Captain: Negotiators Did Everything to Save Messina

Capt. Joe Satterfield had hoped to get through his whole career without having someone shot, let alone killed.

But that hope ended Tuesday night when a sniper on Satterfield’s after the boy stuck a .357 Magnum through the front-door glass at negotiators.

“We can’t control a suspect’s actions,” said Satterfield, who heads the Cherokee County SWAT team. “We can only react to situations.”

, Messina’s mother said her son was on Zoloft and another medication for his ADHD. The sophomore also reportedly had pointed the gun at his mother.

He can be heard screaming and using profanity inside the house in the Eagle Watch subdivision while his mother stood on the back porch during the call.

According to officials, the team that arrived was well-trained and experienced and knew the job—to disarm the situation.

Cherokee County's average sniper gets at least 300 hours of training a year after the initial training to be on the SWAT team and more to be on the sniper team.

Many SWAT members have been on the team for 10 or more years, Satterfield said.

One of the two negotiators who tried to talk with Messina is an instructor for the Crisis Intervention Team and, Satterfield said, is “one of our best negotiators.”

After the SWAT team got Messina’s mother away from the house, the negotiators tried to contact him.

One of the first things negotiators do after arriving is try to make phone contact, said Capt. J.C. Easterwood of the . If that is unsuccessful, they move close enough to speak to the person inside.

“If you can develop rapport, then generally it’s going to end well for everybody involved,” Easterwood said.

When he was a negotiator, he said, he talked a man out of killing himself by saying that his own wife was pregnant and needed him home.

“He felt bad for me,” Easterwood said.

Sheriff Roger Garrison has with the negotiators, who got within feet of the pane-glass front door.

“He never calmed down at all, never,” Easterwood said. “This young man, either because of emotions or illness … he was always in charge.”

The captain, who was not at the shooting, said one of the negotiators told Messina repeatedly to quit pointing the gun at them.

Even though the negotiators wore bulletproof vests and had shields, Easterwood said, the officers were vulnerable to a shot to the head or lower body.

After an hour of negotiations, Messina shoved his gun through the glass of the front door toward the two officers, .

The sniper was across the street. Before he reacted, Easterwood said, he would have considered three things:

• Did Messina have the ability to hurt the officers? Was there a gun?
• Did he have the opportunity? Was Messina close enough?
• Were the officers in jeopardy? Was the teen going to harm them?

Easterwood said a sniper is trained not to shoot to kill, but to aim for the center of the largest available body mass.

Messina was shot in the abdomen and taken to , where he was pronounced dead, Sheriff's Office spokesman Jay Baker said.

Satterfield said it is a terrible situation all around.

“None of us have ever set out to hurt anyone," Easterwood said, but situations "aren’t going to always end happily.”