T he worst night of state police Capt. Christopher Paris’ career began with an 11:19 p.m. phone call on Sept. 12, 2014.
The then-officer-in-command of Pike County’s Blooming Grove barracks had been asleep at his Dunmore home for about a half-hour. His phone rang.
“Did anybody call you from the Grove?” the on-call lieutenant asked him.
Nobody had.
“I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but something bad is going on at the Grove.”
Just how bad was revealed long before sunrise.
A sniper had hidden in the woods across from the rural barracks and opened fire with a .308-caliber rifle a few minutes before 11 p.m.
Two troopers fell. Cpl. Bryon K. Dickson II, 38, of Dunmore, died at the scene. Trooper Alex T. Douglass, now 32, of Olyphant, was severely wounded.
The suspected gunman, later identified as Eric Matthew Frein, became the focus of a 48-day, $11.7 million manhunt stretching across Pike and Monroe counties and involving hundreds of state, local and federal law enforcement officials. Mr. Frein, 32, of 308 Seneca Lane, Canadensis, soon was added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted fugitives list.
However, details were sketchy as Capt. Paris quickly put on a T-shirt and shorts and sped toward the barracks. The on-duty lieutenant told him there was a report of shots fired. Multiple people were down.
“Are you kidding me?” Capt. Paris asked.
“No. No, I’m not,” the lieutenant replied.
He drove fast. He would reach the barracks, 32 miles away, by 11:50 p.m.
At first, as he swung onto Interstate 84, his radio was eerily quiet. Maybe this wasn’t happening, he hoped. Maybe some faulty information had been relayed.
“Blooming Grove 1 to Blooming Grove,” he called into his radio.
Silence.
Eight miles into the trip, the radio exploded with calls from Gibson, Honesdale and Swiftwater troopers, all asking questions for which Capt. Paris had no answers: What’s going on? Where is it? Where’s the staging point?
“That’s when I knew that it was bad,” said Capt. Paris on Thursday.
He arrived at Blooming Grove and met about 10 other troopers who already staged two miles away from the barracks on Route 402. More information came in. He learned who died.
“(Cpl. Dickson) was phenomenal,” Capt. Paris said. “Someone you wanted to have working for you.”
More police trickled in. A command post was established at a nearby Baptist church.
Lt. Col. George Bivens, who would become the face of the manhunt for Mr. Frein, arrived in a helicopter flying with its lights out. He began preparations to evacuate troopers and civilian employees from the barracks and send in tactical teams to find the accused killer.
The night passed second by second into the morning of Sept. 13. Dawn arrived chilly and slick with rain.
Hopeless hunt
For the first few days, state police chased a ghost.
They didn’t have a suspect. Bullet casings were recovered in the woods near the barracks, but there was nothing against which to match them.
Troopers at checkpoints on local highways stopped drivers and asked if they had seen anything.
Investigators began methodically checking off leads — sorting through reports, looking for threats made against Blooming Grove and law enforcement, interviewing troopers to see if anyone had a vendetta and reviewing recent cases where someone became hostile, Lt. Col. Bivens said this week.
The haystack was large, and the needle could be anything.
“You really have to consider all possibilities,” Lt. Col Bivens said.
Meanwhile, troopers worked nonstop, Capt. Paris said. Nobody wanted to sleep. By the beginning of the next week, Capt. Paris started ordering people to go home and at least get a hot meal.
Big break
The first big break came three days after the ambush when a Hawley man found the getaway vehicle.
It was Monday, Sept. 15 — James and Kate Novak’s 45th anniversary — when Mr. Novak decided to walk through the woods behind his Route 6 home. The news of the shooting bothered him, he told his wife, and he wanted to see if he could find anything that might help investigators.
About 500 yards from his house, Mr. Novak spied a green Jeep in the high grass of a swampy retaining pond. It looked abandoned.
Maybe some drunk kid drove it in, he thought. Or, maybe someone looking to get rid of some junk ditched it. Maybe not. The ambush was the main topic of conversation in the small town. Mr. Novak knew approaching the Jeep could be dangerous.
He saw danger before. A Purple Heart Medal recipient, he served a year in Vietnam in the mid-1960s before a gunman shot him three times 16 hours before his planned flight home. After the war, he worked as a correctional officer in New York and as a police officer.
He decided to take a look. He wanted to report it to state police but first wanted to be sure he had something that was worth bothering them.
He peered through the Jeep’s open front door and saw papers and loose change. He opened the back door and spotted a gun case and shells.
He knew investigators needed to see this. He called and by the end of the day, troopers had a suspect.
