, the fire department, they were either the basement savers or the cansey cans pool department. You know, we'll show up and turn your house into a swimming pool. Yep. Um and so it that's that was really all that that that got from our family is just joking around. And they uh but they're proud of us and they talk about us a lot, and I know that.

SPEAKER_01 23:03

Us that are in the in the um being first responders, please or fired, we talk amongst ourselves, but as far as the family members, we really didn't talk about the calls and stuff we did. Sure. If they ask about something, we'd give them a skim over it, you know.

SPEAKER_00 23:19

Uh you're familiar with guns and hoses?

SPEAKER_02 23:21

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 23:21

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 23:22

But people aren't necessarily. So explain what what's a guns and hoses?

SPEAKER_00 23:26

So uh guns and hoses is a charity event, it's a boxing match between cops and firemen. And it's a big deal. People train for weeks. The fireman wanted me to fight my brother. And uh number one, he's a little bigger than me, and I'm not gonna fight my brother. That's that's not happening, and I'm way too pretty to get in a boxing ring. But they really, really pushed us, like, and it went on for a couple of years. Like, you're gonna fight your brother at guns and hoses? Absolutely not. But you do go to the fireman's ball.

SPEAKER_02 23:56

Uh, I got asked one time to give a prayer at the fireman's ball, and I ran into a police officer.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

My wife is also a firefighter, as is my son, and uh she has been on the ball committee forever, and it she loves to get dressed up, and I go and and I like these guys, they know me. I've been around forever, and I have a great time. Uh, and there's the rivalry, that's what we teach and stuff. But uh, you know, and I tell them, hey guys, stand back here. I'm gonna go to the bar and I'm gonna secure the scene for you. You know, I keep all the second responders back. Uh but I we go to the fireman's ball every year. We just went two weeks ago.

SPEAKER_01 24:31

Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. And then there's the joke that you know why firemen have bigger balls. More people go.

SPEAKER_00 24:38

You know, I I do have a quick story about what they do. My own personal uh I I was uh a detective. This wasn't that long ago, uh less than 10 years ago. I woke up in the morning and my chest felt funny, and I could feel my heart racing. And you know, I uh heart disease runs in our family, uh, is rampant. And so I've always taken good care of myself and I've always been an avid runner. But I woke up and I felt funny that day, and I went to work and I still felt funny. I just just my heart didn't feel like it was beating right. And I waited till about 10 in the morning. I came on at eight. And so police headquarters is at 7th and State Avenue. Fire headquarters is just two blocks away on 6th Street. And so I went down to fire headquarters and the the uh the crew is upstairs. So I went upstairs and you know, and they, well, what are you doing here? And they were teasing me out. I said, Man, my heart feels kind of funny. And they started joking around. And I said, Man, I'm serious. And a switch flipped, and I watched their faces go from teasing me to all business in a microsecond. And one guy set me down, and one guy got a machine out, and they got my shirt off, and they hooked, I mean, and they were it was amazing to see them go from one condition to more serious so quickly. Yeah, and they put a 12 lead on me, which I learned is a heart thing. Um, and they ran my numbers and they said, Hey, you're fine. And as soon as they said I was fine, my heart felt great. I it went whatever I felt inside went away. Yeah, and they didn't tease me and they thanked me for coming in. And uh one of them actually said, you know, we make house calls. And I was very clear, I'm not calling the fire department to the detective bureau to have you tell me I'm fine. But uh, but that was one of the most, as as simple as that sounds, was one of the most amazing spirit experiences I've ever had interacting with firefighters.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

But as far as like stories of like with him, the experience with that, I never I don't really have one. Okay, okay. Um I mean, I've run a ton of calls with him. I mean, and they knew they knew show oh, I can tell you a call. So it was cold out. Uh would have been mid to late 90s again. Pretty common theme. Domestic violence call, and there were two female officers and they're trying to there was a the female was probably three times the size of the guy. The guy's in the house, he got his butt kicked. So they had the female outside trying to get ready to arrest her or take her into custody, and they're gonna put handcuffs on her. Well, this gal is probably she's at least 350. She's big, and she's probably six foot tall. She's a big gal. And one officer has her by the hand, the one hand trying to get it behind the back, and the other officer has her other hand. Well, they got one handcuff on her, and she's whipping the other officer. I mean, they can't control this gal. And of course, we rolled up for a medical call, and we see this going on. So me and my buddy Billy, we jumped off and we just went at him and we just bum rushed him, and we just bulldogged her and took her to the ground. Yeah. And of course, we're on her back, we got her leg bent up, twisting her, twisting her foot, and she's screaming. Nosegots are trying to get her handcuffed. They finally got her handcuffed. And what we didn't realize is that we when we took her down, we also took one of the officers down and she's face down the snow. So we're like, I apologize for that. Go, no, we really didn't know.

SPEAKER_02 28:07

You roll her over, and there's an officer underneath.

SPEAKER_01 28:09

Yeah, yeah. But uh they really appreciate they did appreciate what we did for them.

SPEAKER_02 28:14

So that's awesome. That's great. Uh, I want to thank both of you guys for coming in. I want to thank both of you for serving our city. Uh, you both contributed a lot, and I'm I appreciate what you sacrificed.

SPEAKER_00 28:27

Thank you, Jared. It means a lot.

SPEAKER_02 28:30

I want to thank Steve and Stuart for coming on the show. And this isn't the last that you'll hear from them. In fact, part of the reason I brought them on the show is because I knew they had a couple really good war stories, and some of those were lengthy enough that I thought, you know what? That needs to go in a separate episode. So, in part two, you're going to hear more from Steve and Stuart Littlefield, twin first responders, cop and firefighter, on the next episode of Hey Chaplin.

SPEAKER_00 29:01

I think he had a gas mask. We looked at it later. I don't recall.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

He did, he had a gas mask. He was he was a Vietnam vet. Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 29:08

And so um gas didn't work. So the next step is to introduce smoke. And if you understand how smoke works, so that you would throw the canister in, and as the canister burns and the smoke begins to fill the house, it pushes the oxygen out. And so you have a choice. You can come out or you can stay in and suffocate. So we introduced smoke into the house from the back to the front. It was my partner and I. Uh he is throwing the canister through the window, and I'm providing lethal cover. And so we kind of made a clockwise move around the house. And uh, when we got to the very front window, we, you know, anytime you threw smoke in, the candles would begin to burn. You'd see the curtains catch fire and glow. And then pretty soon the smoke would push out the oxygen and the fire would die. So we got all the way back around to the front of the house, and he put a canister through the window, and the curtains began to burn like they always did. And then I don't know what was there, but something exploded. Boom! And the front door slammed shut and then slammed back open. And that fed oxygen into the house, and that house went up like a Roman candle.

SPEAKER_02 30:22

If only we had a firefighter here to explain that to us. The views expressed here are the personal views of the hosts and our guests, and do not necessarily represent the views of any law enforcement or fire agency for its components. If you like this episode, please share it with a cop or someone who loves a cop. Thank you for listening to Hey Chaplin. And as always, let's pray for peace in our cities.