San Angelo's Most Bizarre Police Stories

A shootout with the devil and a secret agent known as Crazy Horse—not all police stories are simple tales of capture. After years of being shelved, some of the SAPD’s more obscure stories on the spectrum of the strange have surfaced again, and a couple of them are just too bizarre not to share.

The tale of Crazy Horse begins prior to 2008, and, surprisingly, has nothing to do with a Native American. SAPD Officer Rick Tinsley had been working in the Security Forces Squadron at Goodfellow Air Force Base, and was often transferred calls that were “of unusual nature”.

One of his most frequent calls came from a fellow who called himself Crazy Horse, a man who claimed to be a special agent for the CIA, privy to all sorts of sensitive information. Tinsley would just take the calls, he said, not being too dismissive or slamming the phone down, a routine that continued for two years.

When he joined the SAPD’s Hostage Negotiation Team some years later, a call for a barricaded subject brought him face-to-face with San Angelo’s most notorious secret agent.

“Crazy Horse has got himself holed up in a house, and I’m talking to him outside the house…I’m talking to him through the kitchen window,” Tinsley says, holding up his hands about six inches apart from one another to demonstrate the size of the gap.

“So I’m talking to him, and I’m trying to get him calmed down, and he’s in his delusional state, and he’s a secret agent again. He doesn’t want to come with us because he has to get this information to the CIA in Washington,” Tinsley explains.

The negotiation lasted hours, and as Tinsley spoke with him, the man held a knife in one hand while the other remained covered with a food bag of sorts, possibly Whataburger, Tinsley says, thus obscuring a weapon he may or may not have been carrying.

Prior to “holding himself hostage” Crazy Horse had made calls to the 911 dispatch threatening to shoot officers interfering with his governmental operations with a machine gun, and had racked up a history of charges for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He was also known to threaten citizens in parks with a knife on his off days, a background that made subdual and apprehension a top priority.

After a time spent chatting through the window, Tinsley had calmed him down enough that he was willing to relax and smoke a cigarette, and around this time the SAPD’s psychologist arrived on scene.

“[The psychologist was] dressed in dress slacks and a dress T-shirt—I don’t know what you’d call it, the Don Johnson kind of look, but not in pastel—and a suit jacket. He usually wears dark sunglasses and is a big imposing figure as it is, and he stands at the corner of the house and the fence, so he’s in line with the house and the fence and can be viewed by the subject,” Tinsley says. “He just stands there with his arms [crossed] and it’s—just the way he does.”

Pausing briefly to consult with the psychologist, Tinsley and the mysterious man in the suit devised a scheme to subdue Crazy Horse and remove him from the house. After the brief planning session, Tinsley returned to the window.

“I go back and I tell him, ‘This is what’s going to happen. You’re going to have to act like you’re getting arrested, because all these neighbors and stuff that you’re reporting to us on are seeing what’s going on, and if we don’t take you into custody, they’re going to know you’re an agent,’” Tinsley begins. “’It’s going to cause problems. That’s your CIA contact standing down there, and he says knock this stuff off and let’s get this done.’”

The plan included details such as an alleged jet waiting on a Mathis runway, burning up fuel as it waited for its occupants, flight plan scheduled to land in D.C.

After hearing the story, Crazy Horse answers, “Oh, okay. No problem,” and he backs slowly away from the window, setting the knife down on the ledge as he retreats. The “staged” arrest then takes place as SWAT enter the house with a diversionary tactic, but Crazy Horse is startled and flees to his bedroom. In an attempt to subdue him, the SWAT team tases the subject twice, both to no avail, before wrestling him to the ground and putting him and hand cuffs.

“The barbs on the taser are pretty short,” Tinsley says. “He had like nine or 10 sweaters on, and they didn’t go through.”

Once Crazy Horse is cuffed, the SWAT Team brings him out to wait for the patrol unit that would take him to jail. Tinsley then met the man he’d spent so much time talking to in previous years.

“We always go face-to-face with our suspects [on the Hostage Negotiation Team], and I did the same thing,” Tinsley says. “I gave him another cigarette and sat there and talked to him for a little bit while we waited for the patrol car to get there and take him to jail.”

At that point, Crazy Horse was still under the impression that he and the psychologist would soon be off to D.C. in a jet, and as the patrol officer drove off from the house, the man in cuffs asked excitedly about the destination.  

“[The patrol officer] gets in the car to take him to jail, and it’s just him and the suspect in the car, and he says, ‘So, you’re taking me to the airport?’, he’s like…didn’t know what to say,” Tinsley explains. “So he’s like ‘ yeah, but first we’ve got to go to the jail.’”

“Oh, okay,” the Horse responded, and the officer drove him downtown. Crazy Horse was booked on two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and one count of terroristic threats in 2008. He is currently sitting out his sentence in a prison for the mentally unstable and is up for parole in 2015.  

But while Crazy Horse suffered from a legitimate mental problem, the subject of a 1993 case involving the devil himself owes his outrage to his use of drugs.

Police had been called to a San Angelo house for reports of shots fired and SAPD Officer Lieutenant Mike Hernandez and another officer now in Lewisville were dispatched to the scene.

Upon arriving, the officers split: Hernandez covering the front of the house, the other officer entering the back. Suddenly, a shot was fired and the officers suspect the worst.

“We hear a shot and both of us think the guy shot at the other one,” Hernandez explained. Unsure of the fate of their partners, the officers called for backup and first learned that neither had been hit when the other officers arrived.  

With the additional support, police began searching for the source of the gunshots.

“We start tracking him down to the house in the back, and that’s where the shots are coming from, and they’re coming through the wall,” Hernandez says.

The walls are thin and without insulation, and a crazed voice can be heard, daring a predator to try his luck. “Come and get me! I’m going to get you! Take that!” the voice cries between firing. A light outside the house burns, making a stealthy approach implausible, and a gutsy officer runs to bust it before heading back for cover.

Not long after, “They made contact and got him to calm down, but we can tell that he is hiding the .22 rifle he’s been shooting,” Hernandez says. The subject, who was high on drugs, questioned the police skeptically: “Are y’all to help me or here to arrest me? The devil’s here and you guys better be ready to take him on,” he says.

The police ensure him they only want to help and are prepared to take on the devil too—who the man has been shooting at all along—and the subject is taken into custody.

The man in the devil shootout was arrested for discharging a firearm in city limits, a relatively light charge back in ’93. He got some medical attention and was sent to Big Spring for about a week, then was released.