Then-state police Commissioner Frank Noonan called a news conference the next day and released the name and photo that plastered billboards and area storefronts until the end of October.
Eric Matthew Frein became a household name.
Reporters descended on the Novak’s home. The attention scared his wife, who feared retaliation. It didn’t faze Mr. Novak.
“Working in a state prison, I don’t know how many times people said, ‘I’m gonna get you when I get out,’” he said this week.
A year later, people still remember him as “the guy who found the Jeep.”
By the end of October, he read with satisfaction how the U.S. Marshals Service captured Mr. Frein in Monroe County. Capt. Paris presented Mr. Novak with a state police shoulder patch and a card with his well-wishes.
“We’ll always be indebted to you for your service,” the message on the card reads.
Frein elusive
Now in possession of their suspect’s identity, law enforcement officials combed the extensive Pike County woodlands surrounding the remote state police barracks.
Searches of the Canadensis home where Mr. Frein lived with his parents and interviews with his family revealed more about the suspected shooter: He made anti-government statements, is adept in the forest and has excellent aim. Mr. Frein proved elusive. The forest was thick and full of hiding places. It turned out Mr. Frein was long gone.
State police needed another break.
On Sept. 18, they got it.
Police say Mr. Frein used his cellphone in an attempt to call his parents. Investigators monitoring the phone traced the call to Monroe County, about 25 miles from the barracks but less than five miles from his parents’ house.
Homes in the area were evacuated briefly, and roads were shut down. The search in Barrett Twp. that night did not produce Mr. Frein.
Under siege
In the days that followed, Barrett Twp. became a community under siege.
“You had all those police just up and down the roads with weapons pointing in and pointing out,” recalled Ellen Kerz, owner of Ellen Kerz Interiors Inc., a home decor and interior design business along Route 390 in Mountainhome, a village neighboring Canadensis. “There were the constant helicopters and just the constant everything.
“I mean it was positively surreal.”
And, it was chilling.
As the search intensified and the purported sightings of Mr. Frein multiplied, Ms. Kerz said people became jumpy. Fear and anxiety ran high.
“You wondered if somebody was under you deck and who was under your deck,” she said. “Was it him? Was it somebody he had with him? Was it the police? You really worried a lot about who was near your home the whole time.”
Armed officers seemed to be everywhere. Temporary road closures became commonplace.
Ms. Kerz said she would return to her home — situated on what she described as “a very private property” in the area of Henry’s Crossing Road in Cresco — and find the way blocked by armored vehicles.
“I would say, ‘You have to move,’ and they would say, ‘Well, we’re blah, blah.’ And I would say, ‘It doesn’t matter. We do not have martial law right now, and I want to get on my property,’” she said.
From her perspective, the massive law enforcement presence stands out as the most unnerving aspect of the Frein manhunt.
“That’s one the things that really did open your eyes to the whole police state,” Ms. Kerz said. “Not that you weren’t happy to have them, but you realized how quickly it could be before somebody declared martial law and takes over everything and says we’re coming into your house.
“I think that is one thing the local people were really quite freaked out over.”
While police converged on Barrett Twp. after Mr. Frein called his parents, Keriann Sanders Killinger tried to plan her wedding.
She had the decorations; she had the food; she had the space for a wedding ceremony.
The only thing missing was her fiance, Andrew Killinger.
After going out to drop off their dog, Mr. Killinger tried to return to their home in the Hamlet development, only to find state police blocking access to his road — and to the future Mrs. Killinger and her daughter.
“He was locked out the whole night,” Mrs. Killinger said. “He spent the wedding night in the car with my brother. I was home with my daughter and I was pregnant.”
The couple recalibrated. As police continued to patrol the area and block roads, Mrs. Killinger convinced them to allow her to leave and reunite with Mr. Killinger. Their pastor agreed to hold the ceremony at Pocono Manor, the couple’s chosen reception hall.
“It wasn’t what we had planned, but it’s certainly something we’ll never forget,” Mrs. Killinger said.
The Killingers will celebrate their first wedding anniversary Sept. 20.
“It surprisingly went very fast,” Mrs. Killinger said.
Their daughter, now 3, has not started wondering about their wedding day yet. When she does, Mrs. Killinger said she will “tell it how it was.”
Things have returned to normal in the Hamlet as the couple navigated their first year of marriage and parenting.
“It’s definitely nice not to hear helicopters every night,” Mrs. Killinger said. “It’s good to know he’s not out there.”
Mrs. Killinger said people still reflect on the shooting at Blooming Grove. She thinks of Cpl. Dickson and his family.
“That was a lot harder than what we had to go through that day,” she said.
Tough terrain
Acting Scranton Detective Lt. Robert Brenzel, a member of the city’s Special Operations Group, a tactical team, walked the Monroe County woods two days a week throughout the manhunt.
He and his team were among dozens of groups to loan their resources to the state police.
Some days on patrol lasted 14 to 16 hours. Lt. Brenzel sometimes walked six miles through thick forest wearing 60 pounds of equipment. Everyone carefully considered each step.
“When walking into the woods, you could be walking into the gun sights of Frein,” Lt. Brenzel said.
Many thought their first contact with the suspected cop killer would be a bullet whizzing from his rifle. They knew he had at least one improvised explosive device. Movement had to be slow just in case they came across one.
The underbrush was deep and could camouflage an adult intent on remaining invisible. Numerous caves as well as vacant hunting cabins that dotted the terrain could provide shelter.
“It’s very mentally demanding, too, because you’re trying to focus,” Lt. Brenzel said.
Days stretched to weeks. Possible sightings sparked a flurry of activity from time to time. Days generally passed in tense anticipation.
Everyone searching hoped it would be the state police who found Mr. Frein. The plan was to arrest him with Cpl. Dickson’s handcuffs.
In the end, only one of those things happened.
‘Is this the day?’
Capt. Paris had just ended a late-afternoon visit with Trooper Douglass on Oct. 30 when the call came.
Mr. Frein was in custody, and no one else had come to harm. It had been 48 days since the manhunt began.
Federal marshals arrested Mr. Frein near a hangar at the abandoned Birchwood Resort airport in Pocono Twp. He was held there until state troopers arrived and placed the suspected gunman in Cpl. Dickson’s handcuffs before transporting him to the Blooming Grove barracks in the slain officer’s patrol car.
Capt. Paris arrived at the barracks ahead of Mr. Frein and waited with dozens of other troopers and civilian employees.
“The emotion of it was palpable, but everyone was very professional,” Capt. Paris said. “I just wanted justice. We know that the system works slowly and deliberately. He needs to answer for what he’s done and it’s my hope that he will.”
At the barracks, investigators said Mr. Frein confessed he shot the two troopers to “wake people up.” He faces first-degree murder and other charges and pleaded not guilty in January.
“How long was the 48 days? Long. Every day you ask, ‘Is this the day?’” Capt. Paris said. “But again, being in awe of law enforcement, you see people who didn’t break when they were broken. You look at them. ... Emotionally, they’ve been through something, and there wasn’t any quit.”
Looking forward
For state police, the shooting and manhunt prodded the agency to increase station security and became an example for how to handle potential incidents in the future.
“Really, it’s allowed us even now to use it as a teaching exercise for commanders directly involved to help prepare them for the future,” Lt. Col. Bivens said.
The Blooming Grove barracks reopened to the public in November. Cpl. Dickson’s handcuffs will likely be incorporated in some memorial at the station, Lt. Col. Bivens said.
The burden fell hardest on Cpl. Dickson’s wife, Tiffany, and two young sons. During the past year, state police have focused on making sure they are taken care of, Lt. Col Bivens said.
“She’s a remarkable individual,” Lt. Col. Bivens said. “She’s pulling forward and taking care of her sons.”
But the high-ranking state police official marveled too at the community support that kept the agency and its officers going when the manhunt stretched from days into weeks. The support still extends now to the fallen trooper’s family.
“I have never seen anything like it,” Lt. Col. Bivens said.
“God Speed, Hammer”
At Dunmore Cemetery, nearly all is silent in the waning days of summer.
Traffic hums in the eastern distance. Gnats buzz furiously in the beating sunshine.
Last Sept. 18, at this spot, scores of law enforcement officers laid a comrade to rest with reverent pageantry.
Four flags flank the relatively simple and well-maintained grave — three American flags and one bearing the Pennsylvania State Police crest.
On the ground beneath a plaque lies a cloth shoulder patch with three stripes — a sergeant’s patch — denoting the rank the deceased held in the Marine Corps before becoming a state trooper.
The plaque calls the man buried there by the name some knew.
“God Speed, Hammer,” it reads.
The grave marker identifies him properly — a husband, a father and a veteran.
“Bryon Keith Dickson II.”
Contact the writers: jkohut@timesshamrock.com, @jkohutTT on Twitter; dsingleton@timesshamrock.com; sscinto@timesshamrock.com, @sscintoTT on Twitter